We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Maybe ideas rather than books, they only die when the last holder of the idea dies without passing it on.
Ben Franklin didn’t discover electricity, he rediscovered it. There are signs that the same times that gave us the pyramids also had electroplating.
You can burn the book, but the idea lives on, and even if the last person to know about it dies — that doesn’t mean the idea can’t be rediscovered.
The Great Library of Alexandria was reputed to contain 700,000 papyrus scrolls. These scrolls were manufactured in more or less standard lengths, such that one scroll would hold about 20,000 words in the handwriting of a trained scribe. Assuming a 50% rate of duplication and waste space, the Library would have contained about seven billion words of text.*
The complete surviving corpus of works written in ancient or Hellenistic Greek (up to the time the Great Library disappears from history, which is earlier than you may think) amounts to about 10 million words.
Based on these figures, out of all the ancient texts that were thought important enough to preserve in the archives of the Great Library, less than 0.2 percent have survived intact. Perhaps another 1 or 2 percent have been preserved in fragments or summarized in epitomes.
Yeah, right, books never die. Pull the other one, it’s got mummy wrappings on.
*N.B. Some scholars knock a zero off the size of the Library’s collection. In that case, 1.4% of the Library’s texts have survived, and perhaps 10 to 20% survive in fragments and epitomes.)
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