Paper
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art. It has created civilizations, fostering the fomenting of revolutions and the stabilizing of regimes. Witness history's greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Mao zhu xi yu lu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), or the fact that Leonardo da Vinci left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. Now, on the cusp of "going paperless"--And amid rampant speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society-we've come to a world-historic juncture to examine what paper means to civilization. Through tracing paper's evolution, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology's influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. 'Paper' will be the history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times.
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- Some recommendations:
Mark Kurlansky's book 'Paper'
Marshall McLuhan
The Secret History of Writing - BBC Full Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96fuXitEwhk
- One book I've read in the last few years was Mark Kurlansky's Paper. Just that tiny corner of the story is a remarkably rich bit of history. https://www.dahosek.com/dewey-decimal-project-676-09-kur-pap...
- Mark Kurlansky has done a brisk business in this kind of biography-of-a-thing, Salt, and Cod were the first two books I thought of when I read your post, but he's also got books called Salmon and Paper that I haven't read.
I think that I would put those books under the broad heading of social histories, which is a genre. You may also look for "microhistories", and here's a list of them:
