The Great Conversation

Hold a sheet of parchment up to the light. It is animal skin, scraped thin — soft as cloth and just as easy to ruin. One flood, one fire, one hungry mouse, and the words on it are gone for good. Now picture ten million such sheets. That is roughly how many books were copied by hand, one letter at a time, in Europe between AD 400 and AD 1500. Of those ten million, historians estimate only about seven or eight in every hundred survive today. The rest rotted, burned, or crumbled to dust.