This is a book dedicated to new words and meanings—and the shifting senses of older words, whose stories within language can never end as long as they remain in use.
Consider the word I’ve used to describe what you’re reading at this very moment: a book. In Old English, in the form of boc, it originally meant any written document; a term derived in turn from the ancient Germanic word for a beech tree, bokiz, which provided the smooth, soft bark onto which runic writing was inscribed.
Physicality, then, is an intimate aspect of the history of the book: the power and possibility that came with turning language into a physical object, fit to be kept for generations, bearing words across time and space in a way no speaker could hope to match.
Today, written words shorn of physical restrictions are traveling in ways inconceivable less than a century ago. The relationship between written language and the mere physical stuff of the world—tablets, trees, wood, paper—has been decisively broken.
So why write a “book” at all? Why bother crafting a text that aims to be a complete, self-contained object when it’s now possible to enter into the open-ended arenas of digital words; to update, respond and interact as you encounter your audience?
One answer, I hope, is implicit in the kind of book you are reading right now. In a digital age, written knowledge is almost infinitely to be found online, together with enough discussion and debate for several lifetimes. We do not read a book, today, simply to learn. Rather, we turn to crafted, bounded texts looking for a quality of time and space that more than ever we deserve in our lives—a place for turning mere information into something that belongs to us.
Thank you for reading.