A list of print literacy things to begin the symposium upon.

1. we know what a book is
2. what a page is (that it has two sides)
3. what page numbers are
4. how to use page numbers
5. how to read
6. how to write
7. more or less how a book is made
8. where to go to find a book
9. that you can buy them
10. borrow them
11. steal them
12. that to buy one you might go to a bookstore
13. to borrow one you might go to a friend
14. or to a strange institution called a library
15. which stores books to lend them out
16. (which let’s face it is an elegantly odd idea)
17. and that the people there are called ‘librarians’
18. and it is a bit like a church as (well, it’s changing) but food and drink is apparently bad, and you are meant to whisper
19. that there is a taxonomy that lets you ‘look up’ books them find them on their shelves
20. you know the social etiquette involved in borrowing a book from a library (it isn’t supposed to be written in or on, that it ought to be returned by the due date, that there could be some sort of punishment for not following either of these two rules)
21. that people write them
22. that these people are called authors
23. (and we mistakenly think, in one of those odd human centric moments we’re famous for, that authors create books but it is obviously the other way round — think about it)
24. how to use a table of contents
25. an index
26. page headers
27. page footers
28. what a cover is and what it is for
29. that there is fiction and nonfiction
30. that there are many genres of fiction
31. that there are dictionaries, encyclopaedias, manuals, reference books
32. we more or less know how to go about writing a book (whether it is any good or not is a very different question)
33. how to fix a broken page
34. where a broken page fits
35. how to fix a cover
36. what a title page is
37. how to cope with an unreliable narrator
38. how to cope with direct narrative address
39. how to read silently
40. that stories think they can tell you what is happening inside someone’s head
41. except that someone (sometimes) is pretend
42. that they are often pretend

With books we developed intimate reading. Also mass literacy. Those together encouraged the rise of the modern ‘psychological’ novel. The technology very strongly affects these things, particularly when we recognise the writing is a technology….