The Book and the Person

A Grade 5 Kyrgyz Literature topic: «The book and the person» (pp. 3–7). The book did not take its present shape at once: first came pictures, and some peoples pressed signs into clay and fired it. In China characters were written on tortoise shells, on hides and on tree bark; our ancestors wrote on stone — the Orkhon-Yenisei, Talas and Kochkor monuments. Paper was invented in China in the 1st century, and the Library of Alexandria held up to 700,000 books. The path: stone → clay → papyrus → paper, and today we also read from a screen. In Berlin there is a monument built out of books. Jusup Balasagyn was born about a thousand years ago near present-day Tokmok, and his book “Kutadgu Bilig” was written to give guidance to the young. There are more than 130 million book titles in the world.