Liz is the bestselling author of the psychological thriller Don’t Wake Up. Her most recent title is My Husband’s Lies.
What will the world be without books? Can you imagine this? The objects of everyday life that we turn to, never in existence. The means to put in writing the history of the world. It’s creation – both biblical and according to science. There would be no record of inventions that changed the world: Telephone. Light bulb. Electricity. Penicillin. Vaccines. Paper. Printing press. Steam engine. Airplane. Computer. Internet. The greatest scientists of all time and their discoveries would never be published.
How would humanity have continued to survive? How would we have evolved? Without preexisting knowledge of human evolution by which people originated from? The first written scrolls were created around 500BC. Homo sapiens evolved around 300,000 years ago in the Middle Stone Age, possessing recognisable human features. But how would we know this, visualise what we would have looked like, without books?
How would we today communicate with one another?
We believe that man used symbolic communication, cave paintings, smoke signals, his voice to imitate the sounds of animal calls that served to communicate meaning. To share where was safe and to find food and water. How would vocabulary evolution have evolved without books? Would we today be fluent in a limited form of language. What words would we use for doctor or teacher, mother or father? What pronoun would we name the moon, the sun, the sky, the earth? Bread, sugar, tea, and butter?
Can we imagine a world without the English language? A million words never to exist? The words of Shakespeare never to be read. The lyrics of songs never to be heard. The plays, operas, films, soap dramas never to be seen.
Would man have walked on the Moon? Would we know that the earth was round? Or the depth of the deepest ocean? Or the height of the tallest mountain? Would we know the universe exists as a result of the Big Bang?
How would we know any of these things without a means to record knowledge? How would we know the origin of storytelling in a world without books? A world devoid of stories, of the hundreds of books we have read, excised from memory.
I can’t imagine such a world to exist. But if it did, there would be no reason to imagine a world without them. My imagination and knowledge will have existed within the confines of a different life.
I will not know of words on paper, of printed pages bound together. I will not know of classics and fairytales, of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, of a bible that sit on the shelves in a library. I will not know of a such a place. Or know what is a book.
Visit Liz’s social media: x.com/authorlizlawler
This article was published February 2025