The world today is built upon a practically incomprehensible quantity of knowledge that has been handed down in books.

It can be tough to picture what the world would be like today if the huge majority of people were unable to read, but for the large majority of history the huge majority of individuals might not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the development of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that altered that, making books much more available. Obviously, it was still only truly the richest and well-read that could read or write, but it enabled an entire host of breakthroughs in science, art, and thinking to be spread out across great distances. Consider what would have happened if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have actually been distributed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are fortunate to be able to just log onto a website like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and quickly access the totality of human understanding.

With such a rich history of concepts, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's often easy to forget how exceptionally lucky we are to have the likes of the founder of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones or the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon books supporting access to a big proportion of all the books that have actually ever been written (or the good ones at the very least). The best books of all time can quickly change the manner in which you look at the world, which has held true throughout all of history as well. The modern-day world is built upon understanding that has been handed down through books, whether that is ideology, science, or history, and human civilisation would not be anywhere near as advanced as it is today if it had not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.

It is essential to bear in mind that, although plenty of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered as ground-breaking works of fiction, for most of humankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Many stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, simply due to the fact that the vast majority of individuals could not read, indicating that most books were specialised things meant for those few who could comprehend them. After a brief boom throughout the classical period of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped considerably during the Middle Ages. Books ended up being rare treasures, with monks meticulously copying out the enduring classic texts by hand so as to protect them, as they were a few of the only members of the populace who could read or write. They were the expert keepers of understanding like biology and religion that all of us have access to in the modern-day world.