But Europe lagged behind. It’s unclear why the continent used parchment for so long, but like all areas that that were slower to adopt paper, this hindered its advancement. Up until the thirteenth century, many kings and princes were still illiterate. The greatest argument for why Europeans eventually switched to paper is because it was cheap. They first used it to make better Bibles, then quickly learned to rely on it for other obsessions, like money and banking. Their various empires expanded as a result, and around the thirteenth century, Europeans began learning more about the advancements of other cultures. Europe “had become a different place,” Kurlansky writes. “One discovery rolled in on the heels of another, which rolled in on the heels of yet another.”

There were limits to this spread of knowledge. Creating books was labor-intensive; they were hand-printed and dictated to scribes. This made them expensive, a problem that was compounded by a tendency to dress them up with heavy jeweled covers. The fourteenth-century Italian scholar Petrarch almost had his leg amputated after dropping one of these books on it.

Still, the demand for books only grew. By the fourteenth century, papermaking was a common industrial activity in Europe, which gave rise to printing, another great innovation that fueled the engines of human civilization—religion, business, art, and empire—for centuries to come. As Kurlansky notes, the greatest single change in Europe during the centuries leading into the Renaissance were “the bustling of intellectual life coming out of the monasteries and into the universities and other places accessible to the general population.”

* * *

Like Plato, however, not everyone embraced this revolution.

Kurlansky’s telling of this history, which is swift, crisp, and deft at navigating around the rabbit holes that could easily drown a story like this in caveats, features a major subplot: people complaining about change. “As with every other new technology, there were those who were disdainful,” he writes, “some who thought it was barbarism, some who thought it was the end of civilization, and some who thought it was a threat to their jobs.”

As far back as the eighth-century, Chinese poet Tu Fu groused that more paper led to more writing, which created more bureaucracy. Later, because books at first were rare and thereby held a unique power, upstart printers with the ability to produce them en masse were suspected of harboring treacherous political agendas; when Johann Fust, an associate of Johannes Gutenberg, went to Paris to sell books, he was chased out of town as an agent of the devil. Scribes saw their jobs threatened when books took off, and many of the aristocrats who hired them saw printed alternatives as sleazy imitations. They feared that a new style would completely overtake the old.