To Living Books

In all of Troncale’s and associated texts, every paragraph is numbered. The purpose of that is to allow any reader to suggest comments on any one paragraph in a place of gathering such as this. The living community, whether the original author is still living or not, is a population or community of participants in the continuance of the fecundity of the ideas. Some future editor could collect and print these comments as a future version of the book just like future generations of living persons pass on, modify, and update their past genetic repositories. This would result in “living” books.

Perhaps some of you have felt this emotionally when visiting a library. The many texts seem to smell moldy and old, and there is a sadness about the aging of the text collection. Libraries are wonderful as collections; but suffer from being static. We want to change that.