One Bit of Prescience

A few years ago, I found an article in a fifty-year-old issue of the arts, culture, and history magazine "Horizon" that intrigued and amused me with its thoughts about the then-hypothetical idea of "universal libraries" on that old stand-by of microfilm. In going back my collection, though, I happened on an editorial comment in the very next issue that seemed that much more up-to-date. In discussing an article by Gilbert Highet dwelling on the bottlenecks ancient texts had to pass through to reach the era of printing (along with the whole "decline and fall" business and ideological pruning, there were issues such as having to copy papyrus scrolls to parchment codices), it managed to make a suggestion of its own:
( The quote at some length )