Stories are as old as humans, and publishing not far behind. These paintings record something significant, to some people (most certainly hunters) about 16,000 years ago near what is now called Lascaux, in France. We can don’t know why they chose to publish these pictures on the rock walls of a cave but can admire the skill and guess at the slow and laborious process it took these early artists to craft them.

They are certainly not the oldest paintings on record: there are some that go back as far back as 35,000 years - but they are accurate and beautiful and even now can tell us a little of something that happened long, long ago. We can ttrack our evolution as a distinct species from the fossils of the mortal remains of our ancestors, from leftover artifacts, but I think it amazing how soon painting and writing about things, in some form, began to come into the pattern of discoveries …

Painting and drawing is an obvious means of representing something. To produce the “whole picture” is just as obviously impossible and unnecessary. Some simplification is called for, some abstraction of just enough to show what the author meant. Then just show the little bit that makes the point as the details don’t matter (and much of those can be supplied by the reader’s (or viewer’s) imagination.

Skip forward a mere few tens of thousands of years and pictures became pictographs and hieroglyphs. Not quite individual letters nor completely understandable as pictures but strung together as language, well suited to the permanent task of keeping things on record. The famous Epic of Gilgamesh was recorded in Akkadian about 2000 BC and this portion in cuneiform script on a clay tablet tells the story of a Great Flood: The legend was already old , about 3500 BC and there is some evidence of the Black Sea being filled from the Mediterranean roughly around that time. Certainly an event dramatic enough to be recorded. Or maybe it wasn’t something that happened: early journalism or a work of fiction (or as some would have it, a Divine Message) whatever, the record stands - published.

So publishing goes back a long way. Forty thousand years? An author from so long ago can still tell his tale. Published in a durable medium with something worthwhile to tell, someone still holds our interest. Until later. (June 2d.- I changed the title, as this will be a series, maybe three parts, leading up to Drupa, the printing industry’s quadrennial extravaganza in Düsseldorf, May 29 to June 11)

Q