Without the word, without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

Among the many worlds that man did not receive as a gift from nature but created out of his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, when he first draws letters on his slate and makes his first attempts to read, thereby takes the initial step into an artificial and highly complicated realm whose laws and rules of play are too much to learn and fully employ in any one lifetime. Without the word, without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to en- close in a small space, in a single house or a single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.