“Humans have evidently been telling stories for about as long as there have been humans,” the poet and polymath Robert Bringhurst writes in his new book, The Surface of Meaning. “That would be at least a hundred thousand years. We have been writing them, however, for fewer than four thousand years, and printing them for no more than twelve hundred. Reading and writing did not become the predominant method of sharing information until the spread of universal compulsory schooling, which is much more recent than printing. It has lasted for less than one half of one per cent of the lifetime of our species.”

That is a sobering fraction for a literary editor - or anyone who loves books - to consider. They seem such a part of us, even now in what we keep calling the internet age (or is it the information age? Who can remember when there's so much information floating around?). I do not think, contrary to what one hears occasionally, that books - the kind with covers and pages, the kind you can drop in the bath and still read albeit in soggy, swollen form - are about to disappear any time soon. I like, however, to think of the time when narratives and facts existed outside the covers of books, before those books themselves existed: narratives, factual or mythic, as complex as any ever printed on a press.

That said, this week I've been thinking again about the book's remarkable power as its battered pages pass from hand to hand. Jeanette Winterson, writing just next door to me of Italo Calvino, notes his powerful influence on a younger generation of writers. And it has been a week to mourn the loss of Marilyn French, whose first novel The Women's Room is a touchstone of what is quaintly called the women's movement - but if that does sound quaint it's in a large part because of French's book. Beau Reve, French called the small town where the supposedly idyllic marriage of one of her characters is set; a dream that she, and many millions of women who came across French's message either directly or indirectly, would soon wake from.

It is said that upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe - the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852 and an engine powering the abolitionist movement in the American Civil War era - Abraham Lincoln said: “So this is the little lady who started this big war.” Apocryphal or not, it is a mark of the power that stories can exert. Printed on the page, stories don't depend on their author's ability to convey them, mouth to ear. The book is a near-miraculous emissary, sent out into the world to speak on its author's behalf. Charles Dickens was taken from school to work in a blacking factory - and so David Copperfield, whom Dickens counted as the fictional child closest to his heart - was sent to work in Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse, and the plight of poor children became far better known.

Of course, it is not only storybooks that change the world - this year is the anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, after all - but their power is still peculiarly strong. Only a story, you say?

The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada by Robert Bringhurst, Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Press (www.ccsp.sfu.ca)

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