Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

Like Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, David Levy’s Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and in the digital age.

We are surrounded daily by documents of all kinds—letters and credit card receipts, business memos and books, television images and web pages—yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as our reading and writing habits are...