THE INVENTION OF the “Great Books” curriculum nearly one hundred years ago in the United States has been almost forgotten. According to this curriculum, all of Western culture is condensed into a collection of specially selected literature that ranges, for example, from Homer to Hemingway. Nowadays, this nostalgic book utopia looks like a dated Sunday School where allegedly Western values, norms, and traditions replace religion. Nonetheless, without reassurance of a meaningful past, there is only an overrated form of presentism. But how is this past accessible in a way that the significant not only is separated from the less significant but above all retains its quality for the here and now. Simply glorifying the past by recommending the works of “great” authors as a timeless treasure will not be sufficient. The following argument is not focused on the treasure itself, understood as the norms, values, and esthetic preferences of a past era. Rather, light is shed on the “Great Book” as a specific media format as a cultural technology that is widely practiced but little understood in its operational logic. In plain language, as a historian of media practices I am interested in advanced forms of book-reading as a way to collect and store cultural heritage.

We do not know exactly what quality storage could mean. Something that would provide our society with a type of storage that collects ideas and objects that have been important, even irreplaceable, in the past and should still be accessible today. What would be required to create an allinclusive storage of such extent? In a Western society that is characterized by accelerating technologies, there is an easy solution for everything. Just believe in the militant technological optimism of Silicon Valley and push a button: To save everything, click here! Storage is always within reach, just click and it is done. Anywhere and anytime. Neither expertise, nor practice is needed. Effortlessly and instantly. Even the problem of selection is solved thanks to the low cost of storage. Do not bother to select, just save it all. No special skills required.

To go beyond such oversimplified approaches, one must first understand “quality storage” as a challenging problem. Because wherever specific demands are made regarding the quality of storage, things proceed differently.