In 1439 the printing press was invented, making books common. Before that, there were scrolls and codices, but from what I understand, aside from religious texts books weren’t common.
Nowadays people who prefer to be alone have tons of modern hobbies like gaming, photography, crochet, biking, podcasts, the internet in general. So I just wanted to ask; if you prefer solitude, what hobby would you enjoy if you could live in any time before books were common? (with the assumption you had a comfortable life.)
The options I thought of were: collecting something, working out, writing, wood working, gardening, hiking, some instruments, and I’m sure there’s many more.
This just sounds like the premise to the anime/light novel series ‘Ascendance of a Bookworm’. It’s about a woman whose sole passion in life is reading gets reincarnated in another world in which books are highly expensive and not available to the common person. I never finished it, but it starts with her basically resolving to write her own books and trying to find ways to publish them cheaply so that they can be popularly available.