Couriers

For four thousand years, every message had a body. A runner, a rider, a pigeon carried it across the land, from the Persian riders of the Angarium through the Mongol Yam and Thurn und Taxis to the bicycle messenger of the 1990s. Then, within a single generation, the message detached itself from its carrier, and a profession vanished that was older than most civilizations. This book tells the history of couriers as the history of information itself, and asks the question that remained when the body left: Whom do we trust with what we have to say?