from Gifts, by Ursula K. Le Guin:

"Gry's question, 'What is a book?' had made my m other think about some matters that had been neglected or ignored in the Stone House. Nobody at Caspromant could read or write, and we counted sheep with a notched stick. It was no shame to us, but it was to her. Id on't know if she ever dreamed of going back home for a visit, or of people of her family coming to the Uplands; it was mostly unlikely that either should happen; but what about the children? What if her son were to go down into the rest of the world, untaught, as ignorant as a beggar of the city streets? Her pride would not endure it.

"There were no books in the Uplands, so she made them. She glazed fine linen squares and stretched them between rollers. She made ink of oak galls, pens of goose quills. She wrote out a primer for us and taught us read it. She taught us to write, first with sticks in the dust, then with quills on stretched linen, holding our breath, scratching and spattering horribly. She washed the pale ink out, and we could write again. Gry found it all very hard, and kept to it only through her love for my mother. I found it the easiest thing in the world.

" 'Write me a book!' I demanded, and so Melle wrote down the life of Raniu for me. She took her charge seriouly. Given her education, she felt that if I had only one book, it should be a holy history. She remembered some of the phrases nad language of the History of the Acts and Miracles of Lord Ranui, and told the rest in her own words. She gave me the book on my ninth birthday: forty squares of glazed linen, covered edge to edge in pale, formal script, sewn with blue-dyed thread along the top. I pored over it. When I knew it all by heart, still I read and reread it, treasuring the written words not only for the story they told but for what I saw hidden in them: all the other stories. The stories my mother told. And the stories that no one had ever told."