Book Culture is the Foundation of Civilization (in Memory of Arkady Vasilyevich Sokolov)

The article traces the evolution of views of the outstanding culturologist, documentologist and librarian Arkady Vasilyevich Sokolov (10.02.1934—16.11.2023) on the integral science, summarizing many related disciplines. At first he assigned this role to informatics, then to bibliofuturology, pinning his hopes on the fact that in the future of Russian books “library humanism” will triumph - the main pivot and target of all scientific work of A.V. Sokolov. In 2019, he rose to a new level of abstraction, reaching the concepts of bibliosphere and documentosphere derived from the concept of noosphere and concluding that their theoretical generalization is bibliosophy. By 2020 A.V. Sokolov began to investigate the phenomenon of library post-modernity. He did all this in order to substantiate at a fundamental general theoretical level the notion of humanistic book culture opposing digital culture. A.V. Sokolov defended the concept that the library is a humanistic stronghold of the nation, and digitalization (informatization, automation) is an auxiliary means to strengthen book culture as a basic value of culture.