I am finally getting back to Ascendance of a Bookworm and it's making me look up articles about like paper, and what was used before paper, and somehow I completely missed wax tablets?? like it's two wooden frames bound together like a book and in the frames is a layer of wax and you just write in it with a stylus and the other side has a wide flat surface so you can smooth over the wax and write over it again. fucking genius. apparently there was a salt mine that used wax tablets for more ephemeral writing until 1812?