If you love to read, you may have some strong opinions about just how you consume your favorite literature and non-fiction. Perhaps you are a stern proponent of the traditional hardback. Or, like me, will settle for the instant satisfaction of downloading an eBook from your local library. The truth is, the medium through which people have consumed the written word has gone through several revolutions already, even prior to the birth of the ePub. So, too, has the act of reading itself. Join me this week for a brief history of the book.
It may be surprising to think of a book as technology. But the fact remains, books were not the first way in which people consumed the written word. From epigraphy (stone inscriptions), to tablets made of clay, stone, or even wax that writers could smooth out and reuse, people have found all kinds of ways to record their ideas throughout history.
But what about more convenient, portable forms? The papyrus roll provided just that. Made from criss-crossing layers of plant fiber obtained from marshes, especially around the Nile, papyrus provided a fairly durable writing support. Readers in ancient times would hold the papyrus roll horizontally, unrolling from one stick (in Greek omphalus, or in Latin, umbilicus*) onto a second one. Have you seen someone depicted reading a roll vertically? This is a sign that you are looking at a medieval, rather than an ancient, reader.
The Problem with Papyrus Rolls
The papyrus roll, however, had its disadvantages. First, you stored papyrus in a roll, so you could only write on one side, or else risk the outside of the document becoming damaged and smudged. Next, it was difficult to navigate and organize. Let’s say you are looking for a specific line of the Odyssey. This would involve having to “scroll” (see where that comes from?) manually through the roll to the desired location. Or, if you are trying to keep your collection in order, imagine the nightmare of trying to stack and catalog a pile of, essentially, wrapping paper tubes labeled with small tags. Finally, among other problems, papyrus began to be harder and harder to find, since so much was in use. So, what happened?
Well, the book happened. And when I say book, I mean technically, the codex, which is a Latin word meaning “tree trunk.” What? Well, binders often made book covers out of wood, which provided one advantage over the papyrus roll: durability. The pages themselves, though, were made of something else: parchment. This is an animal product, made from calf, sheep, or even goat and pig hides, treated to make them as white as possible, stretched, and then dried. From there, you would fold the hide to create pages, whether quarto (in fours; large display volumes) or all the way down to octavo (in eights; pocket editions). Scribes would gather the pieces into a quire, or a hand-sewn packet, then write, illustrate or illuminate, and then perhaps bind them, in either a hardcover or softcover form.
How the Book Made History
This format had some significant advantages over the papyrus roll. The pages are safe inside of a hard binding, and they can safely receive ink on both sides. Readers could flip more quickly to desired passages, and the parchment, which was pressed flat inside the binding, could support more forms of paint, and even gold leaf, without fear of damage from rolling and bending. Crucially, pages would eventually come to be numbered, and reading aides like indices and tables of contents became standard.
Finally, books would have their titles written on the page-edges. Libraries would store them flat with those edges facing out, so librarians and patrons could more easily find texts. Yes, you read that correctly–books were stored flat, not on their ends! Titles did not originally appear on the spine! Libraries might also literally chain their books to the work area to prevent them from walking off.
Just who first innovated from papyrus roll to book is unclear. But there are theories as to its spread, of course. One popular idea is that Christianity played a role in popularizing the codex in the 4th century C.E. (Roberts & Skeat 1983), as its form allowed religious texts, such as the Bible and the letters of Paul to the Corinthians, to remain more stable. All the content is there, from beginning to end, and not spread over several papyrus rolls that could be read in any order. But others point out that Roman poet Martial references the codex much earlier.
Book History Continued?
As for the transition from manuscript (literally “hand-written”) texts, to printed ones, and the evolution from reading aloud to silently–I’ll save that piece of book history for another day.
*Fun fact: omphalos means “belly button.” So you unroll the papyrus from its navel, or its center point!
Works Cited
Roberts, Colin H., and Skeat, T. C. (1983). The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press.
