The Book
by Amaranth Borsuk
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018)
In today’s era of instant information gratification, we have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world.
Page vii.
Our digital reading environments maintain codex-like features, from bookmarking and page turning on-screen to iPad cases that simulate hardback books.
Page xi.
The codex has endured over two millennia thanks to its utility as a device for the dissemination of ideas.
Page xi.
The term book commonly refers interchangeably to both medium and content.
Page xi.
To see where books might be going, we must think of them as objects that have experienced a long history of experimentation and play.
Page xiii.
Perhaps our hand-wringing over the death of the book is as misplaced as fears regarding the decline of reading a decade ago.
Page xiv.
We are not reading less, but simply differently. Humans’ interaction with language and literature necessitates certain kinds of portable reading experiences. It seems only natural that the book should grow and change with us.
Page xiv.
The story of the book’s changing form is bound up with that of its changing content. The book, after all, is a portable data storage and distribution method, and it arises as a by-product of the shift from oral to literate culture.
Page 1.
Content does not simply necessitate its form, but rather writing develops alongside, influences, and is influenced by the technological supports that facilitate its distribution.
Page 3.
Different technologies of the book exist side by side throughout its history: tablet and scroll, scroll and codex, manuscript and print, paperback and e-book.
Page 3.
As people settled in villages and a system of kingships formed, Sumerians needed a way to track trade and record information about their governance. Cuneiform writing developed in Southern Mesopotamia around 2800 BCE thanks to a confluence of material availability, linguistic development and utility.
Page 4.
Around 3100, scribes began to add designs inscribed with a stylus depicting the goods these token impressions represented, and a pictographic writing system in clay was born.
Page 6.
With the stylus in one hand and the damp tablet in the other, a scribe impressed a corner of the reed into the clay at an oblique angle, using combinations of wedge shapes to make characters, thus transitioning from pictographic to syllabic writing. This shift from shapes depicting words to signs representing sounds had the additional benefit of reducing the number of characters required to convey information.
Pages 6-7.
Ranging from the size of a matchbook to that of a large cell phone, cuneiform tablets were highly portable, could be inscribed on multiple sides, and could rest stably on a flat surface for storage or consultation. Some were cured in ovens, but most were simply allowed to dry in the sun.
Page 7.
The increase in writing also led to the development of archives to store these texts.
Page 9.
The Egyptians reached to their own river for a support to writing: papyrus, which only grows in the Nile Valley. Egyptians used the plant widely: for building materials, clothing, and even food.
Page 12.
As the need for documentation increased and Egyptians sought a more portable surface for writing, they developed an ideal material from papyrus: a paper both smooth and flexible that could be sized to the needs of a given document.
Pages 12-13.
Papyrus was durable, could be extended by adhering additional sheets, and allowed texts written on it to be amended, unlike hardened clay.
Page 16.
Scribes developed techniques to facilitate the reading of written work, one of the hallmarks of the book as not only a storage, but also a retrieval device.
Page 17.
The normalization of reading practices bears remembering, since from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, our own codex book has been normalized to such a degree that we question the “bookness” of anything that challenges our expected reading experience with little regard for the fact that reading in one direction rather than another, scanning text silently, and putting a title and author’s name on a book’s cover are all learned behaviors.
Page 18.
Parchment developed around 1600 CCE, provided a durable alternative to papyrus and ensured a long life for the scroll in Greece and Rome, where the Latin name for such a roll, volumen, gives us an important foundational term for the book.
Page 18.
Its greatest asset was mobility: parchment could be made wherever there was land to raise cattle, goats, and sheep - unlike papyrus, whose manufacture and export Egypt had cornered.
Page 19.
Generally, readers would unroll a scroll with the right hand while rolling it with the left, an active process revealing only a column or two at a time, which meant that to read it again one had to rewind it, much lie a reel-to-reel, cassette, or VHS tape.
Page 20.
Scrolls of both kinds existed side by side for centuries, much as tablets and scrolls did.
Page 20.
In addition to requiring utmost care, the process necessitated the slaughter of great quantities of livestock, a costly prospect. Much as in our own technological moment, where print books and e-readers continue to be used despite staunch proclamations in favor of the portability, durability, and cost-effectiveness of one or the other, established systems of production and use take time and resources to change.
Page 21.
The movement from orality to literacy plays a central role in the further development of writing to produce literature and its necessary audience: readers. It is through the Greek development of the alphabet that writing gained enough of a foothold to foster the book in the West.
Page 21.
Establishing a writing system of consonants and vowels with one symbol for each sound, the Greeks exploded the capacity of language, magnifying the number of words and ideas it could represent.
Page 23.
The Greek invention of the consonant-vowel alphabet assured the development of literacy and the shift from tablet to scroll. This alphabet proved easier to learn and write than its predecessors, since it involved far fewer signs.
Page 24.
The enhanced speed of writing in turn influenced the alphabet. Initially written in straight sided majuscule only, Latin grew curves in the fourth century CE, and miniscule letterforms arose in the fifth century, perhaps because of the increased production of Christian codices at that point.
Page 24.
Writing’s form and materials developed in dialogue with one another.
Page 24.
The traditional Chinese style of writing from top to bottom arises directly from the book’s materiality - a bamboo slip s too thin to permit more than one character per line. They were thus inscribed from top to bottom in a column of single characters, and the text continued to the left.
Page 26.
Scribes wrote with their right hands, black slips were help in the left. Moving the painted strip to the right to dry and adding a blank slip to the left was the most expedient approach.
Page 26.
Th random orientation and interlocking of the fibers made paper and flexible.
Page 28.
The high value placed on writing and intellectual pursuits in Muslim culture, coupled with the expansion of the empire, led to a boom in bookmaking between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.
Page 30.
It was ultimately through Islamic Spain that Europe would receive paper in the twelfth century, at which point the codex had be come the dominant book structure.
Page 31.
Our challenge, as students of the book, is to think about the way its materiality is both a product and constituent of its historic moment.
Page 34.
Because glued bindings attracted insects, they eventually gave way to a thread-based system.
Page 40.
When a large sheet is folded down, the resulting pages are called conjugates because they are still attached. When the conjugates have been sliced along their folds, the pages become leaves, each with two sides: recto (front) and verso (back). … When looking at a two-page spread or opening in a codex, the left-hand page is always a verso and the right always a recto.
Page 44.
The advent of the codex doesn’t mean scrolls disappeared.
Page 46.
Early Christians, the essayist and book historian Alberto Manguel suggests, embraced the codex as a means of clandestinely transporting texts banned by the Romans.
Page 47.
It is through the rise of Christendom that codex book production developed in the West - in the form of monastic manuscripts.
Page 47.
The emphasis placed on literacy led to a boom in book production within monasteries, each of which had its own library and a scriptorium for copying texts by hand.
Page 48.
Monasteries monopolized book production until the thirteenth century.
Page 48.
The monks who served as scribes did not, in fact, relish the task. While their brothers worked in the fields or traveled, they spent six hours a day hunched before the page in a cold scriptorium, incurring back-aches, headaches, eye strain, and cramps, all while wasting away the daylight hours, since candles were costly and fire was a great risk to their highly flammable materials. They labored in silence, communicating by hand signals when they needed materials or simply wanted to communicate about their lot. This they sometimes did in the margins of their pages, leaving complaints in ink among the text’s glosses.
Page 48.
To keep their writing clear and uniform, scribes pierced or marked lines and margins on their pages.
Page 49.
Scribes copied the text before them with a goose quill in one hand and a knife in the other, the latter allowing them to hold pages flat, sharpen their pens, and scrape away mistakes.
Page 50.
Reading was, in the manuscript era, a practice fundamentally different form the kind of private, meditative engagement we now experience. A monk did not sit silently at a desk or reclining in bed or while in transit from one place to another. He might be read to in assembly by a fluent reader among his b rothers, or he might mumble to himself as he learned the Latin text.
Page 53.
Each book was a unique and hard-wrought object to be enjoyed by a limited audience.
Page 54.
Reading had been, since the Hellenic era, an oral practice - one reflected in writing itself. Greek bookrolls were written in continuous script, or scripta continua,withoutspacegetweenwords.
Page 54.
It also facilitated a culture of shared inquiry, in which challenging texts were read aloud in groups as a springboard for debate. In ancient Greece, literature was primarily a social activity, with audiences gathering for performances of epic poetry and drama.
Page 55.
The written word enabled Greek scholars to transcribe and codify effective rhetorical strategies. It also vastly increased human vocabulary, since we no longer had to rely on memory to hold all of language at the ready. Writing, in fact, allowed rhetoric to flourish.
Page 56.
The population boom in Europe during thee late \middle Ages meant a middle-and-upper-class laity needed to be educated, and therefore needed access to books.
Page 58.
To meet the rising demand for and production of texts, guilds of stationers, acting as copy services, binders, booksellers, and book lenders cropped up to serve both faculty and students.
Page 58.
As a scholastic audience for books developed, so too did the structure of the page and of the codex designed for individual, silent consultation and annotation.
Page 59.
Indispensable in the exchange of ideas by thinkers far removed from one another, the easily transported written codex allowed exactly that asynchronous development of thought Socrates and Plato feared.
Page 59.
It bears emphasizing that writing itself fundamentally changed human consciousness, much as our reliance on networked digital devices has altered us at the core.
Page 60.
Many of the features we now associate with the codex arose in response to the boom in silent readership.
Page 61.
When the codex moved beyond the monastery, notions of authorship gradually changed as well, since monastic scribes were not seen as originators of the ideas they put on the page, but workmen transcribing cultural knowledge. With the rise of universities and humanist inquiry into Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric, a picture of the author as originator began to take shape.
Page 62.
Gutenberg almost didn’t get the credit for the innovations that made that feat possible.
Page 63.
To make printing possible, Gutenberg had to develop a wooden screw press based on those used for olive oil and wine, movable type created from molds, and an oil-based ink that could adhere to metal. Though popularly considered the “inventor” of printing, many of the technologies Gutenberg used were already in existence by the time he set up shop. His great achievement lay in bringing these technologies together, perfecting them, and persuading others to fund his vision.
Page 65.
By the Renaissance, type cases had developed from an upright series of cubbyholes into a system of drawers divided into small compartments for each letter. These were arranged to provide more of the most common letters, like e, and fewer of those used less frequently, like z. our terms uppercase and lowercase come from this system, in which majuscules were kept in the upper drawer and minuscules below.
Page 70.
It is likely that 180 copies of Gutenberg’s Latin Bible were produced, 135 of them on paper and the rest on vellum. Intended primarily for sale to churches and monasteries, each two volume set included both the Old and New Testament and as printed in to column with wide margins to allow later illumination.
Page 72.
Of the copies produced, around fifty are currently held in library and museum collections - almost half of them incomplete.
Page 72.
Much as we laud Gutenberg, he was not, in fact, the first person to print with movable type. We can trace it as early as 1041 to the Chinese engineer Bi Sheng who developed a technique for printing from clay type he cared by hand. … Not only was he not type’s inventor, Gutenberg may not have been the first European to print with movable type.
Page 73.
Book historians refer to books printed in Europe before 1501 as incunabula (or incunables), a term from the Latin that refers to the infancy of the printed codex - its “cradle” period. During this time, printers largely emulated the look of illuminated manuscripts, falling back on the aesthetic with which their audience was already familiar.
Page 74.
In our own era of proliferating book copies, we have become so accustomed to the codex that we often fail to see it unless it fails us: an unwieldy textbook, a misprinted cover, a missing page.
Page 76.
Books were, at the time, shelved with spines facing inward, and a book’s fore-edge might be embellished with designs, gold leaf, or intricate paintings to help a reader identify it. It wasn’t until the mid-sixteenth century, as readers became collectors whose ever-expanding libraries served as displays of both intellect and wealth, that books were shelved with their spines outward to showcase their bindings, leading to the addition of authors; names and titles to facilitate access - a feature of the codex we now take for granted.
Page 81.
A large book, whether in dimensions or heft, suggests value.
Page 81.
Although Latin was the language of the church and education across Europe, fifteenth century printers began to issue vernacular books to serve a wider audience, a move spurned by the Protestant Reformation, which advocated for a more direct relationship between the individual and God.
Page 83.
Not only did incunabula facilitate a religious Reformation, they aided in the spread of humanism and scientific knowledge.
Page 83.
The navigational aids we now associate with books - tables on contents, page numbers, running heads, and indexes - arose during this period through a shift from devices that helped printers and binders in manufacturing a book, to de I ex that helped readers navigate that same text.
Page 86.
Most incunabula … did not include page numbers - readers were expected to number them by hand.
Page 87.
The efficiency of page numbering in facilitating book use became clear to early modern printers, and, along with running heads, was incorporated by the seventeenth century.
Page 87.
Prefaces as we know them developed to invite readers into the book and instruct them in its goals, setting up a conversation between author and reader.
Page 88.
The value placed on reading during the Renaissance was not simply in absorbing a text, but in actively engaging, consuming, and reframing it. Readers of the period made books their own through the practice of keeping a commonplace book in which they copied selections of texts and organized them thematically for easy reference.
Pages 88-89.
Our conception of the book and access are intimately shaped by the shape it takes.
Page 88.
Manuscripts continued to enjoy wide use during the Renaissance, for four hundred years after Gutenberg.
Page 89.
Early printers’ types were modeled on the manuscript tradition and thus used heavy formal scripts.
Page 91.
Competition among printers and stationers, as well as humanist inquiry, led to a careful consideration of the interior of the book as an expressive space.
Page 95.
Copyright did not exist during the manuscript era, but ideas about ownership had developed with the rise of print as publishers sought to protect themselves against competition.
Page 97.
Debates around copyright mark an important shift in thinking about “the book,” transferring rights from the object itself to the text it contained at a moment when it could be not only printed but also translated and adapted for another medium - all of which needed protections.
Page 98.
As authors began to receive a living wager for their work, writing became a profession.
Page 99.
The legal shift to conceiving of the book as content, rather than object is virtually inseparable from its commodification.
Pages 100-101.
As readers turned more and more to private circulating libraries and public lending libraries, publishers saw an opportunity: publishing longer books that could be bound in sections, allowing them to sell several volumes instead of one.
Page 101.
Publishers seeking to maximize profits experimented with publishing the same work in several forms: first serialized in journals or as pamphlets; then bound for libraries as a triple-decker; and, finally, as a cheap reprint for a mass audience.
Page 101.
The book required widespread literacy, an easy reproducible material form, and a means of distribution.
Page 108.
The thing we picture when someone says “book” is an idea as much as an object.
Page 111.
The clay tablet, papyrus scroll, and codex book each were shaped by the materials at hand and the needs of writers and readers. Those materials in turn shaped the content with which such books were filled.
Page 111.
The late nineteenth century saw an explosion in signage, visible in photographs of the period depicting city streets crowded with signboards and advertisements pasted and painted on the sides of buildings. The period also saw an increase in the availability and quantity of print, thanks in part to the advent of typesetting machines, which allowed compositors to set type using a keyboard, rather than hunting though the cases. Page 126.
Books are fundamentally interactive reading devices whose meanings, far from being fixed, arise at the moment of access. The commodification and industrialization of print crates the illusion of text’s fixity and meaning’s stability.
Page 147.
Flip-books … were the precursor to cinema.
Page 157.
The book’s role in the development of film adds a layer of irony to 1950s fears that books simply couldn’t compete with cinema. Similar complaints arise with each new technology - will video games, the computer, the dramatic miniseries, streaming video, or the latest media consumption technology signal the death of the book? That question isn’t as interesting, tough, as the question of how each of these technologies has been, and will continue to be, part of the book’s development.
Page 158.
A book’s meaning arises through use and through the apparatus set up to shape our interpretation of it.
Page 178.
Much as we love books, archiving them in libraries for future generations and exhibiting them behind glass as art objects, they are a vulnerable medium. Not only are their physical forms (including the tablet, scroll, codex, and variations) susceptible to decay, their power to spread ideas makes them vulnerable to censorship, defacement, and destruction, particularly motivated by ideological and political difference.
Page 179.
In spite of its vulnerability to flame, insects, water, and sun damage, the codex is, in fact, a wonderful archival medium. It requires no software updates, can hold up in hot and cold climates, and, if printed and bound with quality acid-free materials, can withstand the oil of readers’ hands, the jostling of being taken up and put back d own, and numerous openings and closings that gradually break its spine.
Page 181.
Libraries throughout the United States have, for the last decade, focused spending on creating comfortable social and collaboration spaces, providing access to computers and the internet, and facilitating meetings and events.
Page 182.
While we might assume that digital books will have a longer shelf life than print, the proliferation of reading devices coupled with the pace of technological development virtually ensures the obsolescence of e-books tied to particular software or hardware. Ephemerality is thus a concern shared by physical and digital books.
Page 182.
A hardback is also known as a case binding because the covers are constructed separately and the book block glued into this case. We also commonly store books on bookcases, once more commonly known as “presses,” perhaps for the way they enclose and contain our ever-expanding libraries.
Page 185.
We keep books on our shelves to remind us who we once were and what mattered to us, even if only to run our fingers along their spines.
Page 188.
The book looms large in English idiom, standing inf or the law (“throw the book at ‘em”), history (“one for the books”), and social norms (“by the book”).
Page 194.
The book has been transmuted into an idea and ideal based on the role it plays in culture. Books are bedrock, and the rectilinear form has allowed us to envision them as the foundation of social order and self-actualization. Easily arrayed on shelves as a sign of erudition, capability, or wealth, the codex’s shape props us up not only metaphorically but also quite literally - for instance, when used to raise uneven furniture.
Page 194.
Defining the book involves consideration for its use as much as its form.
Page 195.
The codex has achieved popularity because it has proven useful as a portable, resource-efficient physical support suited to the average human body.
Pages 197-198.
The book is a model … for the way we think about reading in electronic space.
Pages 200-201.
The codex emulated the narrow columns of the scroll, early typefaces copied manuscript hands, and the design of the penguin paperback revisited the golden ratio of the medieval manuscript page.
Page 202.
Adding metadata to book entries has become a key component of library science since digital finding aids replaced card catalogs. Pages 210-211.
eTexts are never checked out when you need them, never in for rebinding, never sitting on a cart waiting to be reshelved or reshelved in the wrong location. Their pages are never missing - they are never lost or stolen - and the library is never closed.
Page 216.
Public domain works account for only around 7 percent of available books.
Page 223.
Each of these three initiatives, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Books, views its massive digitization effort as a public good, but their approaches to the book itself differ in important ways. Project Gutenberg’s focus on ASCII renderings of public domain works aims to make the text as accessible and fluid as possible, ignoring its former materiality. This aligns it with Google, which also emphasizes text in the interest of indexing, searchability, and easy access. Offering images of the text at a reduced file size, it reminds us that the book is an object, but deemphasized its particulars - the ultimate goal of Google’s book scanning initiative remains fattening its search engine. The Internet Archive has it both ways - it treats the book as an object, providing high-resolution color scans that show the nuances of the page’s surface and include foldout images and marginalia to replicate the book as closely as possible, but it also makes the same book available in multiple digital formats to meet the needs of different readers.
Page 229.
The use of the term e-book to apply to digital content read on screens blurs the boundary between content and form, much as our use of the work “book to refer to both a specific object and a general idea allows one to be subsumed by the other.
Page 230.
As e-readers proliferate, their features continue to remediate those that developed with the print codex.
Page 237.
Given that anyone can become an author thinks to Amazon, it bears considering how we might differentiate between a digital file on a home computer and a “book,”
Page 239.
The act of publication - of making public - is central to our cultural definition of the book.
Page 239.
The ISBN developed to help manage the vast quantity of books being produced and to catalog them in a central database, which enables them to be bought and sold through distributors and bookshops. Authors and publishers pay for the privilege of entering this database, and the ISBNs are issued by different agencies around the world.
Page 242.
In 2016, 43%$ of e-book sales went to books lacking an ISBN, reflecting the number of self-published authors who see no benefit to buying into the system.
Page 243.
Just as manuscript books persisted into the Gutenberg era, books currently exist in multiple forms simultaneously: as paperbacks, audiobooks, EPUB downloads, and, in rare case, interactive digital experiences.
Page 244.
The book changes us as we change it.
Page 258.