November 2016.
The Book
by Keith Houston
(New York, W.W. Norton & Co.2016.)
Papyrus, the paperlike material upon which the ancient world wrote its books and conducted its business, is every bit as Egyptian as the pyramids, or mummies that have since eclipsed it - and it was, in its day, considerably more important than either.
Page 3.
The inhabitants of the fertile Nile delta cultivated papyrus for papermaking purposes from the fourth millennium BCE onward, though papyrus reeds were adapted to a bewildering array of other uses too. It was a veritable wonder plant: to the ancient Egyptians, papyrus was an essential part of life, and not only as a writing material.
Page 4.
Papyrus stood in for wood in ancient Egyptian boatbuilding, especially for the simple, flat-bottomed punts used for hunting and harvesting in the Nile’s papyrus swamps.
Page 6.
In Egyptian myth, the goddess Isis sailed the Nile on a papyrus boat to search for fragments of the body of Osiris, her husband (and her brother, so the story goes), and it was said that the river’s crocodiles feared to attack any such craft lest they encounter a wrathful deity aboard it instead of a cowering human.
Page 6.
Some translations of the Old Testament say that the basket in which Moses was hidden among the reeds of the Nile’s shores was made from papyrus.
Page 6.
Aside from its dubious value as a footstuff, papyrus was a common ingredient in medicinal preparations: papyrus ash healed ulcers; macerated with vinegar, it treated wounds; the pressed juice relieved eye complaints; and, somewhat redundantly, it was mixed with wine to cure insomnia.
Page 7.
Papyrus’s centrality in the daily lives of Egyptians was a potent symbol of the land, its traditions, and its social strictures.
Page 7.
Priests were forbidden from wearing sandals made from anything except papyrus, and the temples over which they presided featured columns modeled after the papyrus stem.
Page 8.
Egyptian tradition, as recounted by the Greek philosopher Plato, told that hieroglyphics had been handed down by the ibis-headed god Thoth.
Page 8.
It is thought that the earliest hieroglyphics were create by one person (or a small number or people) over a short period of time, thus explaining their seemingly miraculous appearance in Egypt toward the end of the fourth millennium BCE.
Page 9.
Papyrus scrolls regularly lived productive lives of hundreds of years. The best scrolls were supple enough to be rolled and unrolled many times, provided that their readers took care to not fray their exposed edges.
Page 15.
Papyrus sheets hold together in all but the wettest environments (as long as it is dried under pressure, it is possible to soak a sheet of papyrus in water for days without causing irretrievable damage), though the mold and bacteria that thrive in damp conditions are hazardous to its well-being.
Page 16.
Modern papyrus is crackly, rigid, and scratchy in a way that is at odds with the smooth, pliable material described in Natural History.
Page 16.
Parchment was smoother, springy, and resilient where papyrus was rough, brittle, and prone to fraying.
Page 18.
The invention of parchment is traditionally ascribed to King Eumenes II of Pergamon, ruler from 197 to 159 BCE of a Greek city-state located in what is now northwestern Turkey.
Page 19.
Tough flexible, and water resistant, leather was a surprisingly accommodating writing surface, capable of being worked to any desired smoothness and absorbing ink well, but it lacked the rigidity, delicacy, and portability that made papyrus an ideal vehicle for writing.
Page 21.
Whereas leather is soft and limp, a sheet of parchment flexed gently across its surface readily springs back to its original shape and will hold a crease if folded more firmly.
Pages 24-25.
Parchment was stronger than papyrus.
Page 25.
Christianity embraced parchment as eagerly as had its elder sibling, and the spread of the new religion throughout the Western world mirrored the ongoing shift in writing materials. By the fifth century CE, more Christian books were written on parchment than papyrus and there were more Christian books than any other kind.
Pages 27-28.
By the thirteenth century the needs of bookmaking monks were being met by a new breed of professional parchmenters.
Page 30.
The French connection also gave rise to a related term: whereas “parchment” carried connotations of the sheep and goats most commonly farmed in the land of its origin, “vellum,” from the Old French vel, or “calf,” suggested calfskin instead.
Page 31.
The distinction between parchment and vellum, however, has always been an uncertain once, and today “vellum” is used to mean any especially fine parchment regardless of the animal from which it was made.
Page 31.
If you love parchment it is perhaps best jot to see it being made.
Page 33.
The world runs on paper. … In the age of email, websites, and e-books, our dependence on paper has grown, not lessened.
Page 35.
Paper, however, was entirely absent from the world in which books first came about. The form of the book was fixed long before paper arrived to meet it, and yet, within a few centuries of that meeting, paper had displaced parchment as surely as parchment had pushed aside papyrus. Without paper, there is not book as we know it today.
Page 36.
Paper’s importance is obvious enough today, but our understanding of who invented it, where, and why, remained hopelessly confuse for centuries after the material itself had all but taken over our books.
Page 36.
Bamboo was t China what papyrus was to Egypt.
Page 38.
Though silk has since been firmly overtaken by paper, its unique qualities still recommend it.
Page 38.
Bamboo was heavy and silk was expensive; as the demands of literate, bureaucratic China increased, a new writing material was needed.
Page 39.
Paper can be made from a huge variety of materials - asparagus stalks, bark, cactus, cotton, ivory, leather, manure, moss, nettles, papyrus (reeds or sheets), peat, pollen, potatoes, rhubarb, satin, seaweed, straw, sugar cane, tobacco, thistles, wood pulp, wool, and more.
Page 41.
Alongside gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and printing … paper has taken its place as one of ancient China’s “four great inventions.”
Page 48.
He secret of paper, as with silk before it, was jealously guarded by the ancient Chinese.
Page 50.
The way we store paper is at least as important as how we make it.
Page 52.
Chinese Buddhist monks were required to learn the arts of paper-, ink-, and brush-making so that they could produce written tracts for their new flocks, and in their missionary zeal they took papermaking to Korea and Japan in the east, Indochina in the south, and India in the west. Beyond China’s sphere of influence, however, the spread of paper was checked; to go no farther, it would rely on a new and energetic religion.
Page 53.
By the time papermaking had traversed Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Sicily, and finally Spain, three centuries after the first mills had opened in Baghdad, the Arabs had transformed it form a cottage industry into a bona fide manufacturing enterprise.
Page 55.
The use of paper suffused Arab life.
Page 55.
Parchment had long been the writing medium of choice for God-fearing Christians, and they looked askance at the material favored by the infidels. … Distrust of Muslim paper intensified to such an extent that in 1221 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, one of Europe’s most powerful medieval rulers, declared t hat any government document henceforth written on paper was invalid.
Page 56.
Today, watermarks are typically used to tie a sheet of paper to its manufacturer, but what medieval papermakers meant by them remains unclear.
Pages 58-59.
When Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type did away with that problem in the 1450s, book production exploded and papermakers found themselves back at square one. They could sell paper as fast as they could make it, but they could make it only as quickly as they could acquire the necessary supply of linen rags.
Page 62.
By the close of the sixteenth century parchment was an order of magnitude more costly and had noticeably worsened in quality. Parchment lingered on as the material of choice for lofty or otherwise important works.
Page 62.
At the end of the “long” nineteenth century, the protracted spasm of war, revolution, and industrialization that remade the globe, the paper industry was transformed. Books were still books, of course, bound in board and leather and composed of the same old paper, but the book industry had grown enormously.
Page 69.
Back in the early part of the nineteenth century, as consumers became accustomed to the neatness and homogeneity of machine-made products, so the prevailing sense of aesthetics had changed to match the new means of production. Readers wanted their paper to be as bright, white, and smooth as possible, and papermakers adjusted their recipes to match.
Page 70.
The very air of the Industrial Revolution conspired against books, with coal-fired power plants belching out sulfur dioxide that leached into paper, making it even more acidic, while the coal gas with which homes and libraries were heated and lit had similarly deleterious effects.
Page 71.
In the 1980s, when the Library of Congress first tackled the issue of brittle books, it estimated that 25 percent of books owned by large American research libraries - 75 million volumes in all - would crumble to dust if handled.
Page 71.
The first, inadvertent steps toward more permanent paper came in the nineteenth century as papermakers were put under pressure to both improve the quality of their products and reduce costs.
Page 74.
The size of an expected print run, the printing technologies and paper specifications required to do justice to a book’s contents, and the demands of a prospective audience can all sway a publisher’s decision to choose longevity over cost or vice versa.
Pages 74-76.
Though paper books masquerade as resolutely old-fashioned artifacts, their production is thoroughly modern.
Page 76.
When the first cuneiform inscription was published in 1657 after its discovery by an Italian traveler named Pietro della Valle, contemporary thinkers singularly failed to perceive its significance.
Page 79.
The key to understanding the symbols on these early tablets, in fact, is that they were accompanied by marks intended to convey numbers: the first written document in the history of the world was very probably a farmer’s sales receipt.
Page 80.
Cuneiform was not true alphabet, in which even individual syllables are broken down into abstract letters, but it looked a lot like one.
Page 82.
Ostraca, as those makeshift media are called, after the ancient Greek for “earthenware vessel” or “hard shell,” were ubiquitous in Egypt and throughout the ancient world.
Page 82.
The ancient Egyptians hankered for a writing surface more portable than hundred-ton obelisks and possessed of a little more gravitas than sherds of broken pottery. The solution was the papery sheets the Egyptians made form laminated strips of papyrus reed pith.
Page 83.
The Egyptians wrote with brush and ink, and they did so with a fluency and grace entirely absent from the writing of their Mesopotamian counterparts.
Page 84.
Ink, like papyrus, is very nearly as ancient as writing itself.
Page 84.
Scribes were a celebrated part of Egyptian culture and a popular subject for stonemasons, sculptors, and painters.
Page 85.
Scribes wrote like artists paint, holding their brushes perpendicular to the papyrus an inch or two from the tip to produce deliberate, even strokes.
Page 88.
The Greeks and Romans viewed Egypt with a mixture of disdain and awe. … The Romans in particular were so fond of such treasures that today there are more Egyptian obelisks in the city of Rome than there are in the whole of Egypt.
Page 89.
The ancient Greeks wrote with pens, not brushes, that they called calami after the hollow reds or canes from which they were carved.
Page 94.
The Egyptians’ rushes made for broad, even strokes, the narrow, flat nib of a calamus on papyrus created the conspicuous variation between thick and thin strokes that characterizes handwritten manuscripts from the Middle Ages until the modern day. If Egyptian brushes were blunt felt-tip markers, Greek calami were neat, precise fountain pens.
Page 94.
Water-based ink could be washed off papyrus if it absolutely had to be erased, but it was perfectly permanent otherwise. The parchment that was set to replace papyrus, however, was more problematic: water-based ink sat precariously on parchment’s impenetrable surface, and once dry it flaked off at the slightest provocation. A new writing material demanded a new kind of ink.
Page 96.
Parchment was so expensive that it would have been unthinkable to discard a book whose contents were no longer necessary or relevant, and so the concept of the “palimpsest” was born: taken from the Greek palimpsestos, or “scraped again,” a palimpsest is a document that has been erased and then reused.
Page 97.
The scribe’s art was an inherently conservative one and the arrival of iron gall ink set the template for book writing for centuries to come. A split-nib quill pen, a pot of iron gall ink, and a smooth sheet of parchment were the pillars of the scribe’s draft form the establishment of the Roman Empire until the height of the Renaissance.
Page 101.
In an era when a handwritten Bible commanded a price equivalent to a laborer’s yearly wage, the ability to print an endless run of books must have appeared as a license to mint Rheingulden.
Page 106.
It bears mentioning that Johannes Gutenberg, the “father of printing,” was most definitely not the inventor of printing.
Page 109.
As enticing as Chinese ink was to calligraphers and doctors, it was a stumbling block for Chinese printers who tried to move beyond simple woodblock printing. Their water-based ink did not adhere well to metal, earthenware, or porcelain and produced blotchy, indistinct images.
Page 113.
Chinese paper was too delicate to withstand the pressure needed to form a crisp impression, requiring that printers use handheld brushes rather than firm mechanical processes to impress their paper onto their type. Not only that, China’s water-based ink tended to seep through the paper and made it impossible to print on both sides of a sheet.
Page 113.
The mechanics of movable type weighed against it: printers found that it was often faster to cut entire pages in wood, as had been done since time immemorial, than it was to set, print from, and distribute movable type on a page-by-page basis. China’s printers were hamstrung by the writing they sought to reproduce.
Pages 113-114.
Though he had not invented the idea of movable type, if Gutenberg is to be credited with anything it must be that he made it work - that he systematically tackled each aspect of a finicky, delicate process until he had perfected it.
Page 114.
Gutenberg was not the father of printing so much as its midwife.
Page 114.
The hand mold was the key to the entire scheme; without this groundbreaking device, Gutenberg could never have produced enough type.
Pages 116-117.
Ink was crucial to Gutenberg’s success. As Chinese printers had found to their cost, water-based ink was unsuited to metal type, and analysis of the surviving Bibles has shown that Gutenberg used instead something closer to the vivid, viscid oil paints popular in the art world of his day.
Page 121.
Until the Industrial Revolution made ink a mass-produced commodity, most printers made their own by boiling linseed oil and then mixing in pigment.
Page 121.
The force of Gutenberg’s press had to be carefully calibrated: too little and the paper would receive only a patchy impression; too strong and the fragile lead type would be crushed.
Page 122.
Though Gutenberg had deliberately aped the Gothic handwriting favored by the Church, and though the text was organized in an entirely conventional manner, each page of the Bible that came off the press was a revolution writ small. Contemporary observers unaware of Gutenberg’s art were dumbfounded by the evenness of the individual letters, the exacting alignment of the text as a whole, and the unwavering perfection of the margins.
Page 123.
The Bibles themselves betray the precise point at which their creator’s financial worries overcame his sense of aesthetics: the first nine pages of each copy have a relaxed forty lines of text; page ten has forty-one so as to cram in a little more, and each of the more than twelve hundred pages that follow bear forty-two lines each, giving rise to the common nickname of the “42-line Bible.”
Page 123.
Decoration was carried out according to the buyer’s whim.
Page 125.
The 180-odd resultant Bible were all spoken for, if not yet paid for in full. It was an incredible achievement, and it was snatched away from its chief architect almost immediately.
Page 126.
Within fifteen years of the publication of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible there was a printing press in every country in Europe, and the making of books had changed forever.
Page 127.
More books were made in the first half century after Gutenberg’s Bible than in the receding thousand years put together, and book production only accelerated from there: 12.6 million incunabula were printed between 1454 and 1500 (these earliest books are known by the Latin word for “cradle” or “swaddling clothes”), and book production subsequently more than tripled every hundred years. In the second half of the eighteenth century, western Europe alone had printed more than 600 million books.
Page 128.
From the very first days of printing, the penning of tirades against the process became a favorite pastime among the intelligentsia, and particularly among those who saw a moral value in the patient copying-out of texts.
Page 128.
The nineteenth century’s continuous innovation in printing technology helped newspapers grow from four-page weeklies in the 1820s to sixteen-page dailies by the 1880s - and put an alarming strain on the surrounding publication pipeline.
Page 135.
The mechanized presses of Freidrich Keonig and William Bullock throw an unforgiving spotlight on the human compositors who typeset the newspapers, advertisements, and books to be printed on them. The composing stick could not match a steam-driven press.
Page 135.
Newspapers preferred Linotype, while bookmakers favored Monotype.
Page 151.
Almost every book printed between 1900 and 1950 was the product of a Linotype, a Monotype, or one of their many clones.
Page 151.
By the mid-twentieth century, relief printing was running out of steam. The method of printing that had been used for more than a thousand years - the inking of a raised surface sculpted into letters and other characters - was being supplanted by sophisticated photographic and “lithographic” techniques, where flat plates were sensitized to attract or repel ink to form letters and illustrations alike. …. “Phototypsetting” was mechanical typesetting’s last gasp.
Page 151.
The printed book maybe a stolidly analog artifact, but its making is n unerringly digital matter.
Page 152.
A thousand miles from beleaguered Rome, the island of Ireland on Europe’s western edge had escaped the worst of the turmoil. Ireland had always been a rural backwater by Roman standards, lacking roads, cities, and even towns of any great size, and yet it was here that the first flickers of a new kind of bookmaking a rose in the wake of Rome’s fall. The catalyst was the arrival of a new religion among the pagan túatha, the Irish tribes: Christianity came to Ireland in 431, introduced there by a bishop named Palladius and reinforced by the ministry of a Roman Briton named Patricius.
Page 156.
Patrick came to Ireland in the fifth century; the island was studded with monasteries by the sixth, and by the seventh the scribes of these centers of religious life were experimenting with new forms of decoration and bookmaking, the better to reflect God’s glory in the written word.
Page 157.
From the middle of the second millennium BCE, more and more Egyptians chose to be buried with copies of what early archaeologists thought was a religious text - an untranslated tract presumed to be akin to the Bible or the Qu’ran. But when one such scroll was deciphered in the nineteenth century it transpired that the “Book of Going Forth by Day,” as the test called itself, focused less on how to behave in this life than it did the next. The purpose of the book was to help its reader to reach the afterlife, whether they were a pharaoh, an aristocrat, or a commoner, and to tip the scales of the final judgment in their favor. Its translator, a Prussian named Karl Richard Lepsius, nicknamed it das Todtenbuch - “the Book of the Dead” - and his plainspoken shorthand title caught the popular imagination.
Page 157.
A desert tomb, it turn s out, is a very good place in which to preserve a papyrus scroll. One of the main reasons that the Book fo the Dead is so well studied is because so many copies have survived, their colorful illustrations intact for Egyptologists to pore over endlessly.
Page 158.
That the Greeks and Romans were prodigious artists is not in dispute - our museums are full of painted vases and classical sculptures, and our cities are littered with buildings that emulate the columns and porticoes of ancient Roman and Athens - but our understanding of how they illustrated those books is woefully incomplete.
Page 159.
The celebrated Book of Kells. Completed sometime around the year 800, it was the vehicle for all that had been learned since Columba’s time. It may be the most famous single book in the Western World.
Page 161.
The Book of Kells was both the pinnacle of the Irish monastic scribes’ art and their last great work before the ugliness of the outside world intruded upon their cloistered lives.
Page 161.
Irish scribes had developed a rounded “insular” style of handwriting that was quite different from the angular roman letters favored on the Continent.
Page 162.
Irish monks began to add spaces between words to make their writing duties less onerous. The Book of Kells and its contemporaries are as important for what they tell us about the state of the art in writing practices as what they reveal about art itself.
Page 164.
At the stern urging of the Carolingian dynasty’s greatest son, the monasteries of Europe became the last refuge of the book on a largely illiterate continent.
Pages 165-166.
Ironically, Charlemagne himself could not read or write - on sleepless nights he sat us with parchment and pen, trying over and over to master the letters of his name.
Page 166.
Banned from speaking aloud while at work, the margins of the pages on which they wrote became outlets for endless grousing about physical maladies and working conditions.
Page 166.
Other than the church itself, the scriptorium was one of the most important features of a medieval monastery.
Page 166.
Discipline in the scriptorium was strict. Forbidden from speaking aloud, monks signaled to one another in a rudimentary sign langue or passed notes like naughty schoolchildren. Supervisors hovered vigilantly at scribes’ shoulders, and workers could leave only with the permission of the abbot.
Page 168.
Scribes formed a kind of production line. Parchment, quills, ink, and gold were fed in at one end, and from the other emerged manuscripts of carefully regimented text set off by images leaping out from shining fields of gold.
Page 169.
Just as Johannes Gutenberg deliberately mimicked the handwriting of his era, so did many of the earliest printed books faithfully replicate the faint guidelines found in the best medieval manuscripts.
Page 169.
Monasteries employed both skilled antiquarii, who specialized in careful, “antique” writing, and scriptores, less practiced scribes entrusted with more mundane tasks.
Page 169.
Fewer than one in a hundred surviving Carolingian manuscripts are illustrated in any meaningful way. Even in the fifteenth century, at the very height of the craft, less than one manuscript in every ten was illuminated. This sort of embellishment was reserved for the most revered texts, and later, for the wealthiest clients.
Page 170.
The inks used were similar to modern tempera paints consisting of a pigment suspended in a binding medium such as egg white, but they were adulterated with additives such as urine and earwax to achieve the desired consistency, color, and opacity. The pigments themselves spoke of a wold well accustomed to international trade.
Pages 171-172.
Always a reflection of the societies that had made them, books were changing in response. Once the preserve of monasteries and churches, they made their way out into the wider world, coveted as status symbols by wealthy private citizens.
Page 174.
Gutenberg’s printing press, which churned out books too rapidly for them to be illustrated by hand, is often blamed for killing off the illuminated manuscript, but that is only part of the story.
Page 174.
The China that Marco Polo viewed during the thirteenth century - Cathay, he called it, from the name of a Uighur dynasty that had ruled some centuries earlier - was a technological superpower.
Page 177.
The use of paper money whose value was determined by the state rather than being inherent in some precious substance - “fiat money,” as it is known - was perhaps the greatest financial innovation the world had ever seen.
Page 177.
Barely 1 in 20 Western manuscripts of Poo’s time were written upon paper (to a European scribe, paper would have ben scarcely les exotic than parchment is today), but in China the “paper of Marquis Cai” had long since replaced bamboo and silk as the wiring material of choice.
Page 177.
The origins of printing in China are mired in uncertainty.
Page 177.
The key to the invention of printing lies in its name: yin, in its original sense, referred to the act of authenticating a document with the impression of a seal in clay, and the tradition runs deep in Chinese history.
Page 177-178.
Ancient seals have been found made out of everything from copper to gold, soapstone, jade, ivory, and rhinoceros horn, and surviving wooden and bamboo documents, sealed with telltale impressions in clay, show how widely those seals were used.
Page 178.
Rather than stamp their seals into wet clay, the Chinese now daubed them with ink and pressed them onto paper and silk. Yin, “to seal,” took on a new meaning, ‘to print.”
Page 178.
China had long carved its most important tests and images in stone to preserve them for posterity, but this sliver of paper showed that these stones were not simply monuments but also master copies that could be duplicated over and over again by means of an “inked squeeze,” or rubbing.
Page 179.
The Chinese people turned to a new religion to help make sense of their predicament and, as in the West, their monks and monasteries became the guardians of literary traditions. Buddhism had come to China, brought there by itinerant priests following the Silk Road form India, and with them had come a vast body of religious texts.
Pages 180-181.
While scribes in Europe toiled away with their quills, Chinese printers were printing comprehensively illustrated books by the hundreds and thousands.
Page 185.
Woodblock printing agreed with China’s sense of aesthetics but moveable type did not.
Page 186.
In the early ninth century … China’s burgeoning Buddhist community had cast so many copper statues of the Buddha that the country was beginning to run out of the raw material from which to mint its coins.
Page 187.
The technology behind each and every Chinese banknote wold have dumbfounded a contemporary Western scribe or artist.
Page 189.
Copies of Rustichello’s record of Polo’s travels circulated widely among scholars and historians during the century that followed Polo’s death, and for many years the text stood as Europe’s primary source of knowledge on the lands and peoples of the mysterious East.
Page 189.
There is no evidence that Marco Polo brought boodblocks back from China or that he ever explicitly referred to the process of printing except as it related to the use of seals on banknotes. Even then, Polo was hardly unique in his admiration for China’s paper money: at least seven other European travelers of his era mentioned it, and to a man, the Venetian and his contemporaries were more concerned with the financial possibilities of this radical form of currency than they were with the methods of its production.
Page 191.
By the year 1400 or thereabouts, half a century before Gutenberg printed his first book, the ancient Chinese art of woodcut printing had begun its quiet overthrow of Europe’s laboring ranks of scribes.
Page 193.
If the money, fame, and legal wrangling it engendered were anything to go by, by the early sixteenth century woodcut printing had well and truly arrived.
Page 198.
The relationship between woodcut printing and movable type is an unsolved question of chicken and egg.
Page 199.
The oily inks employed by Johannes Gutenberg and his disciples suited woodcut printing every bit as well as lead type.
Page 201.
Fewer than 1 in 10 handwritten books had ever been illustrated, even at the height of the illuminated manuscript’s dominance, but by 1550, less than a century after Pfister’s first woodcut-illustrated book, more than half of all printed books were illustrated in one way or another.
Page 202.
Dürer, Titian, and company had pushed the woodcutter’s craft as far as it could go, and prints made from wooden blocks simply could not reproduce the level of detail their creators desired. To borrow a modern term, woodcut was too low-res.
Page 203.
Intaglio printing offered a precision entirely absent from woodcut, an ability to faithfully reproduce fine details and subtle variations in tone with cross-hatching and lines of varying width.
Page 209.
The Renaissance is remembered as a buoyant tide of science, literature, and culture that carried Europe out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era. But progress toward a more intellectual way of life did not dampen the Continent’s enthusiasm for robustly traditional pursuits such as jousting, territorial disputes, and outright war, and military technology advanced as steadily as did the arts.
Page 210.
By the end of the eighteenth century etching had supplanted woodcuts as the default medium for book illustration.
Page 213.
Today, virtually all books are printed using the lithographic process.
Page 227.
Developed separately in both sides of the English Channel, by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot respectively, and unveiled near-simultaneously by both men in 1839, the new art of photography was futuristic as wood engraving was old-fashioned.
Page 227.
To truly marry books and photographs, printers needed to convert analog photography to digital print.
Page 229.
By the 1960s, web-fed offset lithographic presses had united with photolithography to be crowned as the undisputed champions of mass-produced printing.
Page 236.
Each of the pages in the printed editions of this book is essentially a single illustration - a combination of text and imagery broken down into pixels too small for the eye to see.
Pages236-237.
When we read a book’s text, we are looking at a picture too.
Page 237.
The Egyptians invented something else too, during that frantic period at the dawn of writing. To borrow the Oxford English Dictionary’s words on the subject, Egypt’s scribes had figured out how to combine individual sheets of papyrus to make “portable volume[s] consisting of a series of written, printed, or illustrated pages bound together for ease of reading”; they had invented the book, in other words, in the form of the papyrus scroll.
Page 243.
The books of the ancient world were made from long series of papyrus sheets trimmed to matching heights and pasted together, to be rolled up for storage and unrolled for reading. What we do not know, however, is why the scroll ever came about in the first place.
Page 243.
Ancient scrolls are often found with their lower edges rubbed away by their readers’ clothing.
Page 243.
Scrolls were both more convenient and more durable than single sheets of papyrus.
Page 243.
Joins between pages were always arranged so that each sheet overlapped the one to its left - the Egyptians’ hieroglyphic and demotic scripts ran from right to left and so a scribe’s pen would slip easily over a joint rather than catch on an exposed edge. (The Greeks and Romans, who wrote from left to right, rotated their scrolls by 180 degrees to achieve the same effect.)
Page 244.
A scrolls’ sheets were always aligned so that the fibers on its writing surface ran horizontally, which made for a smoother writing experience and saved the horizontal fibers from being stretched too tightly around the scroll as it was rolled up.
Page 244.
The Ptolemies attracted scholars with tax breaks and free accommodation.
Page 250.
The Mouseion’s crown jewel was the fabled Library of Alexandria, reputed to contain some 700,000 scrolls. And just as a visit to any modern library reveals shelf after shelf of nigh-identical books, each one a variation on the same basic design, a visiting scholar at Alexandria would have been greeted by endless rows and cubbyholes of scrolls all produced according to a common standard.
Page 250.
A scroll’s height was governed by the size of its constituent sheets - a scrupulous scroll maker would use top-of-the-range sheets of hieratica, if they could get it, which Pliny described as thirteen “digits” (around ten inches) on a side - while its length was dependent on the number of sheets from which it was made.
Page 250.
Columns were a few inches wide, depending on the scribe’s preference, and they were constrained by the scroll’s height to a few tens of lines each.
Page 251.
Rolled-up scrolls were stored vertically in jars and horizontally on shelves, with protruding tags affixed to one end so they could be identified without having to be unrolled.
Page 252.
Greeks and Romans often read aloud as they worked their way through written works, and so a given scroll would invariably “say only one and the same thing” as it passed through the hands of different reads. Unlike today’s hushed reading rooms, the chambers of the Library of Alexandria and other like it would have been noisy places.
Page 253.
Little wonder … that archaeologists are skeptical about ancient boasts that the Library of Alexandria held some 700,000 scrolls - no building remotely large enough to house such a collection has yet been found in old Alexandria, and current guesses place the library’s holdings at 35,000 to 40,000 volumes.
Page 254.
Searching for a favorite passage or reading through an unfamiliar work, “scrolling” through a scroll demanded their full attention. It takes two hands to simultaneously unfurl a bookroll at one end and roll it up at the other; there is no way to casually prop open a scroll in one hand while sipping rom a glass of wine held in the other.
Page 254.
Except in Egypt, which was firmly wedded to papyrus scrolls, writing tablets were the everyday notebooks of the ancient world.
Page 257.
Erasure put wax writing tablets millennia ahead of their time. It was not until the invention of the graphite pencil in the sixteenth century, whose marks could be rubbed out with a piece of bread, that there was there an equally convenient way to selectively emend one’s writing.
Page 259.
Whereas a modern reader presented with a diptych would automatically hold it vertically, with its hinged edge running top-to-bottom like a book’s spine, ancient illustrations show scribes grasping them horizontally with a “top” page and a “bottom” page, like a laptop computer.
Page 259.
The origins of the codex are every bit as obscure as those of its ancestors.
Page 260.
A large part of what is known about humanity’s past has been divined form contents of the piles and pits of refuse that surrounded our settlements. History, it turns out, is written not by the strongest but by the messiest.
Page 261.
Speculation about a missing link between the scroll and the codex first arose toward the end of the nineteenth century. Its subject was the orihon, or concertina-folded book, a mythical scroll-codex hybrid that seemed to present believable I f not definitive proof that the one had evolved into the other.
Page 266.
The Chinese and the Mayans invented their concertina books independently, and if the orihon ever existed in ancient Egypt then it lived and died there without a trace.
Page 270.
The first paged books may not have had anything to do with books at all.
Page 270.
In Egypt, Greece, or Rome, the smooth running of the ancient world was predicted on the exchange of letters. Politics, business, and family matters were managed by correspondence between friends, allies, patrons, and clients. … It is the interplay between the content and the physical form of these letters that some academics think explains the creation of the paged book.
Page 270.
By the time the Roman Empire, the exchange of letters had grown into its own literary genre: philosophers laid out their ideas in letters, and politicians disseminated their gest speeches; and the adherents of religious movements, like the Christians, built entire books around the letters of their most trusted disciples.
Page 271.
The earliest complete papyrus codices were all made so that the joins inherited from their parent scrolls run parallel to their spines, and the text perpendicular to both.
Page 272.
Parchment begs to be bound into a paged codex or similar form.
Page 275.
It may be that papyrus books were created by letter writers in Egypt, and spread northward from there to Greece and Rome; alternatively, the parchment codex may have been invented by the Greeks or Romans, closer to that material’s spiritual home in Pergamon, and later adapted to use the plentiful local papyrus of Ptolemaic Egypt.
Page 276.
Working with the vast body of books housed in the world’s libraries, museums, and private collections, codicologists, or those who study the history of the paged book, have built up a minutely detailed timeline of every change in materials, binding technique, and design from the fourth century onward.
Page 277.
For book historians … the Nag Hammadi codices were of paramount importance: they were a gnosis of sorts in and of themselves, a time capsule that had preserved a small part of the lost world of ancient bookmaking for posterity.
Page 279.
The Nag Hammadi codices display certain self-evident truths about how books should be made. Most basic of all is their fundamental shape: each page is taller than it is wide, by a factor of around four to three, making them almost exactly the same size and aspect ratio as a sheet of letter paper.
Page 281.
Historians have never agreed on why papyrus books were rectangular: one theory is that pages were bound along a longer edge because it produced a more robust text block; another is that the columnar layout commonly used in scrolls naturally translated to pages that were taller than they were wide.
Page 281.
The history of the paged book as we know it started in 333 CE, almost seventeen centuries ago.
Page 282.
As late as the seventeenth century books were most often laid flat on their bookshelves with the front cover facing upward, rather than stored vertically. Many medieval bookcases were almost like lecterns, their shelves angled downward so that books could proudly display their decorated covers.
Page 295.
With the adoption of double-cord binding, the form of the book was effectively standardized.
Page 298.
In the eleventh century, the act of sewing books together was made easier by the invention of the “sewing frame,” a pair of parallel wooden bars between which cords or tapes could be stretched taut.
Pages 299-300.
Endpapers are any leaves at the front and back of a book that are pasted to the inside of the boards.
Page 300.
Endpapers have always served a practical purpose in anchoring the text block to the cover, and when marbled papers, decorated with swirls of color became available in the seventeenth century, they became a way for bookbinders to inject some personality into their products.
Page 300.
At first, Western bookmakers preferred stiff, wooden boards that could be fastened or even locked shut to stop parchment pages from curling.
Page 302.
As readers began to shelve their books into tightly packed vertically aligned rows, there was less of a need for lockable, rigid boards to hold their parchment pages in place.
Page 303.
Leather lends itself to being decorated by “blind tooling,” a process where heated metal tools are applied to moistened leather to leave a permanent indentation.
Page 303.
It was not until the sixteenth century, when books began to be shelved vertically, with their spines facing out that titles and authors names finally began to appear on their covers.
Page 303.
By the nineteenth century, gilt-tooled book covers of delicate leather had become so exquisite - and so easily damaged - that they themselves needed protection: the earliest surviving dust jacket, a plain paper wrapper sealed with wax, dates to 1830.
Page 304.
“Anthropodermic bibliopegy,” or the binding of books in human skin.
Page 305.
Most of the books made in Europe and the United States, paperbacks and hardbacks alike, have long since stopped being sewn together in any way at all.
Page 306.
Bookmakers fiddled around the edges of their craft, refining methods, materials, and tools by degrees, but the basics remained the same. What changed instead was whom books were for, and what they were supposed to look like.
Page 310.
The idea of the modern book, the fact that handy, affordable books such as this one exist at all is a direct result of a pattern established in the intellectual, mercantile, and artistic crucible of Renaissance Venice - and it all hinges on the size of a sheet of paper.
Page 310.
The oldest books in the world are almost exactly the same width as this one, and a scant couple of inches taller.
Page 311.
Very few ancient books were wider than they were tall, helping keep the stresses and strains on their spines to a reasonable level.
Page 311.
Literary tastes may have changed since then, but the breadth of our arms, the span of our hands, and the workings of our brains are still much the same as they were in the fourth century.
Page 311.
Books are rectangular because cows, goats, and sheep are rectangular too.
Page 312.
Papyrus codices were often constructed in the same way as parchment books. Papyrus does not have a hair side or a flesh side, of course, but it does hafe fibers running perpendicularly on the opposing sides of each sheet.
Page 312.
The largest books were called folios: each pair of leaves was made form a single sheet of paper folded in half, then gathered into quires of anywhere between two and five folios each. Quarto books, on the other hand, were more regimented. Each gathering was made by folding a single sheet of paper in half and then in half again to produce four leaves - hence quarto - exactly half the size of those in a folio book. After quartos an octavos, where a quarto gathering was folded one more time to yield a quire of four individual sheets, eight leaves, or sixteen pages, in exactly the same manner as the traditional parchment quire.
Page 313.
For all its cozy familiarity from older times, early printers deliberately shied away from the octavo book. Gutenberg printed his 42-line Bible in a lavish folio format to mimic the grandest handwritten texts then available.
Page 314.
Fully half of all books printed before 1500 were quartos, and more than half of the rest were folios. The first printed books, like the first automobiles, were luxury items.
Page 316.
Aldus’s octavo Virgil ushered in the era of portable books - an era that continues today.
Page 321.
When it comes to determining the size of a book, the size of ht paper from which it is made is paramount.
Page 323.
It is system that appeals to math professors, visual designers, and office managers alike (a sheet of A-series paper can be magnified or reduced on a photocopier to fit any other A-series sheet with no waste); it informs the size of books, passports, and even toilet paper; and it rules from Austria to New Zealand.
Page 325.
Whereas empire-obsessed European papermakers had given their paper sizes imposing titles such as “crown” and “imperial,” their American counterparts called their uncut sheets “bible,” “book,” “offset,” or “text” according to the uses for which they were destined.
Page 325.
In the early days of printing however, before epilogues and appendices and bibliographies and indices, the last thing a reader saw was the “colophon,” a single page at the back of the book named after the Greek word for “summit,” or “finishing touch.”
Page 329.