Critical Pages is back. This website has been around for a number of years and had changed, vanished, reappeared, had bursts of growth, gone dormant, and at times has apparently joined the Choir Invisible. Fortunately, while Critical Pages was gone our writers kept busy, cutting fine quill pens, scraping velum, and getting familiar with the new technology.

Notice that our writers are not working on scrolls. They’re composing individual pages and when they have completed a work they sew the stack of pages together along the left-hand edge beside the text. The result is a codex, or book. The benefit of this revolutionary change is that readers can move from one part of the text to another with having to unroll and a long length of scroll. Or if they want to stop reading and mark the stopping place, they can put a small strip of vellum partly on the page and shut the book, so that when they want to resume reading, they open the book just where they put the vellum and – presto! – they can begin reading where they left off with no bother and mess of unrolling a great length of scroll.