Technology Of The Book
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 margin. The result is a codex (in Latin), or book (we’re using English). This revolutionary change in publishing means that we can write on both sides of the velum, so the book weighs only half as much as the same writing on a scroll. And we no longer have to unwind a scroll on a long table in order to go forward of backward while hunting for a particular passage. Long scrolls were not only heavy and awkward to read, the constant unrolling and flattening and re-rolling could cause the dried ink to flake off the vellum.
If you’re wondering, vellum is animal skin which has been soaked, scraped clean, stretched and trimmed, and for over a thousand years it was the most widely used surface to write on. The word vellum comes to us from the Old French word velin, meaning calf skin. Vellum was most often made from a calf, but skin from a sheep or goat was sometimes used too. Now, the skin of a calf might contain 6 to 8 square feet; say, a rectangle of 2 by 3 feet or 2 by 4 feet. So, that was the area that your scribe was working on after the skin had been trimmed from calf shape to rectangle.
No matter the disadvantages, vellum scrolls were used from about the second century BCE, on through the end of the Roman Empire and into the Middle Ages. Books, or codices, with their wonderful two-sided pages, began to gain popularity around the second century, and by the sixth century the codex had replaced the scroll.
Unlike a scroll, the book’s flat pages offered a tempting surface on which to paint fanciful and intricate letter forms and illustrations to brighten the text. The top image on the right is a page from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and an anonymous artist has added not only an exceedingly intricare initial letter but also an illustration to portray the Wife of Bath. Indeed, books became precious works of art as well as valued sources of knowledge or entertainment.
What had not changed were the sizes of those sheets of vellum. The pages of the early books were huge. Remember, those sheets of vellum had an area of 6 to 8 square feet. You needed both arms to carry a book that size, and though you didn’t need a long table you did want a small one on which to lay open the book when you read it.
Of course, every scroll or codex was written by hand and if the text was an important preseration of knowledge, it was copied and recopied, slowly and tediosly, by hand. Books were rare and expensive. The quickest way to spread the knowledge preserved in a book or to share the pleasure of the story told on its pages, was to read the book aloud to people who had gathered to hear it. People of all ages like to hear stories. Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are collections of stories and if your lifestyle permits you to own a few codices you can probably afford to gather a few people together for a dinner followed by an entertainment, such as a reading from one of those collections. So, with the invention of the codex there developed a particular table to hold the large open book, namely the lectern — a small table with a top that slants slightly up on the side most distant from the reader. The lectern is still with us; the pastors still go to the lectern to read from the open book to their parishioners, and teachers still read from a lectern to their students.
The second image down on the right is in poor condition and the painter lacked every skill, but with patience you can make out the anonymous face in the gold disk-like halo, and the tall book case with codices on every shelf, and a slant-top lectern on which to open a book to read. No central heating in those days, and no heating at all for that poor writer. Like most people of that era who had to sit to work, he has a foot stool to keep his feet from that especially cold air along the floor.
The oldest codex that has survived is the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century Christian manuscript of a Greek Bible, containing most of the Greek Old Testament. It was discovered at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in 1844 — an interesting story that we don’t have space for here. The handwritten codex, or book, was the dominant form of publishing for almost a thousand years, sometime prized more for the bright colored illustrations than for the text. After almost a thousand years of handwritten codices, the invention of movable type radically changed the publishing world.
If we enlarge our view of the publishing world to include the whole planet, then we have to say that the world’s first movable type was invented around 1040 AD in China during the Northern Song dynasty by the inventor Bi Sheng (990–1051). There’s more that can be said about printing in China and Korea, but since we’re Europeans transplanted to the Western Hemisphere, let’s return to Europe in the year 1455 and the familiar story of Johann Gutenberg.
The invention of moveable type changed the making of books. Of course, setting the type to compose the page was a manual job that required the novel ability to read backward, but once the type was set, you could print and reprint that page any number of times. The first major book to come from a press was Johann Gutenberg’s edition of the Bible in 1455. Around 180 copies were printed – 145 on paper and the rest on vellum. It’s a big heavy two-volume work, each pages being a foot wide and seventeen inches tall. Most early printed books were large, for despite being printed on paper, the habit was to make the pages the size they would have been if they had been hand-written on trimmed vellum.
As the printing of books increased and spread through Europe, these mechanically reproduced works still had the aura of the precious hand-written and hand-decorated codices. Books were still rare and costly. Furthermore, books were still too large to be comfortably held in the hand and read. The printer who changed all that was Aldus Manutius.
The somewhat sour looking character on the right is our Aldus. That’s his name in Latin. Aldus was a Renaissance printer-publisher in Venice who loved the classics. His name translated back into Italian is Aldo Manuzio, which he was also known as. His original name was Teobaldo Manucci and he was born 1449 in Bassiano, the Papal States in Italy. He was six years old when Gutenberg produced the great two-volume Bible, and this Teobaldo Manucci, calling himself Aldo Manuzio, became a printer and publisher just as the invention of moveable type was spreading through Europe.
Aldus revolutionized printing by producing books that could be carried in one hand, books so small you didn’t need a lectern in order to read them. The works he published were carefully edited and beautifully printed, and most of the classics from Greece and Rome that we read today appeared first as books from his Aldine Press. Some readers – maybe many readers – had a nostalgic fondness for the look of a hand-written page, so in 1500 his type cutter, Francesco Griffo, produced a typeface that rather resembled the script of hand written text. It became a standard typeface and, having been invented and used first in Italy, it was called italic, the name we know it by today.
At the bottom of the right had column is the famous emblem of the Aldine Press, first used on the edition of Dante’s La Devina Comedia in 1502.The image symbolizes the motto “festina lente” or make haste slowly, for the dolphin embodies speed while the anchor holds steady.
