1.

From Gutenberg’s Movable Type to the Digital

Book, and Other Studies in the History of Media

1.A. Relating the Rapidly Changing Present to the Distant Past,

as Far as Book History is Concerned
Those familiar with the early history of printing, and its impact on European
society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, may have occasionally
entertained the possibility that the transition from print to digital we are
presently experiencing is a kind of fast-forward replay on a
multi-dimensional scale of what happened after Johannes Gutenberg
invented printing by movable type over five hundred years ago. Will the
Internet and digital books eventually make printed books obsolete the way
that printing eventually made manuscript copying obsolete? Could studying
what happened in the late Middle Ages and earlier somehow provide
insight into the present rapid change in the form and function of the book?
Since these questions represent the intersection of two of my core
interests--computing and book history--they definitely piqued my curiosity.
Attempts to answer these questions originally motivated me to build this
database. In the process my inquiries expanded far beyond their original
scope.

My 2005 book, From Gutenberg to the Internet , was the first anthology to
reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the
Internet. Separate from the anthology which comprises most of the book,
the introduction contains, among other things, a relatively brief introductory
essay which compared and contrasted the transition from manuscript to
print initiated by Gutenberg’s i nvention of printing by movable type in the
mid-15th century with the transition that began in the mid-19th century from
a print-centric world to the present world in which printing co-exists with the
various electronic media that converged to form the Internet . Specifically it
compared the 15th century transition from manuscript to print to the 20th
century transition from print to the Internet and the World Wide Web. When
I wrote and published that essay I had in mind examples like the transition
in distribution of newspapers and magazines from primarily printing on
paper to their growing distribution as multimedia websites on the Internet.

After I published the brief 2005 essay comparing these developments in

media separated by more than five centuries, and continued to research
the issues, the more I appreciated their complexity. Attempting to compare
two multi-faceted transitions in media separated by more than five hundred
years is, I suppose, one of those problems that some people might wonder
about, but few would try to research in detail. Since publication of From
Gutenberg to the Internet my efforts to research problems raised in that
introduction more accurately and in more detail have resulted in this
database, the freewheeling nature of which has, of course, led to much
wider fields of investigation, from the earliest surviving elements of what we
may call information, to the present.

Writing essays like these, while building a database that covers much wider
ground, is a little like trying to solve discrete portions of a very large and
changing jigsaw puzzle. By the time I think I have formulated arguments
supported by sufficient evidence, further information comes along to alter
the perspective. Still, as research progresses, certain elements of the
overall puzzle are coming into clearer view. Having researched in and
around this topic for years, I doubt that we can, with any accuracy, compare
fifteenth century developments in media with those of our own time. What I
used to characterize as an attempt at comparison I now characterize more
as a study of analogies. There are many analogies between fifteenth
century developments and our time, but whether these developments are
truly comparable may be debatable, and building the arguments one way or
the other is problematic. To review fifteenth century developments in the
form and function of the book and those in our time you need to have a
reasonable grasp of the numerous topics involved in the book history of
both periods. This means an understanding on some level of medieval
technology as it related to book culture, of current computer technology,
and the many developments in between.

One of the Chester-Beatty papyrii, in roll form.

http://www.timetrips.co.uk/hieratic.htm
You need some understanding of the medieval manuscript tradition, out of
which printing by movable type evolved. To understand aspects of the
history of manuscript books over the nine hundred years of the Middle
Ages I think you need to learn about the earlier great transition in the form
and function of the book-- the transition from the roll to the codex that took
place during the second through fifth centuries CE. This is a topic that I
cover in Section C of the second of these essays on "Transitional Phases."
And these are just some of the wider topics that come into play!

When reviewing the history of information from the earliest written records
to present digital technology, many factors make analysis difficult. One is
the quantitative scale of evidence when we work between the recent and
the distant past. Before electronic computing and the Internet, which began
to have widely-recognized impact upon society as a whole after the
development of the personal computer in the 1980s, and excluding
analogue communication media such as the electric telegraph, radio and
television, if we focus our attention on books and documents, the history of
information may often be studied through specific examples, or examples
on a relatively small scale, such as individual books or manuscripts or
specific libraries, while the numbers are often several magnitudes higher
when we address issues relating to the Internet, especially since the
development of the web , in the 1990s. This is the result of several factors.
On the one hand so much of the record is lost the more we move backward
in time; on the other hand there is the growth of information, which
occurred with the advance of societies and populations, and grew through
the development of communications media, but which became much more
widely recognized as explosive since the Internet. The early history of
information in places like ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece or Rome
often means the study of individual items, or groups of items-- often, but not
necessarily books-- or libraries with a finite, though not always quantifiable
number of physical volumes.

The 31-line indulgence preserved in the Scheide Library at Princeton.

Both before and after the invention of printing in Europe about 1450 we
may think in terms of books written by individuals, or libraries formed by
individuals, or institutions directed by individuals or small teams1. 1.A.1
Printing, of course, signficantly increased both the quantity of information
production, and the speed and scope of its distribution. These incremental
increases, dramatic by the standards of the relatively slow-changing
fifteenth century, are difficult to relate to the instantaneous or nearly
instantaneous speed of electronic distribution over the Internet. The most
significant change was that fifteenth century printed editions resulted in
multiple copies--usually hundreds of copies versus one or a handful at a
time resulting from manuscript copying. By 1480, twenty-five years after the
introduction of printing by movable type, the typical print run of a book is
estimated to have been between one hundred and three hundred copies.
By 1500 printing presses had been established in 282 cities in Europe . It
has been estimated that at least 35,000 different editions were printed
during the fifteenth century, of which approximately 28,000 survive in one
copy or more. How these numbers might have correlated to the production
of manuscripts is far more difficult to quantify, but we can review the
estimated time involved in preparing a hypothetical or specific manuscript

1
<a href="http://www.historyofinformation.com/outline.php?category=Printing+%2F+Typography">Though
paper and printing on paper originated in China</a>, and the process spread westward over many
centuries, <a href="http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?id=2616">the earliest printing was
stamped into soft clay, circa 2250 BCE, in Mesopotamia, long before the developments in China</a>.


versus the time involved in producing a hypothetical or specific book. To do
so means analysis of numerous production stages, some of which I will
review later.

Relative to speed of early printed book production, one way we can follow
advances is to consider the speed of the printing component, which took
place after hand typesetting and make-ready, the process of preparing the
forme and the cylinder or platen p
acking to achieve the correct impression
all over the forme. Regarding these time-consuming processes I have not
seen any attempts at calculation of the time that might have been involved.
Speed of typesetting and make-ready would have depended upon the
efficiency of individual workers, and would also have varied from project to
project, while pulling a hand-press was primarily a mechanical process
which remained fairly constant for the first two hundred years after its
introduction. In the mid-18th century a competent printer could expect to
print on average, about 200 sheets per hour . Enhancements to the
technology by the end of the eighteenth century, such as using an iron
Stanhope hand-press -- more rigid than wood-- allowed the forme to be
printed by one pull of the press instead of two, but output increased to only
around 250 sheets per hour.

With the growth of literacy in the nineteenth century, and the widening of
newspaper circulation, there was strong demand for increased printing
speed to produce more and more copies of daily newspapers, some of
which produced morning and evening editions. 1.A.2 Invention of the
steam-powered press by Friedrich Koenig in 1810-1813 provided the first
truly significant increase in speed first exploited by The Times of London
newspaper, which in November 29, 1814 published its first issue printed on
a double steam-driven Koenig cylinder press. The output of the new
machine was initially 1,100 sheets per hour—more than four times that of
the manually operated presses previously used by the newspaper. For a
long time I have been interested in the early history of the mechanization of
book production. Some of the results of my research may be read in a
theme in the database concerning developments from 1739 to 1901: Book
Production in the Industrial Revolution: Origins of Mass Media.

The Cowper & Applegath printing press.

By 1827 Edward Cowper & August Applegath in England completed the
design of a four cylinder steam-powered printing press with capacity of
4,000-5,000 impressions per hour. In 1868 The Times of London
newspaper installed a Walter press, developed by the owner of the
newspaper, John Walter , that printed on continuous paper, further
increasing the speed of production. The next major advance occurred only
seven years later, in 1878, when J.G.A. Eickhoff built a four-cylinder
perfecting press, capable of printing two sides of paper simultaneously.
Since then newspaper printing technology has made great strides with full
color newspapers, some of which in Asia are printed in millions of copies
per day . Today's fastest double-width offset newspaper press, tall as a
four-story building, may be the Mitsubishi DIAMONDSTAR 90 with a
printing speed of 90,000 full color, 96-page broadsheet copies per hour.

Since the way I approach some of these problems is through referencing

surviving examples of primary sources, there is a disconnect when we
relate interpretations of the past, based on sometimes unique books or
manuscripts, and relatively finite or paucity of evidence-- very small
editions, quantities most often gradually increasing with the advance of
time-- to issues of modern media and computing and the Internet, which
require us to think on an almost unimaginably larger scale, explosive
growth rates, and usually too much evidence: hundreds of millions or
billions of people, millions of books, a few of which are printed in millions of
copies, trillions of URLs, as of January 2011 over 10 billion apps
downloaded from Apple's app store, which opened only on July 10, 2008 .
In May 2011 Skype, founded in 2003 , was purchased by Microsoft for $8.5
billion. At the time of purchase Skype, which had yet to turn a profit, was
growing at the rate of 500,000 new registered users per day, had 170
million connected users, with roughly 30 million users communicating on
the Skype platform concurrently. Volume of communications over the
platform totaled 209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010.

As large as these numbers are, they have precedents: the development of

electric and electronic media, beginning in the 1830s with the development
of the electric telegraph, stimulated more and more communication. If we
go back to the end of World War II in 1945, the year in which telegraphic
use peaked in the United States, Americans sent 236 billion telegraph
messages that year , seeming a huge number relative to U. S. population at
the time. With respect to the amount of information transferred, numbers
may be deceptive since telegraph messages were charged for by the word,
and tended to be exceptionally brief, while the amount of text, audio and
video information that can be transferred or exchanged in one minute either
through analogue channels or digitally on the Internet is incomparably
greater than the amount of text that could be exchanged in the same time
by telegraph. Because of the availability of increasingly rich and diverse
information over wireless networks, the nature of telecommunication has
changed. As of May 2010, cell phones, used by about 90% of American
households, were used more for data, such as text messages, streaming
video and music, than speech , and during 2008 to 2010 the average
number of voice minutes per user in the United States fell. In his book, The
Information. A Theory. A History. A Flood (2011, p. 395), James Gleick
quotes Jaron Lanier dramatically describing the scale of the
ever-accelerating flood of electronic information we are experiencing: "It's
as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it
swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet."

To attempt to compare the rapidly changing present with the late Middle
Ages or the more recent or more distant past, we often have to move back
and forth from limited evidence viewed through history's microscope, more
accessible to individual interpretation, to quantities of information that may
be most efficiently viewed through the telescope of the algorithm and the
search engine. This exponential increase in quantity of available
information, building since the telegraph in the nineteenth century, and
additionally amplified from radio and television in the early twentieth
century, was exponentially multiplied when communication technologies
converged on the Internet in the late twentieth century, to the extent that
information overload became a buzzword. And yet these problems of scale,
though enormously increased, are not entirely new, as Denis Diderot raised
aspects of them in the mid-eighteenth century when the number of printed
books seemed to be getting out of hand. Even when Diderot wrote the
problem of information overload was by no means new to scholars. Long
before the invention of printing, when manuscript books were
comparatively, expensive, scarce and often difficult to obtain, scholars who
demanded the most intimate understanding of long texts expressed
concern that the number of books being produced was becoming
excessive, and worried about their quality.

A statue of the Muslim polymath Ibn Khaldun in Tunis.

To cite only one example, which happens to come from medieval Arabic
literature, in The Muqaddimah , written in 1377, the Arab polymath and
historian Ibn Khaldun worried about the great number of scholarly books
then available in every field, so many that they could not be read in a
lifetime. He recognized that the existence so many books resulted in the
need for summaries in textbooks, which he understood served useful
purposes. Summaries and condensations, as necessary as they were, he
considered detrimental to scholarship and the acquisition of good study
habits. True scholarship, he believed, required painstaking study of long
and detailed works over a considerable period of time. 1.A.3

Until the development of analog recording devices such as photography ,

cinematography , microfilm , sound recording , and audio and video tape in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, books and archival records
remained the primary means of recording and distributing information. For
that reason what we know about the early history of information, and
related topics like early views on information overload, from the earliest
writings, through the manuscript period, and even through the first half or
more of the twentieth century, comes primarily from the physical books or
documents that survived. These tend to be the work of individual authors or
identifiable groups of writers. That for most of recorded history surviving
historical records are primarily in book and archival form explains why book
history holds such a central place in the history of information, especially
before the growth of analog and digital telecommunication and storage
systems in the twentieth centuries. Apart from my life-long focus on books
and their history, the central role of the book in the early history of records,
particularly up to the twentieth century, may help explain why I concentrate
my narrative and analysis of this panoramic database in this way.

Methods of comparing the growth rates of electronic information versus

physical or book or archival information were developed from social
science techniques. Toward the end of the twentieth century, with the rapid
expansion of television, for example, researchers suspected that the
growth of electronic information was surpassing the growth of information
recorded and distributed by print. To study very large information flows new
statistical research methods had to be developed, focusing on large-scale
quantitative measurement rather than individual works. Social scientist
Ithiel de Sola Pool measured the rapid growth of electronic media, including
the growth of television, relative to the slower growth of print media from
the 1960s. His pioneering study published in 1983 1.A.4 confirmed that for
at least the past five decades books and print media represented only a
very small, though very significant, diminishing percentage of total
information flow. I believe that it is reasonable to assume that the
percentage of stored information recorded by books may remain small, yet
very significant relative to content, whether books are printed or digital. In a
study published in 2011 Hilbert and Lopez show that books represented
only 1% of the world's stored information as early as 1986. 1.A.5 Not
surprisingly, perhaps, in May 2011 the bulk of Internet traffic (49.2%) in
North America was real-time entertainment applications : chiefly film
downloads with their very large files, and it was predicted that
entertainment downloads might represent 60% of Internet traffic in North
America by the end of 2011. In June 2011 it was reported that social
networks were used by 90% of U.S. Internet users , for an average of
more than four hours per month. This growth in Facebook and other social
networking sites was taking web users away from the so-called " document
web " which includes documents such as digital books, or essays like the
one you are presently reading.

Is it ironic that indexing and searching technology for digital information

assists research on analog records, including books? Data scanned from
print into the ocean of bits and bytes becomes more quantifiable, more
readily accessible, in the sense of an encyclopedia article, an image, or in
some cases an online digital facsimile, assisting us far more than hindering
research, making my project possible. But, as some scholars observed as
long ago as the Middle Ages, access to increasing quantity inevitably raises
issues of overload, of quality, requiring efforts in focus, and evaluation.
What may be most difficult in comparing old and new technologies with
respect to these very general topics is the necessity of thinking about the
unique and special, such as a famous illuminated manuscript or papyrus
roll, or small groups of people listening to a book being read aloud in the
ancient world, and then thinking about the opposite of unique-- the socially
pervasive, Internet social media issues, and back again, requiring frequent
change of focus. We may also observe, however, that in spite of the
exponentially inscreased quantity of data, and the greater number of
people often involved in projects today, individuals still play key roles. We
can still tell their personal story.

Levels of complexity also complicate comparisons between earlier and

current information technologies. As technical and difficult to learn as
professional writing must have been in the ancient world or the Middle
Ages, or however complicated the process of medieval manuscript
illumination, or hand-production of papyrus or parchment or paper, or the
mechanical process of printing by movable type must have been, these
were arts that individuals or small groups, with effort and practice, could
eventually master from the ground up. The computers we use today, and
the software we typically run on them are so complex, that their hardware
and software require large teams of engineers for design and
programming. In 2001 the operating system Windows XP contained 45
million source lines of code ; I have not been able to find data regarding
the size of more recent versions of Windows. Thus even though the end
products, such as the HTML editor I have been using to write these
essays, facilitate individual use, and an individual may still write a book that
can be printed on paper, published on the web like this, or issued in ebook
format for ebook readers, the development of software for electronic
composition, for display on ebook readers, and the design and production
of ebook readers themselves, require numbers of people and capital
investment magnitudes greater than they would have prior to electronic
computing, the Internet, and the development of digital books. Though the
end result of programming is to simplify, or at least to facilitate operations,
the size of code to attain those goals may be immense.
 The Chevrolet Volt, whose complicated machinery
requires approximately 10 million lines of code to run.
An article published in the New York Times on January 21, 2011
mentioned that it takes eight million lines of code to run Boeing's new 787
Dreamliner , and it takes ten million lines of code to run the new Chevrolet
Volt plug-in hybrid automobile. Inevitably, as programs become ever
larger and more complex, the debugging process becomes more and more
difficult, often resulting in bug fixes or updates, adding further layers of
impenetrability, especially as compared to mechanical processes. 1A.6

Other elements of complexity are the multi-media aspects and interactive

features of the web relative to individual broadcast media. By broadcast
media I refer to the traditional media such as print, television and radio, that
transmit information from its source to a wide range of receivers: one way
transmission, as compared to social media which combine broadcasting
with reader or viewer feedback and comment sharing. Since its
establishment in January 1996 T he New York Times interactive online
version passed the limitations of print and images on paper to include audio
and video in many articles. You can watch television from their website, and
you can interact with the columnists by entering your comments online
either on the newspaper website or social media sites. These video and
audio features turn up in many places on the web. From the standpoint of
book history, in 2010 The Grolier Club of New York, the leading American
book collector's club, keeping up with current technology, began making
videos of selected meetings and events available from their website to
members who are unable to attend, using new technology to promote
interests which are frequently antiquarian in nature. Using new technology
for historical research is, of course, also what I am doing here. When we
trace media back to their roots we follow the histories of individual media
such as manuscripts, print, photography, tv, movies, or radio. From the
mid-20th century we may follow the development of experimental projects
in multimedia and virtual reality . While we may find partial precursors, there
is a disconnect when we try to relate the history of different broadcast
media- among which I include print- to the immense diversity and
interactivity of the Internet media experience, which allows hundreds of
millions of people to produce online content of all kinds, and to interact
through social media .

There is also a disconnect with respect to networking and information

transfer, both in speed and amount of data. In the ancient world
messengers on horseback, riding in relays on the Royal Road, as
described by Herodotus , could travel 1,677 miles in seven to nine days. At
that time an army on foot might have taken three months to cover the same
distance.

The Chappe optical telegraph.

Until the development of the Chappe optical telegraph at the end of the
eighteenth century , relay riding, especially over improved roads, remained
the fastest method of communication over extended distances. Chappe's
semaphore technology could transmit a 36-symbol message between Paris
and Lille (about 230 kilometers or 143 miles) in about 32 minutes, or a little
less than a minute per character, significantly faster than relay riders could
cover the distance. The system eventually expanded to 556 stations
covering and 4,800 kilometers, and remained in use for military and
national communications until the 1850s when it was superceded by the
electric telegraph . The Morse code for the electric telegraph allowed
another incremental advance in speed, but like the optical telegraph,
remained a method of transmitting individual characters or words by code,
except over electric wires rather than line of sight--a major advantage in
speed and efficiency, since messages were not delayed by low visibility
caused by overcast, could also be sent in the dark, and could go longer
distances between relay stations.

As in other fields of information transmission, technical advances in

communication and information theory as well as practice caused speed of
communication to accelerate, to the present level of essentially
instantaneous transmission of small files, high speed downloads of large
files like the one you are reading, speed enhancements being one of the
most frequent "new and improved" announcements we receive, as we
reach light speed with optical transmission . With so much of the world
networked, all of us have access to a quantity and diversity of digital
information that is unprecedented and incalculably larger and more diverse
than anytime before. Without the space limitations of print, media can
publish enormous texts and keep them archived for easy access. In
2010-11 Wikileaks , founded as recently as December 2006, could expose
hundreds of thousands of secret documents, and newspapers could
publish their selections without concern to the restraints of size or weight of
their publications or the cost of paper. 1A.6
There is also the matter of scale with respect to time. Change in media
occurred slowly in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, sometimes
requiring centuries for measurable change, beginning to accelerate with the
introduction of printing by movable type in the mid-fifteenth century,
advancing inexorably, but measurable during that so-called incunabula
period of printing from 1455 to 1500, more in terms of a decade, or multiple
decades, than in terms of sudden disruptive events. Inevitably, disruptive
events did occur during the late Middle Ages, as they did throughout
history, such as outbreaks of plague, or in the first decades of the sixteenth
century, the Protestant Reformation. Epidemics impacted society one way,
ideas another; the contagion of reform spread by Luther's prolific
publications resulting in the Reformation, impacting religion and society by
its occurence. Yet the rate of disruption, as dramatic as it must have been
at the time, seems, at least through the lens of history, to have been less
frequent than now. Because most of us are connected by the web, we learn
about new developments in information technology and digital books often,
experiencing along with the barrage of available information a glut of
change disruptive by its almost constant introductions of "new and
improved." But, if we step back and look for precedents we may find them.

The Google N-Gram viewer, which allows users to track

cultural trends based on the frequency of appearance in the Google Books database.
For example, the existence of the searchable texts of millions of books is
being exploited by scientists and scholars in ways that might not have been
imaginable just a few years ago, leading to entirely new approaches to the
history of books and libraries, including the emerging field of Culturomics
emanating from the Cultural Observatory at Harvard. On December 16,
2010 a highly interdisciplinary group of scientists and scholars from
Harvard, MIT, Google, Houghton Mifflin publishers and the Encyclopaedia
Brittanica published " Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of
Digitized Books " in the journal Science . These new explorations of
astronomically large amounts of digital text are outgrowths, on massively
increased scale, of automated textual researches originated by Father
Roberto Busa with the support of IBM as early as 1949. To me there is a
beautiful irony in having what was later called humanities computing-- at
the time a radically new approach to scholarship using cutting-edge
technology-- originated by an Italian Jesuit priest for creation of an index
verborum of 11 million words of medieval Latin mainly written by the
thirteenth century scholastic philosopher and theologian St. Thomas
Aquinas . Father Busa used innovative technology to understand the past.
Faced with the barrage of innovation and change that we experience, it has
been my life-long habit to search for historical perspective, to understand
the present more clearly by understanding the past.

Created from both physical and digital sources, HistoryofInformation.com

has become a kind of personal research laboratory for the history of the
digital and physical approaches to information and media. Some of the
themes focus on digital information, some on the development of broadcast
media, some on physical information such as book history; some are
otherwise characterized. You will find that the data is searchable by a
virtually unlimited number of parameters. Creating this database is one
thing; using it is another. As much as I have immersed myself on these
topics for nearly the past twenty years, and I have designed the database
to be accessible from many different points of view, my overriding
preoccupation remains the relationship between past and present
transitions in media, and the development of information technology as it
relates to the history of books, libraries, and digital information. In spite of
the challenges, some of which I have outlined, I find this a fascinating way
to approach history in general, and I hope you will too. From my ongoing
research I will present my latest work on the comparison of the transition in
media which we are presently experiencing with that which occurred in the
fifteenth century. Then I will review transitions in media before Gutenberg
(Chapter 2). After that I will discuss the history of information
searching--without which I could not have undertaken these studies-- from
its origins in ancient libraries and archives to the development of web
search engines (Chapter 3). (This section was last revised on October 15,
2018.)

1.B. The Transition from Print to Digital: The Cumulative Aspect of

Media Means that Transitions Involve Co-Existence of the Old
with the New Rather than Replacement, For Extended Periods of
Time
Though it was more than obvious that the world of books was in the midst
of great change, when I wrote the introduction to From Gutenberg to the
Internet in 2004-2005 I did not foresee the enormous speed at which the
transition from print to digital would occur. At that time the massive projects
of scanning the world's printed books were just beginning, and the ebook
was only a fringe product. But even before the wide availability of digital
books and acceptable ebook readers, the rapid development of online
editions of newspapers, encyclopedias, and other large online research
sources during the 1990s confirmed that the graphic qualities and
searchability of web resources provided a growing substitute for the
creation and distribution of information that had previously been distributed
primarily through print, as well as an alternative distribution method for
other electronic media such as television and radio. When describing this
transition from old to new media we should recognize that one of the chief
lessons of the history of media is that transitions from old to new are more
a matter of co-existence rather than replacement. Because older media
may remain useful, to a greater or lesser extent, for the reading, writing or
storage of information media tends to be cumulative, and the new media
rarely entirely replaces the old. Instead older media co-exists with the new,
usually for an extended period of time.
In October 2004 Google announced its Google Print project, renaming it
Google Books in December 2005.

The Elphel 323 digital camera. Source: Elphel, Inc.

Prior to announcing the project Google had the open-source firmware for
the Elphel 323 digital camera adapted to allow the camera to scan books
at the rate of 1000 pages per hour. In only about five years, by October
2010, the Google project, working at a multiplicity of sites, had scanned
over 15 million books from 100 countries in more than 400 languages. That
number represented more than ten percent of Google's August 5, 2010
estimate of the number of different books in the world, excluding serials and
pamphlets: 129,864,880 . Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of
Google's overall estimate, which may be impossible to confirm, the
magnitude of their accomplishment of scanning and making searchable
over 15 million books within only five years may be put in perspective by
considering the slow growth of printed book production in prior centuries.
For comparison we have the statistics of the Incunabula Short Title
Catalogue , which provides an inventory of all surviving printing from its
invention in 1455 to 1500. This includes a total of 29,777 different editions
published in the first forty-years after the introduction of printing, out an
original number of editions that is thought to be around 35,000. 1 Following
that we have the English Short Title Catalogue which lists all surviving
books printed in English between 1473, date of the first printing in English,
to 1800. This lists over different 460,000 items published in over 300 years.
Because this lists only books printed in English, we may reasonably
assume that the number of printed titles in all languages would have
exceeded the million mark fairly early in the eighteenth century, or around
150 years after the invention of printing. I have not seen a compilation of
statistics on this matter. As population grew and literacy increased over the
next two hundred years, book production also increased, balanced by the
inevitable losses from a wide variety of causes, the greatest being war. To
cite the most dramatic example, in the twelve years between 1933 and
1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million
books produced over centuries throughout occupied Europe, an act
inextricably bound up with the murder by the SS-Einsatzgruppen of six
million Jews, and more than thirteen million unarmed Russians, Poles, and
Russian POWs. Unlike all the unique individuals brutally murdered, only a
certain percentage of those hundred million books would have represented
unique items that are lost forever; how many copies of those destroyed
books might have survived in some form is unknown. 1.B.1

From the speed at which over 15 million books were scanned we may
consider the tremendous difference in velocity between the automated
process of scanning and indexing compared to the centuries required for
thinking, discussion, writing and editing before publishing in print or digital
form. With the scanning and online publication of tens of millions of books,
periodicals and manuscripts by Google and other organizations including
academic libraries, the online publication, or conversion from print to
online-only publication, of numerous periodicals and newspapers , and the
development and exploding popularity of electronic books or ebooks , for
which the texts of hundreds of thousands of books are already available for
reading on a growing diversity of ebook readers , cell phones, and
computers, it is evident that books and digital information-- formerly
separate cultures-- have rapidly merged into one. The result of improved
ebook readers, improved wireless communication, expanding selection of
content, widespread adoption of online buying habits, and prior widespread
adoption of other hand-held digital devices such as smart phones and MP3
players, success of the ebook is even more recent, dating back only as far
as the introduction of the Amazon Kindle , which occurred in November
2007. The Apple iPad , currently the leading competitor to the Kindle, was
introduced as recently as January 2010. Since 2008 sales of ebooks and
ebook readers have grown dramatically. In December 2010 ebooks made
up 9 to 10 percent of trade-book sales , double the rate of the previous
year. On December 13, 2010 Amazon announced in its blog that "within the
first 73 days of this holiday quarter" it had sold " millions of the new Kindles
with the latest E Ink Pearl display ." On March 2, 2011 The New York
Times reported that Steve Jobs announced that 100 million iBooks were
downloaded from Apple's iBookstore during its first year of operation. On
May 19, 2011 Amazon reported that it sold 105 books for its Kindle ebook
(e-book) reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback physical books .
At this time ebook sales represented 14% of of all general consumer fiction
and nonfiction books sold, according to Forrester Research .

The avalanche of success of the electronic book confirms that computing is

involved in virtually all aspects of book production, including writing, editing,
images, design, prepress , and distribution of nearly all books issued in
printed or digital form. Some printed books are, of course, also output on
digital presses , in those cases making even physical book production,
except for paper and binding, an entirely digital process.

The cover of the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker

magazine. Source: Endgadget.

An example of an artifact formerly primarily associated with print evolving to
digital in an amazing way would be the June 1, 2009 cover art of the The
New Yorker print magazine created entirely on an iPhone ! Reflecting the
growth in digital book production, in November 2010 one of the best-known
short run book printers in the United States began offering ebook
conversion services to its clients , assisting them in moving traditional
printed books to ebook formats.
The implications for brick and mortar libraries of the online availability of an
increasing percentage of the world's information remain uncertain. Beyond
serving as repositories for printed information, one of the central roles of
university libraries has become managing Internet gateways to both free
and subscriber-only paid electronic information. Though the amount of free
information, or advertiser-supported information, on the Internet may
appear overwhelming, we often forget about the vast amount that is
subscriber-only or otherwise restricted access that specialists require. But if
users, including those affiliated with universities and research centers can
access so much information without leaving their desks how many will
actually enter physical libraries? On my visits to university and city libraries
over the past few years I noticed that in addition to their traditional roles as
research and study centers, some are becoming meeting places, with such
facilities as coffee shops, reflective of their non-traditional usage. And in
spite of the explosion of digital information, a significant percentage of
books and periodicals are still published in print, rather than in digital form.
Besides that, even though many books are technically available online,
copyright restrictions often prevent more than the "snippet view" access,
making reading the online versions highly frustrating, and driving the
student toward the physical book held in the physical library. These
restrictions are lifted for digital books, but typically the reader has to pay for
them. Here libraries have found a new role in the lending of digital books
for ebook readers.

There is also the side issue of digital preservation . Until reliable

international standards and protocols are established for the long term
preservation of digital files, if that is even a possibility, it remains safer and
sometimes more economical, when compared to the cost managed
archiving of digital information, to store information on paper. In June 2011
the founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, stated that "Physical
archiving is still an important function in the digital era," especially as some
libraries are de-accessing physical books after they have been digitized,
and announced that the Internet Archive is building a Physical Archive of
physical books that it has scanned . The Physical Archive of the Internet
Archive is intended to serve as a back-up for the digital texts, perhaps also
a tacit acknowledgement of the uncertainty of long term digital archiving.
The physical books will be carefully catalogued, packed in archival cartons,
and stored in climate and humidity-controlled shipping containers within
warehouses.

Another aspect of the complex evolving relationship between physical and

digital books in academic research is that many obscure publications such
as pamphlets or manuscripts are not available online. Still it is my
impression that as more and more material is digitized many brick and
mortar libraries will place increasing emphasis on their unique or very
scarce material while continuing to acquire quality or popular physical and
ebooks and other media, along with physical and electronic subscriptions to
journals they deem necessary and affordable. Researchers will more often
need to consult the physical object when doing research concerning
aspects of book history or material culture. For those interested in the
history of books and manuscripts for their full cultural value, viewing and
studying the original artifact will never be completely replaced by a
facsimile, any more than a facsimile of a painting can replace an original.
As preservers of the original artifacts, rare book and manuscript libraries
serve a museum role as well as a research role. Unfortunately most
libraries do not have appropriate exhibition facilities or sufficient knowledge
of exhibition design to fulfill their full museum role. Hopefully they will
compensate for this by building virtual exhibitions and other historical
websites. Some of the libraries with the best physical facilities and greatest
skill at mounting actual exhibitions are the Morgan Library and Museum,
The Huntington Library, and the New York Public Library. (This chapter was
last revised on September 20, 2018.)

1.C. Defining "The Book"

Because of the ongoing changes in the form and function of the book
during the present transition from mostly print to the combination of print,
digital and multi-media, defining what we mean by "book" presents more
challenges than one might expect. As a life-long afficionado of the finely
designed and produced physical book, my first inclination remains to think
of the book as a physical object which, depending upon the quality and
aesthetics of its overall design, paper, printing, typography, illustrations and
binding, may be appreciated perhaps romantically, as "a sculpture for
reading." However, the qualities of most physical books may not fulfill all
our subjective aesthetic expectations, and whether they do or not, the book
is often defined more abstractly both in terms of text, and as a medium for
conveying a text. According to the Oxford Companion to the Book, Suarez
and Woudhuyen, eds., published in 2010 (p. 543) the word book may be
used both to designate a text and the vehicle in which the text is
transmitted: the word "has long been used interchangeably and variously to
signify any of the many kinds of text that have been circulated in written or
printed forms and the material objects through which those words and
images are transmitted. The ancestor of the modern word 'book' is used in
both senses in Anglo-Saxon documents. . . ."

In 1998, near the dawn of electronic books, Frederick G. Kilgour , the

creator of OCLC, defined the book as "a storehouse of human knowledge
intended for dissemination in the form of an artifact that is portable--or at
least transportable--that contains arrangements of signs that convey
information. . . . The electronic-book system, when fully developed, will
need to be accessible by a device that will serve as a comfortable vade
mecum for an individual user." 1.C.1 By requiring the book to be at
minimum "transportable," Kilgour seems to have excluded such writings as
stone inscriptions, though stone inscriptions were certainly a durable
means of communication. Furthermore, transportable is relative; even a
heavy stone inscription would be transportable by the right equipment. By
focusing on the book as "artifact" Kilgour acknowledged that electronic
books would be future developments, referring to the then-current
inconvenience of reading an electronic text on a desktop computer screen.
As many of us recall, in the early years of personal computing, before the
development of high-speed wireless Internet connections and truly
user-friendly hand-held reading devices, the question always raised against
electronic books was "Who would want to curl up with a cumbersome
computer or laptop when you could curl up with a "real", i.e.'physical'
book?" Or, this question would be turned into a joke by asking, "Who would
want to curl up with a computer when you could curl up with a book, or at
least with someone who had read a book?"

Stripping away non-essentials, I believe that we may characterize a book

as a container for text and related information, designed for storage,
distribution and communication. Of course, the communication usually
occurs by the process of reading, and reading may be the process of
viewing images as well as text, or images themselves may be considered
text, and sometimes what might appear to be text could be very small
drawings.
 "Fusion," a 1988 piece by the artist Timothy Ely. Source:
The Center for Book Arts.

In a discussion of Timothy Ely's mystical unique manuscript books in

issue 9.1 of Fine Books & Collections magazine (Winter 2011, p. 9)
Nicholas Basbanes quotes Ely relative to the difficulty that a graduate
student was having in an attempt to decipher Ely's "language": "He finally
summoned up the courage to ask me if I would tell him what this stuff
meant. I told him that for the most part he was to look at these things as if
they are tiny drawings, and he just found that to be absolutely
unacceptable. It was really frustrating for him, because he just wanted me
to give him the code, and I said, there isn't one."

For all intents and purposes a book should be identifiable or labelled;

however, an incomplete book or fragment, which may have lost its title
page or other bibliographical identifiers, may still be characterized as a
book. Prior to the Internet and the electronic book we might have assumed
that the book was defined by its most common physical form, which for
about 1500 years has been the codex. Or, if we took a wider historical
approach, we would probably have acknowledged that throughout their
history books have existed in a variety of physical forms, and we would
have described the book in terms of its physical attributes.

The front side of the Cyrus Cylinder, dated circa 537

BCE, upon which is written a declaration of the King Cyrus II in Babylonian cuneiform.
We could have said that it took the form of a clay or wax tablet, a clay
cylinder, perhaps a stone inscription, a papyrus or parchment roll, or a
codex. If a codex, it had a certain number of leaves usually made of
papyrus, parchment or paper, containing information in the form of words or
images or diagrams or a combination of those, either written or printed or
both, and that it might or might not have a binding. Depending upon the
physical format of our book, we could attribute certain characteristics to the
form. A codex might have a title page, pagination or an index.

However, if we wish our definition to include non-physical forms of the

book, such as audio books , and digital books, whether issued for an ebook
reader, as a downloadable PDF , on CD-ROM , on a DVD , or
what-have-you, different kinds of physical attributes apply. Many devices
could serve as ebook readers: those specially designed for the purpose,
such as Kindles and iPads, smart phones, tablets, and conventional
desktop or laptop computers.

The recto side of a papyrus containing lines from

Homer's Illiad, found at Hawara, Egypt and dated to circa 150 CE.

If published as a physical codex, this essay would have fixed pagination. In

its current display form, which, incidentally I hope to improve in the fairly
near future with redesign and the addition of images, it occupies only one
long web page, more like a roll than a codex, but holding far more
information than a typical roll would have held in the ancient world, as most
of those contained a text equivalent to about one book of Homer's Iliad or
Odyssey . Whatever physical form my essay is taking on your computer
screen depends both on the formating built into my electronic text and the
nature of the screen from which you are reading. As a feature of your web
browser, you have the flexibility to increase or reduce the point size of the
typeface. If this was an ebook, and you were reading it on an ebook reader,
you might also have the option of changing the typeface. Pagination of my
text might change as you adjust the point size or change to a typeface with
a different character count, or software might be able to retain the"fixed"
pagination for consistent reference even with the changes.

Does my electronic text exist as book without a storage and display

medium such as a computer or an ebook reader? If I had written out my
text in longhand or on a typewriter it would have to be stored,
communicated, and read in a traditional physical medium of some form,
such as a collection of unbound sheets of paper or a physical codex. Or
before writing, or in ancient or medieval culture, a text could be passed
down orally from person to person through memorization. If written on
some physical medium, however, it could be presented as a physical book.
Unlike a physical book, the text which you are currently reading is a digital
file which I could not write or read without hardware such as a computer
and software to enable its creation and programming. Since a device is
required for communication between the human and the file, the digital file
only serves its purpose for communication if it is running in the reading or
reading/writing device. However, because a digital file of this type can
neither be created nor used without such a reading device does that mean
that a reading/writing device is an integral part of my text? This is an
interesting question. If, for example, there was only one specific reading
device required to read a specific text we might argue that the device in
that instance is an integral part of the text. However, because digital files
can be downloaded over the web to a variety of non-unique reading
devices providing they are running the right software, I would argue that the
digital text exists independently of the reader, but that the text does not
become a "book" until it is in a usable form in some kind of reader.

Reflecting on common qualities of books stripped away from their physical

attributes, I thought that one quality common to all books, physical or
digital, is a static text at the time of completion. 1.C.2 Including this,
however, confuses the textual aspects of the book with its form and
function. Another problem with including a concept of a fixed or static text,
or even any form of text within our definition of the book, is that so many
books exist in variant editions or states showing different stages of the
development of their text. Textual variants, of course, occur in many books,
from papyri to medieval manuscripts to printed books of all kinds, and these
variants can be collected and studied whether the text is perceived as
complete or incomplete or fragmentary. This returns to the larger question
of whether or not the text is independent of the form and function of the
book. If the book is a container should the container be defined without its
content? Do we necessarily include the concept of text within our definition
of the book, or is it more the other way around: do we define a text by its
various editions or states in books? Certainly students of texts take the
media on which the texts are recorded into account, and the field of book
history encompasses fields which study texts as well as the history of the
form and function of the book. Often the nature of a text affects the form,
such as size or design, if not necessarily the function of a book. If images
may be considered text could a video be considered a text? Until relatively
recently we thought of books in codex form presenting texts that were
either manuscript or printed. Audio books were mainly audio renditions of
printed texts. Is there such a thing as a video book? Perhaps we do not
have definite answers to these questions.

As I wrote this database online I did not think of it as a book. Nor do I

intend it to be viewed as a book in the way that I understand the concept of
"book." The scope of material that I am attempting to cover in the database
seems too wide and too multi-dimensional for any book in the traditional
sense. An interactive database with thousands of entries and even more
thousands of hyperlinks would seem to stretch the traditional definition of
the book. The database hardly ever presents arguments, though
occasionally I slip in some. It also lacks a cohesive point of view. Instead
the database is not intended to present a point of view except through the
process of selection of what is included, and how those entries are
indexed, and that is a continuously evolving process. The goal of the
database is to present information that you can follow or use from your
point of view, whatever that is. Furthermore, the thousands of links to
entries within the database itself, or to outside sources, tend to diffuse
focus rather than to concentrate it, unless one views the links as equivalent
to footnotes--details supportive or extraneous that you read if you have the
time or inclination. My purposes in adding so many links are both to
document the sources of my information like footnotes, and to amplify what
I have written by providing links to further information. To me, the most
appealing aspects of creating this database are its interactive aspects, its
fluid, multi-dimensional nature with its links to the greater world of
information, and the opportunity organize in different ways the widest range
of material on the history of information as my curiosity expands with the
ever-increasing accessibility of historical and other information on the web,
and my greater access to physical books.

These narrative and analysis essays could appropriately be called a book

though I am not writing them in the way that someone would normally write
a book: map out its scope, write an outline, organize it into chapters,
publish it when finished. If viewed from the perspective of traditional book,
my process of writing these essays would more reasonably be considered
a series of published drafts, or works in progress--not a finished text.
However, under the working, and also unfinished, definition of book
formulated here I am aware that this unfinished work may be called a
book--a published book, as it is online-- even though I continue to rewrite,
revise, and expand it regularly. Having these essays online helps to explain
the unique project that is HistoryofInformation .c om . Whether or not these
essays, and their associated database, are perceived as a book, or books,
since their inception in 2005 these studies of media-- from ancient to
newest-- have been created entirely as digital files on the Internet as I work
at my computer, drawing from information in both digital and physical form,
surrounded by thousands of physical books, many of which are beautiful
objects produced over five centuries. I would not want to create these
studies in any other way.

In an April 2011 blog post under The Technium heading from kk.org
," What Books Will Become " Kevin Kelly wrote of "the web's great
attraction: miscellaneous pieces loosely joined." He seemed to suggest that
an essential element of "the book" was its separateness from the loose
conglomeration of material on the Internet rather than its connection
through the many cross-references to the conglomeration that websites
typically provide by links:

" . . .bookish material tends to dissolve into a undifferentiated tangle of

words. Without containment, a reader's attention tends to flow outward,
wandering from the central narrative or argument. The velocity of shifting
focus creates a centrifugal force which spins readers away from the
pages of the book."

To counter the distractions of the web, Kelly states that "a separate reading
device seems to help," such as an ereader or even a cell phone. Taking
advantage of future reading devices and interactivity with readers, some of
which he outlines, Kelly suggests that as the ebook evolves it will take a
form very different from websites, reflective of the rapidly evolving definition
of "the book" and "the ebook"--definitions that seem to be growing more
complex along with the increasing complexity of the associated
technologies.

Perhaps the most complex publication on the Internet, and the ultimate
intellectual expression of its social networking aspect, the Wikipedia , with
its 3.5 million articles in English, and 17 million in about 250 other
languages as of December 2010, is presumably the longest, or among the
longest Internet publications, and it might be the longest book, or figurative
set of books, ever created, with the most different currently published
versions, and the largest number of authors. 1.C.3 The speed at which it
has been written would have been unimaginable before the Internet; the
Wikipedia began on January 15, 2001 ! But should we call it a book? The
enormous length of the Wikipedia does not prevent it from being called a
book by the present definition, which in theory could encompass a work of
any length. It may certainly be described as a container for information that
is designed for distribution over the Internet and communication by reading,
and even, if by some stroke of our imagination, the Wikipedia could be
issued in an enormous set of physical codices, following Kilgour's definition,
those individual codices would be transportable, and the entire set, of who
knows how many volumes could be tranported in a series of semi-trailers or
railroad cars. However, if we require a static or finished text for a work to be
called a book, the Wikipedia , which is constantly being revised, improved
and expanded by an online group of over 100,000 volunteers, cannot be
called a book. You might ask whether selections from the Wikipedia copied
off the website on a given date could be published as a book. Because
everything in the Wikipedia is made available free of copyright in theory this
would be possible, and it has probably been done more than once, though I
have not found the specific bibliographical references. Paradoxically, if we
were thinking only of physical codices in defining the concept of the book, a
work the size of the Wikipedia would probably have been unimaginable,
and, of course, if it had to be written in the traditional methods, by hand or
by typewriter, on paper, by an imaginary team of typists passing paper back
and forth, it could never have reached its current form within a century or
even a millenium, let alone a decade.

If length does not factor into our definition, brief documents may also be
considered digital books or printed books, just as we sometimes count
printed pamphlets and short codices or ancient papyri as books, even if
some of these books have survived in fragmentary form. This means that
groups of blog entries, or even SMS text messages, may be considered
books; I admit that including text messages with all their abbreviations and
less than literate language seems to stretch the definition of the book about
as far as it can go! Would we more accurately characterize them as graffiti?
In December 2010 Blog2Print! offered a service by which a blog could be
turned into a professionally printed 20-page soft cover "Blog Book" for
$14.95.

Michel de Montaigne.
Because we tend to view the past through modern metaphors, also in
December 2010, the sixteenth century creator of the essay form, Michel de
Montaigne , was characterized as the " father of all bloggers ." A book
also needs basic means of identification including author, title, date, and
publisher, though not all of these details are always provided. If it is being
marketed today in either printed or digital form a book needs a unique
product identification code called an ISBN (International Standard Book
Number). If the ebook is being marketed in different electronic formats each
different version is supposed to have a different ISBN . Still, even without
these basic means of identification, a scholar or detective might be able to
identify a book from its text whether the book is physical or digital.

But what if a book does not have any text or images? Should we call a
"blank book" a book? With respect to physical books, blank notebooks are
sold as books every day in a wide varieties of formats and bindings. A
blank codex is still a functioning codex, and a blank papyrus roll remains a
papyrus roll. Both of those are books partly, I believe, because they have
the potential to carry text and illustrations even though they are blank. Does
that mean that an ebook reader without a digital file is essentially a "blank
book"? Perhaps. Summarizing our definition then, the concept of book has
moved far beyond its traditional physical limitations, and may be thought of
as a container for text and related information designed for distribution and
communication, chiefly by means of reading, but also perhaps by listening
and viewing. At the present time a book may exist in two basic forms:
physical and digital. If a text exists in a physical form like a codex it
contains an integral display mechanism in the form of pages on which
information may be written or printed. If a text exists in the form of a digital
file or files, which require a separate reading device or display mechanism,
that device, separate from the text, is an essential, though sometimes
interchangeable part of the digital book, as without a reading device the
text cannot be read by humans. Whether at some future date humans, or
humanoids, will be able to read digital files by direct input into their brain
using a brain-computer interface, without an external reading device,
remains, at least for the time being, a topic for science fiction. Research on
a brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes also called a direct neural
interface or brain-machine interface, through which digital files could be
directly input to the human brain, processed in the human brain, and also
output digitally, began in the 1970s. It was featured in such science fiction
or cyberpunk classics as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and the
film The Matrix (1999).
 The theatrical poster for the film Blade Runner.

Relative to humanoids the issue was dramatized in the film Blade Runner
(1982) in which the humanoid (replicant) received a personality, including
memories such as books read, by data input. If and when people can read
digital files without an external reading device, the digital file or files alone,
or what traditionally was called text, without a separate display mechanism,
may be viewed as books.

(This section was last revised on October 5, 2018.)

1.D. Comparing the Fifteenth Century Transition in Media to that

of Our Time
In the 1990s when I began researching the issue of comparing the fifteenth
century transition from manuscript to print with the present transition from
mostly print to websites on the Internet I had spent several years
researching the development of the technologies of computing, networking
and telecommunications that underpinned the Internet and the World Wide
Web. I also thought of websites, such as those for the digital editions of
traditional print newspapers and magazines necessarily as multi-media,
involving sound and video as well as text and graphics. Attempting to
compare the transition from manuscript to print with the twentieth century
transition from primarily print to multi-media websites was difficult and
problematic, especially since most of the media underpinning the Internet
such as electronic computing, video, sound, and networking technologies
had evolved centuries after printing, and attempting to include those in the
comparison confused the issue. Nevertheless, even though I was
dissatisfied with my attempts, I continued my research, resulting eventually
in HistoryofInformation.com .

As I continued my historical research, the technology of the digital book

and its popular acceptance evolved rapidly. eBooks and ebook readers
such as Kindles and iPads became widely popular, and as difficult as the
historical problem of comparing transitions in media separated by five
hundred years had originally seemed, it became increasingly clear that in
spite of the rapid changes in many forms of media including video, cinema,
audiobooks, and new forms such as podcasts, if we exclude other forms of
electronic media from the comparison, ebooks provide a means by which
we may draw reasonable analogies between the fifteenth century and our
time. There is a clear analogy between the fifteenth century transition from
manuscript copying to print and the transition in our time from printed books
to ebooks or digital books. Much like the transition from manuscript to print,
in our time digital books co-exist with printed books, and some printed
books still sell millions of copies in print, while most of the growth overall of
information production occurs in digital form. We may view computing and
the Internet-- the overall technologies on which digital books or ebooks are
based-- as analogous to printing by movable type. Images in digital books
such as photographs, or even videos, reproduced on the computers
controling the electronic displays in ebooks may be viewed as analogous to
the images in fifteenth century printed books. A related analogy may be
drawn between the libraries of our time, with their holdings of physical
books and their increasing focus on digital information and eBooks, and the
libraries of the fifteenth century, all of which contained manuscript books,
which were increasingly augmented and supplemented by printed books as
more and more printed information became available. Viewed in this way
the analogy is complete.

A Gutenberg-style press, circa 1568.

That the electronic book and ebook readers are adaptations of computing,
networking, and various other electronic technologies is hardly different by
analogy from the adaptations that Johannes Gutenberg, formerly a
goldsmith , made to much simpler technologies nearly five hundred years
ago when he adapted a wine or oil press for a printing press, adapted metal
casting techniques to create movable printing types, and created an
oil-based printing ink which would stick to his metal types. Gutenberg’s ink
differed from the traditional water-based ink used to write manuscripts.
1.D.1

The Eniac.
While the electronic book is the product of many different electronic
technologies developed by numerous inventors over more than fifty years
since the invention of electronic computing , it is probable that at least a
few others besides Gutenberg were involved in aspects of the invention of
printing.

Within the context of the relatively slow-changing fifteenth century, printing

by movable type was probably perceived as much more radical than
electronic books are today within the context of our rapidly evolving
habitual use of wireless devices such as laptops, tablets, cell phones and
smart watches for connection to the Internet. And even though the
technology of early printing was far less complex than today's, its
technology also evolved in stages. For example, from relatively recent
historical research we have learned that the method of producing movable
type attributed to Gutenberg seems to have developed in phases rather
than as a complete system , and that Gutenberg’s initial technique of type
casting (1454-55) was a precursor to the punch-matrix process which
became dominant. Whether Gutenberg or someone else developed the
punch-matrix process, and when this development might have taken place
remains unknown. By the early 1470s the printing press that Gutenberg
had developed was also improved, presumably by another inventor--
identity unknown but probably in Rome-- with the introduction of “a movable
carriage which enabled the printer to place a whole sheet on the press and
print it in two pulls from two successive moves of the carriage. This new
procedure spread from Italy to other countries, and by the middle of the
1480s it had become generally available. This improvement, which sped up
the process of printing, had a profound effect on the production of texts.”
1.D.2

Emulating manuscript codices that had evolved as information creation,

transmission, and storage devices for over one thousand years, early
printers copied manuscript formats in their page layouts and adapted
manuscript hands in the design of their typefaces. Some of the earliest
printers had previously made their living as scribes, and some called the
new art of printing ars artificialter scribendi, or the art of writing by
mechanical means. 1.D.3 The first scribe to adopt the new technology was
Peter Schoeffer , the successor to Gutenberg’s printing equipment along
with his partner Johann Fust.

The colophon of the 1457 Mainz Psalter, bearing the first

printer's mark.

Schoeffer’s colophon for his exquisitely beautiful Mainz Psalter of 1457

described its innovations in scribal terms:

The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters,
and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an
ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the
pen…”

Published only two years after Gutenberg's 42-Line Bible, this magnificent
book was:

A. The first printed book to include a colophon giving both the name of the
printer and the date of printing.

B. The first work to incorporate color printing, with initial letters printed in
red, light purple, and blue (from an engraved metal plate).

C. The first printed book to include music— two lines of music printed with
a 4-line staff.
D. The first book to contain a printer's mark: the two linked shields of Fust
and Schöffer hanging from a branch, the first of which was inscribed with
the Greek letter χ for Christ, the second inscribed with the Greek letter Λ
(for logos = word). 1.D.4

Though the unusually elaborate printed graphics in the Mainz Psalter are a
partial exception to the rule, by necessity printers standardized and
simplified the graphic form of the book, incorporating those features of
script for their typefaces which were essential for communication, and
rejecting “the endless variation in form and function that handwriting can
create.” 1.D.5 Like Gutenberg's 42-Line Bible or Fust and Schoeffer's
Mainz Psalter, many early printed books were very beautiful in their own
right. The efficiency that book production gained through the mass
production process of printing inevitably caused printed books to lose part
of the artistic individuality inherent in the process of writing out manuscripts
one copy at a time; what was lost by mass production was replaced by a
new aesthetic of print media.

To lessen the graphic difference between this new aesthetic and the
traditional appearance of illuminated manuscripts, to which their customers
were accustomed, some printers left space in their typographic designs for
illuminated letters or other kinds of manuscript decoration, such as
rubrication, to be added to books after printing. This process of first printing
the text, and then having it decorated, followed the centuries-old pattern of
manuscript production in which the scribe first wrote out the text, leaving
space for illuminations, and then turned the pages over the artist who
would do the illumination. The difference was that instead of requiring
miniature paintings to be painted in by hand as in manuscripts, early
printed books, when illustrated, incorporated printed images, either
woodcuts or engravings, which could, at additional cost, be hand-colored or
even illuminated to more closely resemble medieval manuscripts.
Sometimes printed editions also incorporated printed woodcut initials which
contained ornaments, or initials that were historiated with images, also in
the style of traditional manuscript illumination, but printed on the pages
along with the text. The printer, who was responsible for both the overall
graphic design of the text and the images, often also acted as a bookseller,
and sometimes employed artisans who also worked in manuscript
production to produce printed book illustrations, reflecting an overlap of
manuscript and printing production workers, techniques, and marketing.
When copies were printed on parchment or vellum and illuminated they
resembled traditional illuminated manuscripts even more closely.

Folios 7v and 8r of the Gottingen Model Book, which is a

primer of sorts on the illumination of books.
A model book for manuscript and printed illumination circa 1450, reflecting
the common source of both, is the Gottingen Model Book . The Mainz
Psalter previously discussed was one of the very few early printed books
which incorporated illuminated initials and other decorations printed in
color, obviating any need for manuscript embellishment after printing.

Not unlike the earliest printers, designers of ebook readers emulate the
most successful and familiar aspects of printed books, simulating the
appearance of print on their high resolution electronic screens, providing
familiar typefaces, page formats, and even simulating the process of
turning pages. These hand-held devices evolved from desktop publishing ,
which was introduced in 1984-85 for the typesetting and page-layout of
printed books. It was the key application in bringing the production of books
and personal computing together on a large scale. Twenty years earlier the
first computer text formatting program, TYPESET and RUNOFF , which was
developed in 1964 for mainframes, was derived from the commands used
by typesetters to format documents on specialized typesetting machines.
TYPESET and RUNOFF was the forerunner of word processing programs,
and also the forerunner of the HTML text and image formatting language
used by web browsers to format web pages. Page formats of ebooks are,
however, limited by screen sizes of the readers; typefaces and point sizes
presumably may be selected by users. If pagination changes with type size
and ebook reader format, indexing no longer necessarily correlates to page
number, but instead to places within the text. Because the page format is
not necessarily static as it would be in a printed edition, rather than
attempting to maintain footnotes at the foot of pages or at the back of a
book, it may be efficacious to conceal foottnotes under the text, as we have
done in this online essay using this symbol: 1.D.o.

Beyond emulating features of the codex, designers and publishers of

ebooks exploit the advantages of the new media in their conception and
creation of digital publications, resulting in multimedia, multi-sensory effects
impossible with print. An elegant way that I saw this new approach
described was by Meri Media , the London-based publishers of Post ,
the first independently published magazine for the iPad, the first issue of
which appeared in January 2011. In May 2011 Postmatter.com described
the project in this way:

"Post is a project born of love for magazines, and one dedicated to

taking that love beyond paper and physical matter. A new frontier and
paradigm in publishing, Post looks beyond the traditional rules of how
and what magazines 'should be', in favour of speculating upon what
magazines could be. It is about fashion, art, architecture, cinema, music,
culture. It is about what's exciting now and tomorrow.

"Post is an only child, born of the iPad, with no printed sibling to imitate
or be intimated by. Liberated from the imposing heritage of print culture,
Post exists an entirely virtual realm, yet is intimately connected to
material through the medium of touch. Inherently interactive Post
presents a truly multimedia, mult-sensory journey from the first frame to
 the last, where the advertisements all built for Post by Post are immerse,
tactile experiences.

"Post is not a thing. It is an idea. A non-surface whose pages dissolve

and reform at your touch. It is material for the mind, the eyes, and
sometimes the ears. An entire world existing only with a plane of smooth
glass, tangibly alive, but cool to the touch. Let Post be your guide."

(This section was last revised on September 26, 2018.)

1.E. Economic Aspects of Book Production and Bookselling

In the fifteenth century printing dramatically changed the economics of
book production and bookselling. Apart from the transition from the roll to
the codex, which took place in Late Antiquity, from the second through fifth
centuries CE, and will be discussed in Section 2.3, the economic model of
manuscript book production had changed little since Roman times, except
that Romans sometimes used slaves, rather than monks, or paid scribes
and illuminators, to produce manuscript books. Both the Roman and
medieval process usually involved the production of manuscript copies of
texts one at a time and to order. It has been suggested that when several
copies of an identical text were ordered, groups of Roman scribes, working
in the same room, might have copied out multiple copies of the same text
from dictation, especially in the ancient world when it is thought that all
reading, or nearly all reading, was done aloud. Though production of
simultaneous copies is unconfirmed, there is ample evidence that scribes in
the ancient world copied manuscripts from dictation. 1.E.1 Whether working
from dictation would have been possible later in monasteries operated by
religious orders which required a vow of silence, is unclear. Benedictines
took no vow of silence, and Saint Benedict, in his Rule, prescribed "four
hours of daily reading, all of which was done orally by selected readers to
the rest of the monks. This edict not only impelled copying and preservation
of books in monastic libraries but also generated scriptoria in which books
were copied." 1.E.2 In classical antiquity, before the production of books
moved out of the private sector into monasteries during the Middle Ages,
usually a bookseller would receive an order for a text from a client and hire
a scribe to copy it out, an artist to produce images if required, and a binder
to produce a cover if the book was in codex form. During the ancient world
we also have evidence of booksellers ( librarii ) hiring copyists, and
individuals such as Cicero's friend Atticus using trained slaves (also initially
called librarii ) to copy out manuscripts for distribution.

"We hear nothing of a book trade at Rome before the time of Cicero .
Then the booksellers and copyists (both initially called librarii ) carried on
an active trade, but do not seem to have met the high standards of a
discriminating author, for Cicero complains of the poor quality of their
work ( Q.f . 3-.4.5, 5.6). Most readers depended upon borrowing books
from friends and having their own copies made from them, but this too
demanded skilled copyists. It was perhaps for such reasons that Atticus
, who had lived for a long time in Greece and there had some
experience of a well-established book trade, put his staff of trained
librarii at the service of his friends. It is not easy to see whether Atticus is
at any given moment obliging Cicero as a friend or in a more
professional capacity, but it is clear that Cicero could depend on him to
provide all the services of a high-class publisher. Atticus would carefully
revise a work for him, criticize points of style or content, discuss the
advisability of publication or the suitability of a title, hold private readings
of the new book, send out complimentary copies, organize its
distribution. His standards of excecution were of the highest and his
name a guarantee of quality" (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars ,
3rd. ed. [1991] 23-24).

After the fall of Rome, when book production gradually moved almost
exclusively to the church, monasteries produced manuscripts substantially
for use within their local monastic community; however, from provenance
and paleographic evidence it is evident that roughly half of surviving early
medieval production from monasteries in the two main producing countries,
Italy and France, found its way to libraries in other countries. Whether this
was through barter or sale may be little known. 1.E.3 Later, in the early
thirteenth century, after book production moved mostly out of monasteries
back into the private sector, by producing mainly to order, medieval book
producers shifted the capital cost to the buyer, who paid for the costly
materials in advance, and presumably paid for the labor either in advance
or as the manuscript was completed. In Medieval Craftsmen: Scribes and
Illuminators (1992) p. 35 Christopher de Hamel cites, as one of the earliest
manuscripts clearly made by a professional scribe in Paris, a copy of
Ptolemy in the Bibliotheque nationale de France "with an inscription
recording its completion in December 1213 from an exemplar in the abbey
library of St-Victor in Paris ." Although the Abbey of St. Victor was
dissolved and destroyed during the French Revolution, remarkably the St.
Victor copy survives and is also preserved in the Bibliotheque nationale.

Professional scribes were capable of writing in several scripts. De Hamel

also illustrates a display poster written by a scribe that was preserved in a
binding from Oxford that can be shown to be dated about 1340. This poster
(De Hamel's plate 31, p. 40) was once tacked up outside a stationer's shop.
It is the "oldest known English public advertisement." The accounting of the
relative cost of the different components involved in the production of a
manuscript book from roughly the same time is recorded in a manuscript
preserved in the Bibliotheque municipale d'Amiens (shelfmark 365). It is a
copy of Henri Bohic's voluminous Commentaires commissioned by
Etienne de Conty from the scribe Guillaume du Breuil between 1374 and
1375. The manuscript consists of two large folio volumes, the first
containing 370 leaves, the second 388. Inside there is a note stating that
the work cost 62 livres and 11 sous, broken down into the following
components:
 The scribe's or copyist's fee: 31 livres 5 sous

The purchase and preparation of the parchment, including the mending

of holes: 11 livres 18 sous

Six initial letters with gold: 1 livre 10 sous

Other illuminations in red and blue: 3 livres 6 sous

The hiring of the exemplar for the copyist, provided by Martin, Carmelite
monk: 4 livres

Repairs to holes in the margins, and stretching the parchment: 2 livres

Binding: 1 livre 12 sous. 1.E.4

What we may observe from this listing was the high cost of writing, based
undoubtedly on the extensive amount of time involved in writing out such a
long text on nearly 800 leaves. The second largest cost (11 livres 18 sous
plus 2 livres for repairs and stretching the parchment) was for the
production of the nearly 800 leaves of parchment--a labor intensive
process. The gathering, (4 bifolios, consisting of 8 leaves) sometimes
called "Quaternion," was the unit of production for medieval manuscripts,
and the unit by which professional scribes and illuminators charged for their
work, the illuminator working on a gathering after its writing was completed.
Because nearly all manuscripts consisted of several gatherings, and these
had to be kept in a discernable order, systems of numbering developed, the
earliest in monastic scriptoria being numbers or letters written on the last
page of each. This system was sufficient in monasteries where, it is
believed, there was little danger of confusing a gathering from one
manuscript with another. As commercial manuscript production developed,
and different scribes might be working on one copy, or producing several
copies of the same text at a time, each scribe might have a slightly different
character count per page, and a system of numbering gatherings could
have resulted in gaps in the text if gatherings from one copy were confused
with another. To prevent that commercial book producers developed a
system of catchwords, by which a catchword would be written in the lower
corner of the last page of one gathering that would be matched up with the
first word of the next, making it easy to keep the gatherings in the correct
order. This catchword system would later be continued by printers who
would print the catchword of at the end of each gathering to be matched up
with the first word of the next, and who also developed an abbreviation
system using letters, numbers and symbols, for each gathering that they
printed at the foot of the first page of each gathering. The order of these
abbreviations would be compiled into a collation that would be printed with
the colophon of each book, so that the binder would be sure that he had
both all the necessary printed signatures, and that they were assembled in
the correct order.

Printing required a different economic model, in which the capital costs and
concomittant risks were shifted to the printer. First, an individual who
desired to enter into the printing trades had to learn the technical aspects of
the trades, and probably also had to hire workers with the skill and
experience of operating a press, cutting punches, casting type, cutting
woodcuts or engraving copperplates, and perhaps binding books. For the
first two centuries of printing its skills remained trade secrets learned only
through apprenticeship.

A 1694 edition of Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the

Whole Art of Printing.
The first detailed printer's manual, Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the
Whole Art of Printing , did not appear until 1683-84, and as detailed as it
was, even this would have been insufficient for a printer to do professional
work without considerable experience. Still, Moxon's manual provided
invaluable technical information and illustrations, and since the
fundamentals of printing did not change rapidly, Moxon's presentation was
adapted and translated in other printer's manuals for the next two hundred
years. Regarding printing as it first evolved in Germany during the 1450s
through 1470s, we lack technical documentation, and even though we
understand the economics of early printing operations in general terms,
most of our information about the earliest printing and typesetting
processes has been inferred from study of surviving examples of early
printing, from the few surviving archival records, and from our more
detailed understanding of later printing technology. Secondly, a printer had
to raise the money to buy the very expensive press and equipment. Thirdly,
in order to print a book, a printer had to buy the costly paper or vellum
needed for the project before printing. Beyond these direct costs, unless he
was a scholar himself, and perhaps even if he was, a printer who intended
to produce a reliable edition needed to locate an appropriate manuscript or
manuscripts on which to base his text, and to hire a skilled editor to prepare
the text for printing and to see it through the press. In the early years of
printing the editor, who might also act as the corrector of the typesetting,
had to stand by to read pages as they came off the press since the great
majority of early printers did not have enough type to leave type standing
long enough to send out proofs. This need to correct pages as they were
being printed remained standard practice, inevitably with some exceptions,
until roughly the end of the eighteenth century when it is understood that
some printers owned enough type to allow type to stand, and printing to
continue, while the author corrected proofs.
As early as 1466, in his preface to a corrected version of Aurelius
Augustinus's (Augustine of Hippo's) De arte praedicandi ( Book IV of De
doctrina christiana ) printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin, an
anonymous scholar described the value and difficulty of preparing as
accurate a manuscript as possible for printing, probably for the first time in
any printed book:

"Nevertheless I have thought it by all means worthwhile that I should first

expend much labour over what would be to the common utility of the
Church: that I may have this most useful little book- worthy of all esteem
- correct, in order that, after correction this way, I would be able to
communicate it more usefully to all those wishing to have it. Therefore,
as God is my witness, I have taken great pains in the correction of it, in
such a way that I have sought out diligently all the copies which I have
been able to discover for this purpose in any of the libraries in the school
of Heidelberg, in Speyer and in Worms, and finally also in Strassburg.
And since in the course of this I have learned by experience that that
particular book of Augustine is rare to come by even in the great and
well stocked libraries, and even rarer can it be had for copying from any
of those same libraries; and also, what is worse, that when it can be
found in there it is more rarely corrected or emended; on that account I
have been moved to work most carefully to this end; that, according to
my exemplar- now corrected at least by as much care and labour as I
am capable of- the said little book can be multipled in this state, and in
such a way that it may become rapidly and easily known in a short time,
for the use of many and to the common advantage of the Church. On
account of which, since I judged that this could not be done more
expeditiously by any other method or means, I have persuaded by every
means that discreet gentleman Johann Mentelin, inhabitant of
Strassburg, master of the art of typography, to the end that the might see
fit to undertake the responsibily and toil of multiplying this little book by
means of printing, having my copy before his eyes. . . ." 1.E.5

Of course, the effort early printers actually devoted to comparing

manuscripts and producing a carefully edited text varied widely, and no
matter how much effort was expended, even the best scholar printers, such
as Aldus Manutius, could be very limited in their access to classical texts,
sometimes basing their editions on only one manuscript. 1 Nevertheless,
once a text was put into print, the printed version often assumed an
authority which it may or may not have deserved. After printing editors
often discarded the exemplar from which they worked, believing that it
would no longer be needed, in the process adding a gap in the record of
the transmission of the text. Very few manuscripts from which early printers
worked have survived.

A copy of the Subiaco De civitate dei owned by the

Bridwell Library.
Probably the earliest is the manuscript which the first printers in Italy,
Sweynheym and Pannartz, used as the basis for the first printed edition of
St. Augustine, De civitate dei , issued from their press at the Benedictiine
Monastery of St. Scholastica, in Subiaco, Italy on June 12, 1467. The
manuscript from which the edition was based remains preserved in the
monastery library, and it is thought that monks at the monastery
participated in printing the edition. "That the codex was used for the printing
is clearly shown by the frequent editorial corrections, the inky fingerprints,
and the scored marks in the margins to indicate the end of the text page.
The texts of the printed pages correspond almost exactly to these
markings." 1.E.6
From the beginning of printing publication of books was risky, as it was
expensive to produce the inventory of copies necessary for sale, and sales
could be difficult to predict with accuracy. These risks, which remain with
publishers today, were particularly great at the beginning of the industry. It
is understood from legal documents that in 1455, the year of publication of
the 42-line Bible, merchant and money-lender Johann Fust filed a lawsuit
against Gutenberg resulting in Gutenberg losing his printing equipment to
Fust .

The notarial document, drafted by Ulrich Helmasperger, clerk of the

Bishopric of Bamberg, royal notary and certified public recorder at the Court of the
Archbishop of Mainz, which provides the only contemporary account of the suit filed
by Fust against Gutenberg.
Ironically, because of the paucity of documentation concerning the origins
of printing in Europe, the legal document which survived concerning this
lawsuit, known as The Helmasperger Notarial Instrument , is one of the
only documents directly associating Gutenberg with the invention of printing
by movable type. Fust's repossession of Gutenberg's equipment became
the basis for the Fust and Schoeffer partnership, resulting in some of the
finest products of the early press.

To mitigate risk some early printers sought to obtain a monopoly for printing
in a certain region before going to the expense of establishing a business.
In 1469 the Venetian state granted a five-year monopoly to the German
printer Johannes de Spira (Speyer). This was the first monopoly on printing
granted by a European government, and by encouraging the very early
development of the printing industry, it set the stage for Venice to become
one of the leading publishing centers of Europe by the 1480s. Other
printers may have sought sponsors or patrons to underwrite costs of
editions, or they entered into cost sharing arrangments with other
printers. 1.E.7 By the sixteenth century it was common for a wealthy author
or patron to pay for the printing of an edition. In the early years of printing,
however, most titles published were standard textbooks, religious treatises
or editions of the classics, the ancient authors of which would not have
been available to underwrite costs. On the other hand the church
appreciated the value of printing for education and spreading the faith early
on, and was in a position to support printers. The introduction of printing in
Subiaco and Rome by Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, both of
whom were clerics, appears to have been arranged by highly placed
persons in the entourage of Pope Paul II . It is also understood that the
church supported the establishment of printing shops in other cities and
towns in Italy. 1.E.8 By the end of the year 1500, only forty-five years after
the invention of printing by movable type, printing presses were established
in 282 cities , nearly all of which were in Europe. From this period 29,777
different editions survive, suggesting a considerably larger original output.
Assuming that the average edition was between 150 and 500 copies,
somewhere around 15-20 million printed books would have been produced.
It is difficult to think of any other technological development in history which
had spread this far, this fast, up to this time, or which had more influence
upon the development of society.

Even if early editions were as small as 150 to 300 copies, and the
manufacturing costs of the new technology were initially high, mass
production would have resulted in books less expensive than manuscript
copies made to order one at a time. Because there were so many different
manuscripts, and so many different printed books, it is difficult to arrive at
any generalization concerning prices except to acknowledge that the cost
of professionally produced manuscripts was high, and ownership of any
kind of luxury manuscript was limited to the wealthy and powerful. In Italy,
where the supply of manuscripts was greatest in the fifteenth century, it was
estimated that "a typical vellum manuscript of the fifteenth century, in
finished form and bound, cost between seven and ten ducats; this equalled
a month's wages for an official at the Neapolitan court." 1.E.9 Naturally
there were less expensive manuscripts of many kinds, including those
written by amateur scribes, semi-professional scribes who occasionally
sold a book, and owners for their own use. Some have suggested that
there were far more manuscripts produced by non-professionals than by
professionals. 1.E.10 Even so, manuscripts were relatively scarce. Toward
the end of the fifteenth century it was estimated that the average private
library contained fifteen to twenty volumes, mostly manuscripts.
1.E.11 Reflecting the lower cost of printed books, in 1468, little more than
ten years after the introduction of printing, Humanist Giovanni Andrea
Bussi, bishop of Aleria, and the chief editor for the printing house of
Sweynheym and Pannartz after it moved from Subiaco to Rome, wrote to
Pope Paul II:

“In our time God gave Christendom a gift which enables even the
pauper to acquire books. Prices of books have decreased by eighty
percent .”

In the same year Bussi, who also served as Pope Paul II's librarian, wrote
in the dedicatory letter of his edition of St. Jerome's Epistolae , also printed
by Sweynheym and Pannartz, that printing was a "divine art" ( sancta ars )
that offered even the poor the opportunity to read. 1.E.12 Lower cost meant
wider distribution. By printing hundreds of copies at one time, rather than
producing a single manuscript copy when ordered, printing also enabled
faster distribution of more information. For convenient and more rapid
transportation of books many printers located their shops in cities or towns
on major waterways. No matter how well some of the books were edited
and printed, customers were not necessarily easy to find, and the earliest
printers had to seek distribution in other cities and towns. As early as
March 20, 1472, Sweynheim and Pannartz, who had been printing in Rome
for only three years, had Cardinal Bussi petition Pope Sixtus IV to subsidize
their edition of Nicolaus de Lyra's commentary on the Bible. They claimed
to have produced 20,475 volumes but were left with an enormous unsold
stock. "Their expenses, they complained, were so heavy and buyers so
scarce ( cessantibus emptoribus ) they had been reduced to near poverty
( pauperes facti sumus ), their workshop full of unsold copies ( plena
quinterniorum ) but empty of the necessities of living ( inanis rerum
necessarium )." 1.E.13 Bussi obtained a subsidy, but this did not prevent
Sweynheym and Pannartz from failing in business in 1473.

It was hard to argue against the production of needed texts at lower costs
than manuscript copying, and inevitably those involved in the printing
process either as printers or editors, such as Bussi, supported it. But as
printing shops opened in more locations, and production increased,
scholars and religious authorities--especially those not invested in an
edition--worried about the proliferation of errors caused by sloppy editing,
about loss of control over the editorial process, and the inevitable
deterioration of scholarly accuracy, analogous to the common current
concern over rapidly generated inaccurate information proliferating on the
Internet. 1.E.14 In 1471 Italian humanist and grammarian Niccolo Perotti,
Archibishop of Sipponto, incensed by the number of errors in Giovanni
Andrea Bussi’s edition of Pliny’s Historia naturalis issued in Rome by
Sweynheym and Pannartz, wrote to the Pope asking him to set up a board
of learned correctors, such as himself, who would scrutinize every text
before it could be printed. This has been described as the first call for
censorship of the press. 1.E.15

Other book buyers simply refused to adopt the new technology, or ignored
it. A surprising number of fifteenth century manuscripts are actually copies
of printed books produced, one assumes, either because an owner could
not afford a printed edition and copied it out for himself, or an owner could
not obtain an out of print edition and hired a scribe to copy it, or he could
not stomach owning the relatively less expensive new printed edition and
hired a scribe to deliver the kind of finely produced deluxe manuscript that
he required. The notion that printing came along and simply put all the
scribal book producers out of business seems not to be confirmed by
evidence, though undoubtedly the number of scribes producing books
would have gradually diminished in response to printing. It has been
estimated that nearly as many manuscripts written in the second half of the
fifteenth century have survived as those which are thought to have been
written in the first half of the fifteenth century, reflecting a continuity of
manuscript copying even as it was being gradually superceded by the new
technology. 1.E.16

Scribes who could write in Greek remained in high demand, as in spite of

the increasing demands of humanists for Greek texts, printing in Greek got
a late start. This is understandable considering that, with exceptions, Greek
had mainly disappeared from literacy in Europe during the Middle Ages,
and was only gradually revived in Italy beginning in the fourteenth century,
becoming of increasing interest to humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Exceptions included the native Greek-speaking communities of
Magna Graecia in southern Italy where monasteries continued to produce
Greek manuscripts of the Bible, of patristic literature, of the liturgy, and
even of classical texts, mainly for their own use. 1.E.17 Obviously, in the
early years of printing the market for Greek books was much smaller than
for works in Latin, but it was growing. The main problems with printing in
Greek were many technical problems in creating Greek type fonts, which
had to be based on non-standardized Greek manuscript hands, with their
ligatures and esoteric abbreviations, unlike Roman fonts which derived
from stone inscriptions and legible Carolingian minuscule. One of the great
challenges was to develop graceful Greek fonts that could be fit into
standard matrices for casting type.

The 1472 edition of Lactantius printed by John and

Wendelin de Spira. Source: Sotheby's
Prior to the printing of long Greek texts these problems had been solved on
a small scale and not very successfully; small amounts of Greek were
included in the Lactantius printed by John and Wendelin de Spira, and the
Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius printed by Nicholas Jenson in Venice. Both
editions were published in 1472. Compared to a total of 1475 editions of
Latin classics printed in the fifteenth century, there were only 26 editions of
classical Greek texts, and they were produced only in five Italian centers:
(Brecia (1), Milan (3), Florence (10), Venice (11) and Reggio Emilia
(1). 1.E.18 On the very specialized topic of early printing in Greek two works
have become classics: Robert Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the 15th
Century (1900) and the superbly written and produced work by Nicolas
Barker, Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek & Script in the
Fifteenth Century (1985). The first edition of Barker's work, which was
limited to 200 copies with four original leaves from Aldine press books, was
designed by Stephen Harvard and printed on excellent paper in small folio
format at the Stinehour Press. In my opinion this edition, and to a slightly
lesser extent, the revised second edition from 1992, which was limited to
350 copies, are among the best designed and printed books on the history
of printing issued during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Compared to printed books, electronic books delivered over the Internet
have the advantages of lower manufacturing cost, and assuming that the
ereader is already paid for, usually lower sales prices, freedom from
shipping cost, and virtually instantaneous wireless delivery. Though they
lack the virtues we appreciate in well designed and produced physical
books, such as the graphic quality of fine printing, fine color reproductions
of images especially in formats larger than the electronic screens, fine
paper, fine bindings or beautiful dust jackets, when it comes to portability
they have a tremendous advantage. In 2010 a Kindle weighing less than a
pound could store up to 3500 ebooks with no weight gain. An equivalent
library of hardcover books would weigh over 10,000 pounds. Having spent
my life in the world of physical books, and accustomed as I am to working
with thousands of physical books, many of which are beautiful or have
extremely interesting physical attributes, I am unwilling to give up the
experience of collecting, handling and reading the physical objects. I want
to feel the physical book, to turn actual, rather than virtual pages, especially
when a book is a thing of beauty, or an object from another time or place,
replete with historical meaning, sometimes with a dusty smell of the past.
However, many books are not available to me in physical form, or lack the
physical attributes that I value, and from my perspective there is little loss,
and significant convenience gained, in owning and/or reading those in
electronic form.

Ironically, distribution of electronic books on demand, or printing books on

demand on digital presses, represents a return to aspects of the medieval
model of book production, in which manuscript copies were produced on
demand. Of course, unlike the one-at-a-time hand production of medieval
manuscripts, which, like any elaborate hand-production process, were
produced more or less slowly depending upon their complexity and the
nature of their writing or decoration, electronic books-- no matter how
complex-- are produced much more rapidly using computerized typesetting,
page layout, and graphics programs. Another great difference is that once
the electronic edition is complete, distribution may be instantaneous. This
production model, in which costs of paper, printing and binding are
eliminated, along with the time involved in physical production and costs of
warehousing and shipping, dramatically lowers the cost of publishing and
reduces a great deal of the risk, allowing virtually anyone with a computer,
an Internet connection, and the inclination, the possibility of publishing an
electronic book. Ease of editing and lack of distribution costs are, of course,
among the reasons why I have chosen to compose and distribute
HistoryofInformation.com in its electronic form. (This section was last
revised on September 16, 2018.)

1.F. How Printing Changed the Ways that Books were Used, and
Manuscript Production Persisted
Compared to the extremely gradual rate of change that had occurred in the
form, function and usage of manuscript books since the papyrus roll, and
the very slow rate of technological advance that generally characterized the
Middle Ages, the introduction of printing in the second half of the fifteenth
century caused transformations that were significantly more rapid, even if
they were not necessarily as rapid or disruptive to manuscript book
production as we might assume. Previously I discussed how printing
changed the graphic form of the codex, and how it evolved by adapting,
systematizing, and changing elements of the manuscript book. Even more
than these changes to the form and function of the book, the growth of
information as a result of printing, and the increasing availability of books to
wider and wider markets had significant impact upon society. As more and
more printed books were available on an increasingly wide variety of
subjects, at lower cost than had been possible in manuscript production, to
an ever-widening market, the nature of reading and study gradually
changed, both for scholars and the literate public, and the percentage of
literate people in society increased.

One admittedly indirect method of measuring the growth of information

resulting from the introduction of printing is to compare present German
library holdings of medieval manuscripts, created over many centuries, with
their holdings of fifteenth century printed books. Compared to their holdings
of 60,000 manuscripts which survived from the entire Middle Ages, or
roughly nine hundred years, German libraries preserve 135,000 fifteenth
century printed books produced in the forty-five years from 1455 to 1500. A
significant increase in information production, and survival is evident from
these totals, but they cannot be used to show a quantifiable ratio of the
increase because the number of surviving medieval manuscripts is
inevitably the result of considerable information loss over the nine hundred
years of the Middle Ages.

". . . many more incunabula have survived from the second half of the
15th century than manuscripts from the entire Middle Ages. Of circa
28,000 fifteenth-century editions known today (the number of
publications printed is bound to have been much larger), German
collections preserve a total of 135,000 copies. As a result of two
decades of work on the 'Inkunabelcensus Deutschland', these are now
recorded in the London database of the 'Incunabula Short Title
Catalogue' (ISTC). By contrast, the number of medieval manuscripts in
German libraries is estimated circa 60,000. Holdings of the Bayerische
 Staasbibliothek at Munich display a similar relationship: about 20,000
copies of 9,700 fifteenth-century editions are kept alongside circa 10,500
medieval Latin and 1,800 German manuscripts - roughly a sixth of the
total German holdings" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufren lerneten.
Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert [2009] 15).

With more and more information readily available as a result of printing, the
usage of books began to change. It became increasingly unnecessary for
scholars to commit to memory a significant percentage of the information
that they were likely to use, as some had done during the ancient world and
the Middle Ages, partly because books were scarce and expensive, partly
because papyrus or parchment for storing permanent notes remained
expensive, and partly because of an intense pre-occupation during the
Middle Ages with a relatively small number of texts considered to be
essential. Because papyrus production was an Egyptian monopoly papyrus
was always expensive. Though production of parchment was not limited to
a single region like papyrus, its production was labor intensive, making it
costly. As a result. the Roman medium of wax tablets remained in use for
note-taking and other purposes throughout the Middle Ages, and later:

"During the middle ages wax tablets were in general use. Daily life cannot
be imagined without them: students were supposed to carry a diptych at
their belt for easy use, while writers used them for rough notes. They were
also employed in private correspondence. Above all, medieval accounts
were kept to a large extent on wax tablets, and most of the surviving
examples served this purpose; even books of wax tablets were formed. In
some places the use of wax tablets for accounting continued up to the
nineteenth century" (Bernhard Bischoff, Latin P
alaeography. Antiquity & the
Middle Ages [1990] 14).

The first paper mills were built in Europe as early as the twelfth century , as
early as the twelfth century, but initial demand for paper was small, and
paper did not truly become "affordable", and widely available for
note-taking, until production increased as a result of printing in the second
half of the fifteenth century. As a wider variety of texts became more
generally available after the introduction of printing, the change from an
intense focus on reading a few texts to reading a wider range of texts, was
characterized by Robert Darnton in 1986 as a switch from "intensive" to
"extensive" reading. Though the switch may have begun as a result of the
proliferation of books after printing, it only gradually spread over portions of
society. Even today many people have access to relatively few physical
books, though it could be said that with the availability of the Internet
anyone with a connection now has access to the " universal virtual library ."
For centuries many people had "only a few books--the Bible, an almanac, a
devotional work or two--and they read them over and over again, usually
aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became
deeply impressed on their consciousness." 1.F.1 Concomitantly, with the
growth of available information in printed form it became impossible for
scholars to memorize significant portions of all relevant information on key
topics, and more and more necessary to consult books for reference, and
to keep notes or commonplace books, instead of primarily using a few
essential works as information to be memorized. 1.F.2

As more books became more readily accessible at lower cost in the second
half of the fifteenth century they stimulated the growth of literacy. Common
sense supports this, but the evidence of surviving early imprints is also very
powerful, confirming the connection of printing to education from the
earliest beginnings of the new technology. Probably the most widely printed
title in the fifteenth century was the small Latin grammar book by the
Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus entitled the A rs minor , a staple of
medieval education.

A 1454 fragment of Aelius Donatus's Ars Minor,

preserved in the Scheide library.
When I checked in January 2011 the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue of
fifteenth century imprints listed 436 different editions of this small work
under the author Donatus, nearly all of which very heavily used, and nearly
all of which existed in only fragmentary form. Printing this small but
essential work was one of the earliest projects of the first printers, both in
movable type and even by the blockbook process, and because so many of
the surviving imprints are fragmentary it is reasonable to deduce that there
were probably numerous other printings of this text for which we have no
surviving examples. At least 24 different editions were issued in Mainz
during Gutenberg's lifetime, most of them set in Gutenberg's
proto-typeface, named the DK-type after Donatus and Kalendar (also called
the type of the 32-line Bible) , or in the type of Gutenberg's 42-line Bible. Of
these not a single complete example has survived from the printing office of
Gutenberg or his immediate successors. These early works of only 28
pages seem to have been nearly read out of existence. All the known
fragments of these earliest printings were printed on vellum, presumably to
make them as durable possible in the face of heavy use, since vellum
tends to be stronger than paper. Such fragments may survived as scraps
used as endpapers, or some other element in early bindings.
The number of early printings of Donatus's Ars minor is evidence of the
central role that Latin played in medieval education. Slightly more than
seventy-five percent of surviving fifteenth century imprints were in Latin.
Because of the manageable number of fifteenth century imprints (roughly
27,000) various analyses have been done of their subject matter. By far the
highest percentage, 45%, concerned religion or theology in some way,
supplying the established church market which clearly represented the bulk
of sales. Between 14% and 20% of imprints concerned either canon or civil
law, supplying both the government and church market. Approximately 10%
of imprints concerned medicine and practical or theoretical science,
supplying the medical and technical market. Another 20% concerned lower
levels of education, as did the multitude of editions of Donatus. The
remaining 10% were generally literary, of which a little more than half,
roughly 6% the total, were editions of classical texts, including 1475
editions of Latin authors. 1.F.3
Along with the wider spread of literacy resulting from the greater availability
of books, it was inevitable that people, whether they knew Latin or not,
would also want to read works in their own language. As the sixteenth
century unfolded, the percentage of works printed in the vernacular
increased, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the number of works
printed in Latin was roughly balanced by the number of works printed in a
variety of vernaculars. 1.F.4 As more and more documents were printed in
the vernacular, printed works were used for reasons possibly unimaginable
prior to printing.The ability of printing to circulate information rapidly and
persuasively to a wider range of society through broadsides, pamphlets,
and books resulted in profound social changes, among which Martin
Luther's prolific authorship, beginning in 1517, of printed pamphlets in
German promoting the Protestant Reformation was most prominent,
stimulating an enormous outpouring of publications on religion and its
reform. By 1520, 32 tracts by Luther were published in more than 500
editions, and within a few years a quarter of all German publications
appeared under his name. Before Luther's death in 1546, more than three
million copies of his writings, excluding his Bible translations, were printed.
It has been estimated that 150,000 items were printed in Germany during
the sixteenth century, a significant percentage of which were Reformation
tracts. It has also been estimated that after the controversies of the
Reformation quieted, the number of publications in Germany actually
declined in the seventeenth century to between 85,000 and 150,000. I.F.5 .

Looking back at the impact of printing in the fifteenth century on the more
specialized field of medieval scholars' use of books, Richard and Mary
Rouse analyzed changes in book usage as a result of printing, including
the elimination of glossing as a method of studying and commenting on
texts, and the reduction of the process of copying out portions of books for
individual use. While numerous manuscripts had been formatted for
glossing, the typographic design of few printed books was set up for that
purpose. Availability of less expensive copies of texts obviated the need for
copying out lengthy portions of texts necessary for individual study, though
writers continued to do so, perhaps for different purposes, in commonplace
books , mostly for personal use, well into the twentieth century. The
history of writing commonplace books has been traced to the zibaldone, or
hodgepodge book, a practice of making personal collections of useful
information on a wide variety of topics, usually in the vernacular, by writing
in paper codices in small or medium format, beginning in Italy in the
fourteenth century. By the seventeenth century this was such a
well-established practice that it was taught to college students. Though
HistoryofInformation.com began strictly as a timeline roughly ten years ago,
in its present form it might be thought of as a kind of digital commmonplace
book, or figuratively as a set of commonplace books on different themes.

Another change in book usage as a result of printing that the Rouses

observed was that after printing was well established major painters who
had specialized in medieval manuscript illumination gradually turned their
attention away from books to panel painting:

"(1) With the growth of print as the normal medium of the page, the main
medieval vehicle for relating new thought to inherited tradition
disappears--namely, the gloss and the practice of glossing. To be sure sure
glossed books like the commentaries on the Decretum , the Liber sextus
or Nicholas de Lyra on the scriptures are often printed; but the printed
book is not itself an object in which one writes long glosses. Perusal of
Chatelain, Paléographie des classiques latin (Paris, 1884-92), will uncover
pages of Virgils, Lucans, Juvenals and Horaces, the set texts of the trivium
, covered with interlinear and marginal glosses of all dates. The
manuscript books had in fact been laid out to be glossed, namely, with the
text in large letters down the center of the page, surrounded by white
space. In contrast, one can think of only a handful of printed books in which
the page has been set up in type to be glossed by hand. What effect this
had on processes of thought, methods of instruction, and the structured
comparison of new ideas to old, would be interesting to work out. (2) With
the advent of print the book becomes a monolithic unit, compared to its
handwritten predecessor. Medieval books, particularly those individualistic
owner-produced volumes of the fifteenth century, are frequently made up of
numerous pieces varying from one to several quires in length, which were
initially kept in loose wrappers and were bound together by the institution
which inherited the volume. A person interested in a given text could copy
out what he wanted and no more: thus, of the two hundred manuscripts of
the Lumen anime , only half can be classified accordng to one of three
restructurings they represent, while the other half are all hybrids,
adaptations to the needs and desires of the individual owner-producer. In
contrast, although printed books are on occasion copied by hand or
sections of them are copied out, the average printed-book library is
comprised of whole books. Not until the advent of the Xerox machine were
individuals again easily able to make up books in sections or produce
tailor-made collections. It would be interesting to know what effect this had
on patterns of reading. (3) Up to about 1450, the main vehicle par
excellence for painting was the manuscript book: the monuments of
medieval painting are in Gospel books , Psalters , Pontificals, Breviaries
and Books of Hours . The advent of printing forces painting out of the book.
It is a desperate wrench. Owners of incunabula have them filled with
beautiful minatures, printers hire illuminators to adorn books with initials
and frontispieces, or to water-color woodcuts printed in Books of Hours, but
it is a losing battle. By 1500-1520, the Book of Hours as the fifteenth
century knew it is in the death throes of mannerism and sterility. With the
exception of the producers of woodcuts—Holbein, Duerer , Pieter Breughel,
all of whom also painted—not a single major artist thereafter did his major
work in the medium of the printed book. While panel painting as an art form
clearly antedates the invention of printing, the transition to the printed page
must have encouraged the growth of the new medium which was so
important to Netherlandish art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”
(Rouse & Rouse 1991, op. cit ., 465-66).

As the Rouses mention, certain major artists with experience in printmaking

continued to produce book illustrations. During the 1520s Albrecht Durer,
who began his career as an illustrator of printed books, and derived a
higher percentage of his income from printmaking than from painting,
published three books which he designed and illustrated himself. These
included his famous works on proportion and letter forms, on the
proportions of the human body , and on fortification. Durer, however, had
never illuminated manuscripts.

In spite of the competition from printed books, manuscript illumination did

not suddenly end with the introduction of printing; luxury manuscripts
continued to be produced, though probably in reduced volume, especially
compared to the explosive growth of printed book production. For unique
books, or very small editions, manuscript book production continued to a
limited extent for three centuries after the invention of printing because it
was often less expensive to hire scribes to produce a book than to print it in
a very small edition. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, by which
time printing had spread over most parts of Europe, the Parisian miniaturist
and illuminator Jean Pichore ran a large and successful workshop, creating
illuminated manuscripts for the greatest royal and ecclesiastical patrons on
secular as well as religious subjects. Pichore is of special interest to the
study of the impact of printing on manuscript book production since in
addition to the usual manuscript luxury books of hours, which were the
most popular of luxury manuscript volumes, he and Remy de Laistre also
adapted to the new technology, producing and publishing printed books of
hours illustrated with metal engravings. Until the 1480s Bruges and Ghent
had dominated the production of illuminated manuscript books of hours,
after which the locus of production transferred to Paris, where, in addition
to the manuscript trade, between the late 1480s and 1550 a variety of
illuminators and printers produced roughly 200 printed editions of books of
hours, adapting the illustration and page-layout formulae of the traditional
illuminated manuscripts to printing. Doing so enabled them to meet the
production demands of the wider market for books resulting from the
introduction of printing, and to offer an increased selection of books of
hours, perhaps for immediate delivery rather than to order, and presumably
at lower cost. With their complex page layouts and elaborately engraved
illustrations these printed books of hours were nevertheless expensive
relative to ordinary printed books in similar format; along with copies on
paper, they were frequently printed on vellum, perhaps hand-colored, and
elaborately bound. Zoehl, Jean Pichore Buchmaler, Graphiker und Verleger
in Paris um 1500 (2004) catalogues many illuminated manuscripts by
Pichore and other members of his workshop, and also catalogues his
printed books of hours and compares them to works by his contemporaries.
Zoehl's work, incorporating information from Tenschert's catalogue
mentioned below, includes 255 illustrations. Nicolas Barker published a
valuable analysis of aspects of the Parisian production of printed books of
hours in a review of a catalogue of a large collection formed by Heribert
Tenschert: "The Printed Book of Hours," The Book Collector , Vol. 53, No. 3
(2004).

A painting from a 1508 edition of Plutarch's Vies de

Romulus et de Caton d'Utique. Source: Sotheby's
On December 7, 2010 a superb manuscript produced in Paris circa 1508,
of Plutarch's Vies de Romulus et de Caton d'Utique in the French
Translation of Simon Bourgoyn, with 54 paintings, each approximately 280
x 180mm by Jean Pichore, the Master of Philippe de Gueldre and another
artist, sold at Sotheby's London for 505,250 GBP (roughly $799,000).
Spectacular illuminated manuscript books of hours continued to be
produced as luxury volumes well into the middle of the sixteenth century,
including a few illuminated by great artists. One of the greatest and most
famous examples is the Farnese Hours illuminated by Guilio Clovio in
1546, preserved in the Morgan Library and Museum.

(This section was last revised on September 22, 2018.)

1.G. How Form and Function of Books Impacts the Reading and
Writing Process
The experience of reading the seven parts of this essay has to evoke some
awareness of how, for better or worse, publication formats impact the
reading process. Whether a document is published as a codex on paper, or
on a website for free distribution like this, or in some kind of ebook format
for an ebook reader, such as a cell phone, computer or a specialized
device such as a Kindle or an iPad, impacts not only the way you read it
but also how much you enjoy the process, and how effectively the text
communicates the author's intentions. Obviously, you cannot read this site
the way you would read a traditional codex, though if it was formatted for
an ebook reader the reading process would more closely emulate reading a
codex. Nor can you read a newspaper website the same way you read a
print on paper newspaper edition, or what we might call the electronic
image version of the printed edition. Obviously, the print on paper and
website versions operate differently. Most notably the website version is a
dynamic series of individual web pages connected throughout by hyperlinks
on a series of index pages connected to the homepage, while the printed
versions and the electronic image versions are static. Most generally, the
web version is highly interactive while the printed version is not, and the
electronic image version may also be interactive. Increasingly web versions
of newspapers include live blogging of events in real time by reporters, and
online comments from readers regarding these blog posts. The live
reporting of news as it occurs, without any delays, is one of the many ways
in which newspapers have adapted features which in the past might have
been limited to radio or television. Among the other ways that newspaper
websites, and other websites, interact with readers is through the
placement of individual-specific or location-specific advertising, such as ads
for movies that are playing nearby if you happen to looking at movie
reviews. The website can do this if you have created an account that
identifies your location, or if you are using a cell phone that includes a GPS
locator to access the site. Some websites may place ads on their pages
related to the topics of online searches that you might have made from that
website or other sites. The web version is updated frequently by updating
the home page, and other index pages, while most of the individual articles
on their individual web pages remain static and searchable in the web
archive of the paper. The web version of a news article is often associated
with links to related articles previously published in the newspaper, or
elsewhere. It may also contain embedded videos or slide shows.

From The New York Times website, on January 13, 2011 I read, watched,
and listened to the 33 minute speech that President Barack Obama
delivered in Tucson , Arizona honoring those who were killed or injured by
a madman. Apart from the grand eloquence of the writing and delivery of
the President's speech, what was most remarkable to me was that I could
watch, listen, and read the speech simultaneously. As the video played and
I listened to the President's voice, the text of his speech appeared on the
newspaper's web page to the right of the embedded video screen. The text
was displayed in such a way that I could use a cursor to move the video
forward or backward and the text would move in synchronicity with the
video and sound. On the web page with the speech there was, as usual, a
way to post comments to the newspaper or social media sites regarding the
speech, or to share the article with others over the web. Though I
understand that this technology is not new, I had never before read,
watched, and listened to a speech in this way, and in my opinion this
presentation by The New York Times , which used so many features of the
Internet, was marvelously effective. In contrast, the electronic image
version of the printed edition of a newspaper is an electronic copy of that
fixed printed edition, much in the manner of a certain ebooks, in which,
using the program provided, the reader can virtually turn the pages, though
presumably links could be built into the electronic image version. Whether
an individual reads one version more efficiently or effectively than the other
may be a matter of personal style or preference. I sometimes I prefer
reading newspapers online, and sometimes I prefer reading them on paper.
When reading online I prefer to read the most interactive web versions
rather than the comparatively static electronic image versions. Sometimes I
follow links in the online versions; sometimes not. Often I take advantage of
the searchability of the electronic versions to find references to previous or
related articles, sometimes for use in HistoryofInformation.com. A key
aspect for me of the difference between reading electronic and print
versions is that I tend to notice and read different articles in the electronic
and print versions of the same newspapers and magazines, indicative of
the value remaining in printed editions of periodicals and books, and one of
the good reasons for the existence of printed editions.

Developments in interactive reading on the web are occurring very rapidly.

At the end of January 2011 The New York Times quietly introduced its
Recommendations service. When I first viewed their recommendations
for me on February 2, 2011 the service informed me that I had read 120
articles in the previous month, tabulated in ten categories. Based on these
statistics it recommended twenty articles in that day's edition. The service is
updated every twelve hours. Flipboard , "your personalized social
magazine" for the iPad, which was launched in July 2010, automatically
gathers articles recommended by your friends from social network sites
such as Facebook and Twitter and presents them to you in a convenient
way. The service also recommends articles for you based on your reading
history. For those who do not want the distraction of online advertising,
Readability , launched in 2009, automatically strips these distractions from
web articles and presents them to you in a customized view. It also enables
you to save articles for reading at some later time. All these services
measure page views (pageviews), and thus measure the popularity of
articles in real time. If they keep their readers apprised of such trends,
some readers may be more inclined to follow the latest trends, fueling the
Internet social reading experience.

In reviewing the differences between reading interactive web pages and the
traditional printed codex we must also consider the multiplicity of ways that
printed codices are read. For example, when I read a novel, typically I will
read it from one end to another. Sometimes I turn back to prior pages that I
have read to refresh my memory of what happened, but the process is
basically a one-directional. On the other hand when I use a cookbook, or
some other reference book, typically I search the table of contents or the
index for what I need, and read that section or related sections. This does
not mean that anyone can't read a cookbook from cover to cover. I am sure
that some people enjoy reading a complete cookbook, but that is usually
not my preference. As you might imagine, the process of creating
HistoryofInformation.com requires a great deal of reading both online and
on paper, and as this project has unfolded, it has been my pleasure to
collect and read hundreds of books on the history of media, nearly all of
which are non-fiction. Some of these printed books I use as reference
books from which I read portions relevant to a specific topic, usually placing
a bookmark at the relevant locations for future reference. Other physical
books I read from cover to cover. However, the way that I read them may
depend on several factors, usually based on the ways that these books are
organized. For examples I will cite two different books on the history of
media that I read from cover to cover. My goals in each of them were
basically the same--to find information and references that I could use to
improve and expand the database and these essays. The first of these
works is the superb book by Ann M. Blair entitled Too Much to Know.
Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age published by Yale
University Press in 2010. This is a book of 397 pages, of which
approximately the final one-third (pp. 269-397) consists of footnotes,
bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, and an index. There is an
introduction and five chapters. Each of the five chapters has about 200
footnotes, so that all together there are about 1000 footnotes in this work.
Because whenever possible I try to cite primary sources, as well as
relevant secondary sources in the database, I typically read all the
footnotes in a book like this, and my copy of Blair's book contains, I would
guess, about 100 bookmarks of the archival and removable colored plastic
"stickies" type that I typically buy from Staples in packs of 125. Probably
because the publisher wanted to save money on production, and issue this
book at a reasonable price, Blair's style of footnoting in this book is
unusually complicated. As is increasingly common, Blait's footnotes are
placed in the back of the book, thankfully in this case with headlines
referring back to the pages of the text to which they apply. However, most
of Blair's footnotes refer only to the main author's name and page number
of one or more primary and secondary references, for which one must then
hunt in the bibliographies which follow the footnotes. Thus, to get the
complete meaning of each of her footnotes one has to first read the
footnote, then check the specific reference or references, sometimes in one
or both bibliographies, and then perhaps go back and re-read the footnote
taking into account her source or sources. In the tedious process of doing
all this frequently I found that I lost my place in the narrative. How many
times did I wish that Blair's footnotes included a longer and identifiable
reference to her sources! Admittedly that would have added perhaps
another gathering or two to the book, and might have increased its
production cost slightly. My guess is that sales would be the same at a
slightly higher cover price, and the book would be so much easier to use.
Having read Blair's book in April and May 2011, in June 2011 I was
gradually going back through her book, following all my bookmarks, and
incorporating relevant portions of her references and observations into the
database, remaining careful to cite her work when I did so.

As I worked back through Blair's book, I wondered how reading all of her
footnotes, and working through the cumbersome way that the publisher set
up the footnotes and references, differs from following hyperlinks in an
essay like this. Following links has been criticized as distracting from
advocates of "close reading," especially since many links are only indirectly
relevant, and one link tends to lead to another, causing one to loose the
original train of thought. Yet, what I would characterize as close reading of
Blair's physical book and her footnotes may very well be just as distracting,
perhaps in a different way, than following any number of hyperlinks that are
directly relevant to a given electronic text.

A more specialized work that I read on paper in June 2011 was Elizabeth A.
Meyer's, Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World. Tabulae in Roman Belief
and Practice (2004). The book discussed the Roman use of wooden
tablets, frequently tied together--probably the precursor of the codex form
of the book. Meyer's work consists of 356 pages, divided into nine
chapters, with a total of around a thousand footnotes. From the reading
standpoint, the main difference between Meyer's and Blair's book is that the
footnotes in Meyer's work are printed on the page openings in which they
occur in her text, much as footnotes were originally intended to be printed
at the foot of pages, thus their name. Having Meyer's footnotes on the
pages to which they apply made it much easier for me to read her text, and
I was able to read through the portions of her book relevant to the history of
the tabulae or tablet format in a couple of hours, placing about 30 markers
on pages to which I planned to return. Because Meyer's footnotes tend to
be longer and more technical than Blair's, and her subject matter is even
more esoteric, it is debatable whether either book is easier to read, but for
those who want to check all the footnotes, I think it is fair to say that being
able to glance at the footnote at the bottom of a page to tell whether the
footnote is worth reading or not, makes the reading process far less
disruptive.

As far as is known, long before footnotes and highly referenced, scholarly

writing and publishing, the earliest reading was often a social experience.
In the ancient world through Late Antiquity the reading experience was very
different from our experience today. During those centuries all reading is
thought to have been done aloud, whether alone or with other people; it
could be listened to by others if they were present. Typically the experience
involved an individual reading to a group. The convention of writing in
scriptio continua without word division, and also without interpunctuation,
whether on papyrus rolls or codices, made reading a slower, sometimes
arduous process, and vocalization a necessary part of reading, probably
even for comparatively brief technical or legal documents. Advance
preparation by skilled readers, or even memorization or partial
memorization of frequently read texts, were common means of
compensating for the difficulties. Because literacy was also very
uncommon, most people in the ancient world would have experienced
reading by listening. Conversely, because composing while writing in
scriptio continua without word division was so difficult, writers in antiquity
and the early Middle Ages often dictated their writings to scribes, or
perhaps they wrote on wax tablets and gave those to scribes for
transcription on papyrus or parchment. It is thought that when different
people read different texts aloud to themselves in the same room, as might
have happened in ancient libraries, the act of speaking or murmuring the
words aloud blocked out the sound of other readers.

An aspect of the reading and writing experience in the ancient world that I
have not seen discussed is the adaptation this served for far-sighted
people. Because of the nature of papyrus as a writing surface, use of
majuscule was necessary, but the act of writing in majuscule on papyrus
would also have allowed a scribe whose vision might not have been perfect
to write in the relatively large letters while the same scribe might not have
been able to see or write in minuscule. Similarly, having professional
reading done aloud would have allowed older readers, who had become
far-sighted, to continue hearing reading aloud after they could no longer
see the words on the page. The process of writing by dictation would also
have extended the working life of far-sighted writers. These factors would,
of course, have remained until the invention of spectacles sometime in the
mid-thirteenth century , and until spectacles were widely available.
 "Stated summarily, the ancient world did not possess the desire,
characteristic of the modern age, to make reading easier and swifter
because the advantages that modern readers perceive as accruing from
ease of reading were seldom viewed as advantages by the ancients. . .
.We know that the reading habits of the ancient world, which were
profoundly oral and rhetorical. . . were focused on a limited and intensely
scrutinized canon of literature. Because those who read relished the
mellifluous metrical and accentual patterns of prounced text and were
not interested in the swift intrusive consultation of books, the absence of
interword space in Greek and Latin was not perceived to be an
impediment to effective reading, as it would be to the modern reader,
who strives to read swiftly. Moreover, oralization, which the ancients
savored aesthetically, provided mnemonic compensation (through
enhanced short-term aural recall) for the difficulty in gaining access to
the meaning of unseparated text. Long-term memory of texts frequently
read aloud also compensated for the inherent graphic and grammatical
ambiguities of the languages of late antiquity. Finally, the notion that the
greater portion of the population should be autonomous and
self-motivated readers was entirely foreign to the elitist literate mentality
of the ancient world. For the literate, the reaction to the difficultes of
lexical access arising from scriptura continua did not spark the desire to
make script easier to decipher, but resulted instead in the delegation of
much of the labor of reading and writing to skilled slaves, who acted as
professional readers and scribes. It is in the context of a society with an
abundant supply of cheap, intellectually skilled labor that ancient
attitudes toward reading must be comprehended . . . .." (Saenger, Space
Between Words. The Origins of Silent Reading [1997] 11). Regarding
the importance of space between words for speeding up manuscript
copying see Saenger p 48.

Use of professional readers for reading and professional scribes for writing
brings up the topics of the interface between the reader and the book. In
the ancient world, when an individual listened to a text read by a
professional reader, he or she was using an interface between the book
and him or herself. Similarly when an individual scrawled out a text on wax
tablets and turned it over to a scribe for transcription, or dictated a text to
scribe for transcription on papyrus or parchment, the scribe served as an
interface between the author and the storage or publication medium. This
interface continued through the use of secretaries, and after the invention
of typewriters, by typists, for many centuries, and in situations where
individuals still dictate correspondence for transcription, may continue
today. Of course, in the ancient world, as today, some people probably read
their own books and wrote down their own texts, without need for a such an
interface. Most of us, however, who primarily use a computer for writing,
now use a computer and word-processing software or some kind of an
HTML editor, for composition. Our computer and software has become the
new interface for both reading and writing, as the digital file that we
generate is gibberish to us without computer interface with its necessary
software or web browser. The essential process of writing, reading, and
publishing has not changed that much in the abstract, but as the
computerized interface has grown increasingly sophisticated and complex,
what we are able to achieve by using our computer and the Internet as a
printing press, has transformed all three of these processes.

During the Middle Ages, beginning in the seventh century, the introduction
of space between words by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes made silent
reading possible. At their remote and sparsely populated end of Europe, in
monasteries which were deliberately located in places of extreme isolation
such as Lindisfarne, in environments presumably with a vow of silence,
Latin was learned from grammar books, rather than from oral culture or
vocalized reading. Probably because of the need to understand the written
word silently, Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes developed word spacing based
on grammatical units, i.e. words, as a way of conveying meaning, rather
than deriving meaning through vocalization of words without spacing. By
the ninth century the practice of word spacing gradually became more
widespread in Europe. Space between words, and the development of
appropriate writing tables, undoubtedly contributed to the ability of scribes
to copy manuscripts visually rather than from dictation, a facility which is
thought to have speeded up manuscript production. Saenger suggests that
the writing table may conceivably have been a medieval invention as
scribes in the ancient world are typically depicted as writing on their knee;
however, it is hard to believe that scribes did not have access to such basic
pieces of furniture as tables and chairs prior to the Middle Ages. "Evidence
of the change to visual copying can be detected at an early date. In his
colophon, the seventh-century scribe Mulling boasted of having copied the
entire text of the Gospels in twelve days." 1.G.1 The earliest unambiguous
image of a scribe using a writing table appears in the Lindisfarne Gospels ,
an magnificent and especially interesting early illuminated gospel book that
incorporates word spacing, produced on the tidal island of Lindisfarne off
the north-east coast of England, circa 715-720. 1.G.2 Among the earliest
evidence of visual copying by a scribe is the graphic relationship between
the British Library's Cotton Tiberius A xiv , an eighth-century copy of the
Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People , probably
made within a generation of Bede's death. This manuscript has been
demonstrated to have been copied visually from the St. Petersburg Bede ,
as certain passages are a line-by-line replication of the St. Petersburg
Bede.

Outside of monasteries, during the Late Middle Ages, public reading aloud,
as distinct from private silent reading, was considered a valued social
resource among the literate classes, serving a wide variety of purposes
from entertainment to education, political commentary, propaganda, and
spiritual guidance. This bias toward public reading is supported by late
medieval images of people reading history, which invariably depict a public
reading, in various late medieval illuminated manuscripts. Private reading,
presumably in silence, was, of course, also done, but seems not to have
been necessarily perceived as an experience so often worthy of depiction.
Some of these images are teachers reading to their students; others depict
voluntary reading experiences which we would characterize as social.
1.G.3

Book clubs, in which readers get together in person to discuss books have
existed for a very long time. Book-oriented newsgroups in which people
exchange views concerning books by emails posted to subscriber lists,
have probably existed for at least twenty years. What is new is how social
reading is being organized for profit on the web. In June 2010 Amazon
added a social networking feature , called "popular highlights" to ebooks for
the Kindle; this feature may be turned off. At thecopia.com you can browse
and buy ebooks and find an online reading group: " All your books. All your
friends. All in one. " The social reading websites, are, of course, subsets
of social media, which, along with web search, has become the most widely
used aspect of the Internet. What is probably most notable about social
media is the speed at which this phenomenon has developed. Facebook ,
founded by Mark Zuckerberg as a Harvard undergraduate on February 4,
2004, reached over 500 million users from around the world as of July
2010, and by December 29, 2010, only six years after its foundation, was
the most searched for and most visited website in America . From the
astonishingly rapid growth of social media sites we may observe the
desires of very large groups of people around the world to communicate
instantly and easily, and to share and compare their tastes or opinions on
everything. Because this was never possible on this scale until just a few
years ago, its impact is relatively new and unexplored, and of the greatest
interest to merchandisers, advertisers and politicians, as well as social
scientists. Certain factors have, of course, combined to make this
connectivity possible. At most basic it is the literacy of hundreds of milllions
of people, as basic literacy is required for computer connectivity. Beyond
that, ease of communication, resulting from very well-written programs,
make it easy for everyone to be their own publisher. Ease of use is a key
factor in the success of one website over another. Since the development
of blogging programs anyone has been able to publish in a fairly
professional way online. As of 2007 there were 12 million blogs in the
United States alone.

Like websites, ebooks may contain hyperlinks. Whether links are an aid to
reading comprehension or a distraction may depend upon the individual. Of
course, not all readers read footnotes in printed books, and the same may
apply to links in digital books or writings. In this essay I am using both links
and footnotes. Some of the links are to relevant HistoryofInformation.com
entries that expand upon ideas I am discussing. The footnotes supply
supporting information or references or both. Do you find the links or
footnotes informative or distracting, or do you ignore them?

As mentioned earlier, I have written these essays entirely on the Internet,

and though I might not be the best person to judge the results, I know that
writing them in this way has affected the writing process. Most significantly,
the ability to link to other sites, or to the database, has raised the ongoing
issue of whether I should expand details within these texts, refer you to a
link for more detail, or move detail into footnotes. What began simply as a
description of the database has evolved, mainly since autumn 2010, into
the essays you are reading now. Rather than attempting to perfect these
writings before posting them to the web, I have found the act of publishing
them online as I write to be a great motivator for me to keep improving
them. There have been innumerable drafts and revisions. What you are
reading now is essentially what I drafted in 2011. Because my focus turned
to other projects, including HistoryofMedicineandBiology.com , I let these
drafts stand for about seven years. When I returned to these essays in
September 2018 I was surprised to find that there were few factual
corrections needed. I did, however, make numerous significant
improvements in continuity, and what I might call writing clarity.

I am doing the composition in Adobe DreamWeaver . As these texts have

grown, issues of formatting, footnoting and others have forced me to learn
rudiments of HTML coding to achieve the results I want. This was not my
intention, but I am finding it increasingly useful to have some understanding
of the interface between the writing, coding and the display. Therefore I
have gotten used to writing with both a code and display window open in
the program. Thinking about coding occasionally as I write also makes me
more aware of how my text will look to you. This was never my concern in
the past; prior to publishing on the Internet I focused only on writing the
text; the completed text, with images and captions, was turned over to a
book designer, who determined the appearance of the physical book and
all its page openings. As I write this on my computer I am amused to be
reminded of the practice of the eighteenth century printer-pornographer,
Nicolas Edme Restif La Bretonne , who composed many of his prolific
erotic novels directly in type before printing, without any manuscript on
paper, leaving no archive tracing the development of his texts. Because of
the difficulty of setting type by hand, the simultaneous process of
composition and typesetting by Restif was no mean accomplishment.
Similarly I am not archiving drafts; because I am also composing for direct
publication on the Internet perhaps unintentionally I fell into Restif's
tradition, though obviously in a far less risque fashion. 1.G.4

As previously mentioned, when time permits I hope to enhance this

electronic text with images and other useful features, perhaps including
links to digital facsimiles of works to which I refer. Some of the best ebooks
contain features with different advantages, such as the electronic version of
Theodore Gray's The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known
Atom in the Universe available in June 2010 for the Apple iPad. Valuable
enhancements to the electronic edition include the ability to rotate objects,
the ability to visualize objects in 3-dimensions using inexpensive 3-D
glasses, and full connectivity to the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine for
additional data. As ebooks develop they are expected to incorporate
increased levels of interactivity, such as videos which explain text, audio
that pronounces foreign language words as you read them, and
assessment that lets you check what you remember and comprehend.
Interactive features in textbooks may test your comprehension and adapt
and change to help you learn questions and concepts you missed. New
novel formats may provide platforms for live exchange with reading groups
where you might be able to discuss the book with the author. Incidentally,
even though I don't have social reading interactivity built into this essay,
and doubt if I would even if I could, I would welcome your comments or
criticisms; feel free to email or phone or discuss it with me if we happen to
meet in actual, rather than virtual, reality !

Enhancements to digital books, while of course different and considerably

more complex in their conception and operation, are analogous to features
printing introduced to books in the fifteenth century, such as title pages
which rarely existed, or were more appropriately called incipit pages ,
prior to printing. Because manuscripts were frequently not paginated, or
pagination varied in manuscript copies, citations had to refer to chapters or
other clearly defined parts of texts. The earliest codices were usually not
paginated.

The Codex Sinaiticus.

For example, probably the most famous early codex, the Codex Sinaiticus
(circa 350 CE) had no pagination but incorporated two ancient systems for
numbering the quires rather than its leaves or pages. Inevitably there may
have been exceptions to non-pagination, or non-standardization of
pagination in manuscript codices, but they would have been rare. In The
Footnote: A Curious History (1997) Anthony Grafton refers to an example
of what might have been a an extremely early use of uniform pagination in
the late fifth century CE. The case in point concerned the Collatio legum
Romanarum et Mosaicarum , a fourth-century legal treatise which argued
that the laws of Moses were compatible with those of Rome. Three primary
manuscripts of this text survive, of which the Berlin codex, dated by various
scholars from the eighth to the tenth century, is considered the earliest and
most authoritative. From the standpoint of book history this text is
significant for its precise references to Roman laws, and the way in which
these could be precisely cited. Grafton writes on p. 30: "Fragmentary
preserved notes on a legal lecture from the late fifth century C.E. reveal
that professors referred students to their sources [in the Collatio ] not only
by book and chapter divisions, but also by the page number, in what were
evidently uniform copies." Standardization of pagination within a printed
edition resulted in more accurate and usable indices with references to folio
or page of a printed volume or set, as well as more accurate citations when
information in the printed edition was cited by other scholars.
Besides greater portability and cost and space-saving, digital books have
the advantage of being searchable almost instantly by keyword or phrase.
This advantage may be so useful, especially for printed books that contain
unsatisfactory indexes or no index at all, that I sometimes find myself
searching the electronic edition when I have the physical book in front of
me. Though these engineered advantages of ebooks and ebook readers
might seem to be their selling points, another advantage they are turning
out to have is privacy, at least for some readers. According to an article
published on December 9, 2010 in The New York Times , one of the
hottest selling fields in ebooks is romance novels, which are also
top-sellers in paperback. It turns out that many buyers prefer ordering
romance novels online to buying them in public locations such as drug
stores where they might run into people they know. Many also prefer to
read these on an ebook reader, especially in public places like buses or
trains, so they don't have to expose the racy nature of the novels, typically
advertised graphically on covers of paperback editions.

In the fifteenth century portability does not seem to have been an

advantage of print over manuscript. The format of early printed books was
typically copied from manuscript formats, of which certain devotional works
were designed to be portable.
 Chained books at the Malatesta Library in Cesena.
Other early printed books, often bound in heavy bindings of leather over
oak boards with metal bosses and clasps, were hardly intended to be
portable, especially if they were chained to reading desks -- a common
fifteenth century library practice. Indeed, the heavy wooden boards covered
with leather and reinforced with metal provided a sturdy base to which
chains could be firmly attached. The first printer to publish a series of
non-devotional works in the more portable, and less expensive octavo
format was Aldus Manutius, beginning with his edition of Virgil (1502) . This
edition was also the first book printed entirely in Italic types, which in
addition to graphic elegance, had a higher character count, allowing text to
be printed on fewer pages. Nor was privacy an advantage that printed
books had over manuscripts. If any literature that we would actually
consider racy was printed during the fifteenth century none survived. In that
very religious time what generally caught the attention of censors was
heresy. Reflecting the tastes of their clientele, the first printers were
generally conservative in their offerings, mostly sticking to accepted
religious texts, school books, and editions of the classics. Nevertheless,
such relatively obscure material as pagan love poetry, tame or not, might
have been perceived as lascivious by prudish authorities, and could have
been both highly commercial and a source of censorship problems for early
printers.
 The Bible of Borso d'Este.
In terms of mainstream printing, historians of the book have observed that
once printers began issuing editions of the Bible demand for production of
new manuscript Bibles appears to have essentially ceased, except for the
production of a few great luxury manuscript bibles such as the Bible of
Borso d'Este , Duke of Ferrara, with its more than 1000 miniatures,
commissioned by the duke coincident with the publication of Gutenberg's
Bible, in 1455. Undoubtedly the cost of copying the lengthy texts of both the
Old and New Testaments by hand was extremely high, and based on the
comment in 1468 of humanist Giovanni Andrea Bussi cited in section 1.D,
we may assume that the cost of printed editions was far less. Whether or
not cost savings was the primary cause, the shift in production of Bibles
from manuscript to print within the first decade of printing, or shortly
thereafter, was one of the first major signposts in the transition from old to
new technologies in fifteenth century book production.

(This section was last revised on September 22, 2018.)

2. Transitional Phases in the Form and Function of

the Book before Gutenberg
2.A. Introduction : Five or Six Transitional Phases A
re Definable
Before the current transition from nearly exclusively print to a combination
of print and digital, and before the transition from manuscript copying to
print that began in the mid-fifteenth century, there were several earlier and
chronologically longer phases in the development of media for the
recording and transmission of information--what we may call early
transitional phases in the form and function of books. Viewing, as we often
do, the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century as a revolution in the
history of information, and caught in the midst of the present rapid
technological change, we may tempted to view phases in early history of
media before Gutenberg also as revolutionary in nature. However, the more
we study the evolution of media the more we realize that the concept of
revolution does not apply to the earlier phases. Perhaps because of
necessarily conservative approaches to the maintenance of archives and
other records over millenia, the number of definable phases or transitions in
the form of the book before printing are relatively few.

In these essays I have devoted chapters to five transitional phases, or six

phases, if we count the loss of information from Late Antiquity to the
Thirteenth Century as a phase. Educated people who lived in one of these
transitional phases, and had access to books and libraries, might have had
opportunities to use what was perceived as newer or alternative media
while the older media remained functional in spite of their sometimes
venerable age, and survived perhaps as the result of responsible care or in
spite of the ravages of war, fire, or neglect. The persistent usefulness of
what might have been viewed as traditional media, and possible resistance
to the new or alternative, or simply the usefulness of different media for
different purposes, may have caused these periods of transition, such as
the transition from the roll to the codex, to extend for centuries before what
we define as new or historically later media noticeably replaced the older or
traditional. For those adopting the newer media there was the possibility of
perceiving the traditional or longer established media as obsolete, but,
considering the length of time that it sometimes took for one medium
supercede another in widest usage, both media may have been perceived
as equally old and traditional, or essentially of equal value, each equally
appropriate for their intended purpose. For all these reasons the transitions
in the form and function of the book that we recognize before Gutenberg
were remarkably slow and gradual, especially when viewed through the
expectations for comparatively rapid tech nological change that we
experience today.

A Gerzan potsherd.
The Earliest Written Records Include Little or No Documentation of
the Transition from Oral to Written Culture

The first transitional phase in the form and function of the book before the
introduction of printing was the transition from oral to written culture.
Because the origins of this transition occurred orally rather than in writing it
may only be studied in instances in which we have substantial evidence of
an oral culture, the earliest example of which is ancient Greece. However,
in spite of the lack of records of oral cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt we
may discuss the origins of writing on clay tablets and papyri in those
regions.

In Western civilization writing began as a system of pictographs created by

the Sumerians in Mesopotamia about 3000 BCE, with predecessors
reaching to the late 4th millennium, or about the period of Uruk IV;
3300-3100 BCE. These pictographs were written with styli on tablets of soft
clay. Around or prior to those dates Egyptian hieroglyphs may have evolved
from symbols drawn on pottery produced by the Gerzean culture in Egypt
(circa 3,600-3,200 BCE). The pith of the papyrus plant, varieties of which
were grown in many parts of Africa, but especially along the Nile River, was
used in Egypt as far back as the First Dynasty (circa 3,100 to 2,980 BCE)
for boats, mattresses, mats and as a writing surface. The Egyptian word
papyrus, meaning "that of the king," may indicate a Pharonic monopoly
during this period. Writing in cuneiform script in Mesopotamia, and hieratic
and hieroglyph writing in Egypt, seem to have developed roughly
simultaneously, with some of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs surviving on
relief sculpture (circa 3,200 BCE). The earliest surviving documents written
on papyrus include the Prisse Papyrus, the Berlin Papyrus 6619 , and the
Ramesseum Papyrus , all circa 2,000 BCE.

Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322, one of the earliest

mathematicals tables.
The durability of clay tablets buried in underground ruins of Mesopotamia
resulted in the survival of remarkably large quantities of business and
archival records, the survival of brief mathematical documents, including
some of the earliest mathematical tables , and in the survival of some of the
earliest western literature. Indeed it is thought that the burning of the
storehouses holding the clay tablets, resulting in heating the clay tablets to
high temperatures, may have "fired" the clay, signficantly increasing its
hardness and durability. Using the hundreds of thousands of surviving
cuneiform tablets and fragments, scholars at the University of Chicago
completed in April 2011 twenty-first and final volume of The Assyrian
Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago . This
massive undertaking began in the early 1920s. It defines 28,000 words in
their context and their various shades of meaning from the first writing
system in the earliest urban and literate civilization, the city-states that
arose in the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys, mainly in what is
present-day Iraq and parts of Syria, from 2500 BCE to 100 CE. The most
complete and "standard" version of the Epic of Gilgamesh , one of the
earliest known works of literary fiction, was written in standard Babylonian,
sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE. The Epic was recorded on twelve
cuneiform tablets, which were among about twelve hundred tablets from
the library of Ashurbanipal , King of Assyria in the mid-seventh centurh
BCE, discovered in Nineveh by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard
in 1849, and preserved in the British Museum. The deciphering of the
twelve tablets in 1872 caused this epic to be rediscovered by the world.
Chiefly because of the durability of the clay tablets, a sufficient percentage
of the library of Ashurbanipal survived for it to be considered the earliest
systematically collected library as distinct from an archive . Originally it is
thought to have consisted of 20,000-30,000 clay tablets. It is believed that
at least 13% of Ashurbanipal's library survived to the present partly
because the clay tablets were baked in fires set during the Median sack of
Nineveh in 612 BCE. This and the library of the Villa of the Papyri at
Herculaneum preserved in lava after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, are
the only libraries of which I am aware that were ever preserved, rather than
destroyed, as the result of fire!

Though a significant percentage of the clay tablets in Assurbanipal's library

survived by burning, non-ceramic elements of his records were lost.
Bas-reliefs at Assurbanipal's Southwest Palace in Nineveh show scribes
with writing-boards and scrolls. 2.A.1 None of these were thought to have
survived from ancient Assyria until sixteen ivory and wood writing boards
were excavated in 1953 from a well in the "North-West" Palace of
Ashurnasirpal in Nimrud. These boards, which were joined together to
form a polyptych, contain residual amounts of wax in which cuneiform
letters were inscribed. 2.A.2

Perhaps as many as one to one and a half million papyrus fragments, of

which most are routine records of business or government, have been
excavated from the dry sands of Egypt; nevertheless, only a small
percentage of information from the ancient world that was originally
recorded seems to have survived. One estimate of the percentage of
classical literature that survived through the Middle Ages to the present is
10%. Because papyrus was relatively expensive, and valued for its
permanence for archival records and books that were intended to last,
whatever information that was recorded on it may have been a fraction of
the information that was written down on less expensive media that were
understood to be less permanent, such as ostraka (potsherds), or thin
pieces of wood or bark such as have been excavated at the fort of
Vindolanda built in Roman Britain, at the most remote reaches of the
Roman Empire, where presumably papyrus was scarce. Some of the most
widely used media for everyday writing were wooden tablets, which when
coated with wax inscribed with a stylus, could be used for notes and
erased, but which were also used in ancient Greece and in the Roman
Empire for legal or financial records intended to last. Loss of preserved and
organized information, through the fabled destruction from uncertain
causes, of possibly tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of
rolls in the Royal Library of Alexandria , the Library of Pergamum , the
Serapeum of Alexandria , later institutional libraries, archives and private
libraries, was not necessarily for lack of durability of the media. Papyrus
had a useful life of hundreds of years, and continued to be used to a limited
extent into the Middle Ages.

The difficulty of arriving at accurate estimates seems to have fueled

speculation rather than restraint regarding the amount of information that
may have been lost from the ancient world. Estimates of the number of
papyrus rolls held by the famous ancient libraries vary widely. Unfortunately
there is no way to estimate accurately how many rolls might have been
stored in any of the ancient institutional libraries. Furthermore, the Library
of Alexandria presumably preserved literary, philosophical and scientific
works rather than business or archival records. If so, its holdings might
have been significantly smaller than some guesstimates. As for the causes
of the loss of so much information, papyrus is preserved best in a dry
climate, and it has been suggested that the humidity of the port of
Alexandria may have contributed to its decay. It has also been pointed out
that another cause of the loss of ancient papyrus rolls which might have
survived into the Middle Ages, as well as a cause of the loss of medieval
papyrus codices, was deterioration in the damp European climates.
Besides the issues of permanence of the storage medium and the climate,
other factors were inevitably involved , including the usual suspects: war,
fire, politics, religious bias, natural disasters and plain neglect. Perceived
obsolescence was probably also a reason for the destruction of papyri. In
libraries like the Imperial Library of Constantinople ancient papyrus rolls,
including some from Alexandria, written in the difficult to read majuscule in
scriptio continua , without word spacing or punctuation, might have been
discarded after their texts were copied in the new, more legible minuscule
onto more permanent parchment codices beginning in the mid-eighth
century. What percentage of the texts preserved in the Royal Library of
Alexandria might have been copied centuries later, and preserved in the
Imperial Library of Constantinople, will, unfortunately, never be known,
because of the loss of inventories of both libraries. For the many other
libraries and archives that were lost over the millenia, or which only partially
survived, specific causes for loss, and accurate knowledge of what books
or records were actually lost, may remain unavailable if inventories and
other pertinent records were also lost with the passage of time.

". . . papyrus books and documents had in ancient and medieval times a
usable life of hundreds of years. Aristotle's manuscripts, many of them in
bad condition through neglect, were part of the loot taken by Sulla to
Rome, where they were edited by Andronicus of Rhodes some 250
years after they were written. Pliny tells of seeing papyrus documents
100 and 200 years old. Searching in books 300 years old is mentioned
by Galen. Cardinal Deusdedit, working the papal archives c. 1085,
consulted papyrus rolls of the Lateran library going back by his specific
citation to c. 1000 and by inference to c. 950. In 1192 the papal
 chamberlain Cencius searched 'in thomis charticiniis et voluminibus
regestorum antiquorum pontificum' , which included archives of the
period 600-1000. Papal documents up to 330 years old were handled in
AD 1213, and there are references in the fourteenth century to
documents contained in volumes (papyrus rolls) of the fifth to tenth
centuries. The historian Tristano Calchi, working in Milan c. 1500, refers
to a papyrus document of the reign of Odoacer (476-93). Among extant
examples may be noted a Pindar volume of the late first or early second
century that is patched on the back with strips of papyrus bearing writing
of the third or fourth century A.D.; a Gospel manuscript of c. 200 with
marginalia of c. 400; a roll that was first written on in the reign of
Septimius Severus (193-211) then made into a codex and reused in the
fifth century; and a document written in Paris at the end of the eleventh
century on the verso of a testament of c. 690. "From all of the above it
seems fair to conclude that the papyrus produced by the ancient
factories had, and retained for years and years, the following qualities; it
was white (or slightly coloured. . . .) flexible, and durable, and its surface
was shiny and smooth. It was not for lack of these qualities that papyrus
gave way to parchment and paper, but because these other materials
were better able, with the passage of time, to meet the needs and
conditions of different times and places for carrying the written and
eventually the printed word" (Lewis, Papyrus in Classical Antiquity
[1974] 60-61). 2.A.3.

(This section was last revised on September 23, 2018.)

2.B. The Transition from Oral to Written Culture

"Some might argue that, without writing, the same beliefs could not have
prevailed over such a long period of time, but in reality, oral traditions are
far more faithfully passed on than the written word. A written account
can be open to multiple interpretations, distortions, and transformations,
depending on the time and situation, economic imperatives, or the
 whims of political or religious leaders. Orally transmitted traditions, in
contrast, must be rigorously and accurately passed on in order to
survive in all their subtlety, and in the smallest of details. Furthermore,
the written word, thought to be the surer and safer means of
communication, is not only less reliable but also more permeable to
outside aggression than are the more secret codes of an oral system.
During the time of the Roman Empire, for instance, the fact that the
Celts were still 'prehistoric'—meaning that they hadn't recorded their
history, ways, and beliefs— made it much harder for the conquering
Romans to devise an appropriate strategy to subjugate them"
(Desdemaines-Hugon, Stepping-Stones. A Journey Through the Ice Age
Caves of the Dordogne [2010] 75).

One of the twelve tablets--of the 1200 discovered by

Austen Henry Layard in Ninveh--upon which the Epic of Gilgamesh was recorded.
Because, as mentioned in 2.A, writing began in Mesopotamia and Egypt in
the fourth millenium BCE, there is little or no documentation of the
transitions from oral to written culture in those regions. The Epic of
Gilgamesh , preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal, was an oral
composition written in a literate culture, as distinct from an oral composition
composed in an exclusively oral culture. 2.B.1

In the European tradition the earliest transition from oral to written culture,
for which there are useful records, occurred in ancient Greece. During this
transition literature was recorded, and passed down from generation to
generation, in both the ancient oral tradition of memorization, and through
the methods, new to this society, of reading and writing. It was a transition
away from a purely oral culture but not a transition to a written culture in the
sense that modern cultures are written cultures; it was an intermediate
condition, in which, after the archaic period in which writing first developed,
the elite educated class relied heavily upon writing, and the rest of the
population was mainly affected by writing, as in the operation of their
government or in having literature to read to them aloud. But some of the
characteristics of an oral culture always remained present in the
society--notably the widespread reliance on and cultivation of memory, and,
in certain contexts, an ambivalence toward or distrust of the written record.
To the extent which some of us are presently imbued with the classical
tradition of Greek literature, philosophy and science, which is based on
surviving elements of the written record, contemplating the ancient Greeks'
ambivalence and distrust of this record may remind us how far we are
removed from the ancient culture on which so many of our traditions are
based. It may also remind us to continue an element of the tradition by
taking a critical view of what we read today.

The Greeks are thought to have inherited the use of wax tablets and the
leather roll for writing, along with the Phoenician alphabet , and to have
developed their writing system in the mid-eighth century BCE. The
earliest known Greek inscriptions date from 770-750 BCE, and they match
Phoenician letter forms of circa 800-750 BCE. Many scholars believe that
the Iliad is the oldest surviving work of literature in the ancient Greek
language, making it one of the first works of ancient Greek literature--a
work which originated long before writing. It is believed that the Odyssey ,
sequel to the Iliad, was composed after the Iliad . Both epic poems,
products of the oral tradition, may have undergone a process of
standardization and refinement out of older material beginning around 750
BCE, when they may have been first committed to writing. The Greek
script, adapted from a Phoenician syllabary, made possible the notation of
the complex rhythms and vowel clusters that make up hexameter verse.
Homer's poems appear to have been recorded shortly after the script's
invention: an inscription from Ischia in the Bay of Naples, ca. 740 BCE,
appears to refer to a text of the Iliad ; and illustrations seemingly inspired by
the Polyphemus episode in the Odyssey are found on Samos, Mykonos
and in Italy in the first quarter of the seventh century BCE. In the narrated
tale of Bellerophon ( Iliad vi.155–203), which introduces the trope of the
"fatal letter", with its message sealed within the folded tablets: "Kill the
bearer of this" the written tablets are an anachronism in a narrative of an
event that was supposed to have occurred generations before the Trojan
War, centuries before writing had come to Greece. The "Fatal Letter"
episode thus helps date the earliest possible recension of the version of the
epic that we read to after the Greeks used writing, in the mid-eighth
century.

Inevitably, texts from the oral tradition would have existed in a multiplicity of
variants, which would eventually have been transcribed, and from which a
standard text would eventually have been established. Homeric quotations
by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom wrote in the fourth century BCE, show
considerable variants which could be the result of reading or hearing
variant texts; however, philosophers, orators and historians from this
transitional period often quoted from memory, with all its limitations, rather
than from a written text, making it impossible for us to know whether
variants in their Homeric quotations are reflective of textual variants or the
vagaries of recall. With memory valued as high or higher than a written text
it appears that textual precision may not always have been appreciated at
this time. Further evidence of textual variation of Homer is documented in
the 680 Homeric papyri of a total of 3026 literary papyri, the percentage of
Homeric papyri reflecting the popularity of Homer in education. 2.B.2. The
first critical edition of Homer was prepared by the Greek grammarian, and
literary critic Zenodotus of Ephesus, first superintendant of the Library of
Alexandria , who was at the height of his reputation about 280 BCE,
during the reign of Ptolemy II. Working without an established tradition of
philology, Zenodotus collated numerous formal manuscripts of Homer
preserved in the library, deleted or obelized doubtful verses, transposed or
altered lines and introduced new readings. It is probable that he was
responsible for the division of the Homeric poems into twenty-four books
each, using capital Greek letters for the Iliad , and lower-case for the
Odyssey . Editorial comments, glosses and commentaries by Zenodotus
and later scholars at the Royal Library of Alexandria are believed to be
preserved among the "A scholia" in the most famous Greek codex of the
Iliad , Venetus A , which is regarded by some as the best text of the epic
poem. This manuscript, which was most probably written at the Imperial
Library of Constantinople about 950 CE, is preserved in the Biblioteca
Marciana in Venice. It was presumably copied from papyri written at the
Royal Library of Alexandria, or from some intermediary copy or copies,
which were later lost or discarded.

Besides the awkwardness of manipulating the roll form, and the limited
information each could contain, papyri were much harder to interpret than
any modern book because punctuation, if any, was usually rudimentary,
and texts were written in scriptura continua without word-division.

"Minor points of articulation or breath pauses, where we now place a

comma or a colon, are left unpunctuated for the most part; when
marked, raised dots are normally used, and these are often additions by
a reader. Punctuation is, however, routine for marking periods (i.e. at the
end of a sentence), changes between speakers in drama and dialogue,
and other major points of division, such as the poems within an epigram
collection. Points of major division are most often signaled by the
paragraphos (a horizontal line at the left edge of the column). . . . Note
that the net effect is designed for clarity and beauty but not ease of use,
much less mass readership. Importantly, this design is not one of
primitivism or ignorance. The ancients knew perfectly well, for instance,
the utlility of word division--the Greek school texts on papyri bear
eloquent testimony to the need for emerging readers to practice syllable
and word division. Similarly philhellenism in the early empire led to the
adoption of scriptio continua in Latin literary texts, which earlier had
 used interpuncts (raised dots) to divide the words-- that is word division
was discarded by the Romans in deference to Greek aesthetic and
cultural traditions. As already mentioned, readers would sometimes add
detailed punctuation to texts as a guide to syntax and breath pauses, yet
the punctuation does not become more complex over time: In general
the deliberate scribal practice was to copy only the bare-bones
punctuation of major points of division even when detailed punctuation
was available. Strict functionality, clearly, is not a priority in bookroll
design. The bookroll seems, rather an egregiously elite product intended
in its stark beauty and difficulty of access to instantiate what it is to be
educated." (Johnson, "The Ancient Book," The Oxford Handbook of
Papyrology , Bagnall (ed) [2009] 261-63).

It is generally understood that in the ancient world all reading was typically
done aloud, either to oneself or to others. This process is believed to have
continued until well after the transition from the roll to the codex, and after
the decline of the Roman Empire, to around the fifth century CE, after
which the rise of monasticism, with its ideal of silence, and the introduction
of word spacing, gradually caused the preference for silent reading which
we follow today. Parallel to reading aloud, scholars have debated whether
scribal book production in the ancient world and the Middle Ages was done
from visual exemplars or from dictation, or both. 2.B.3. By reading aloud
the sound of the words compensated for lack of punctuation and
word-division. In this early period literacy was, of course, limited to only a
small portion of society, and the oral tradition, with its mnemonic devices
built in, would have continued both in the recitation of literature that had not
been put in writing, and in customs of listening to written literature read
aloud, which would have been maintained partly out of tradition, and partly
because of the high cost and scarcity of books, and partly out of necessity.
In his classic study Harris estimated literacy at 10-15% in the overall
Roman Empire, assuming that literacy would have been higher in some
localities depending upon local education systems, and lower in others. In
the western provinces he doubted that literacy reached 5-10%. Because of
the difficulties in defining literacy, and the enormous variations it entails,
influenced by educational systems, geography, and economics, among
other factors, these general quantifications should be taken chiefly to reflect
the minorities in the populations that would have been directly involved with
reading and writing. 2.B.4 We might add that the peculiar difficulties that
had to be surmounted in reading early manuscripts would more than likely
have contributed to lower literacy rates:

"Finally it should be emphasized that the text as arranged on the

papyrus was much harder for the reader to interpret than in any modern
book. Punctuation was usually rudimentary at best. Texts were written
without word-division, and it was not until the middle ages that a real
effort was made to alter this convention in Greek or Latin texts (in a few
Latin texts of the classical period a point is placed after each word). The
system of accentuation, which might have compensated for this difficulty
in Greek, was not invented until the Hellenistic period, and for a long
time after its invention it was not universally used; here again it is not
until the early middle ages that the writing of accents becomes normal
practice. In dramatic texts throughout antiquity changes of speaker were
not indicated with the precision now thought necessary; it was enought
to write a horizontal stroke at the beginning of line, or two points one
above the other, like the modern English colon, for changes elsewhere;
the names of the characters were frequently omitted. . . . Another and
perhaps even stranger feature of books in the pre-Hellenistic period is
that lyric verse was written as if it were prose; the fourth-century papyrus
of Timotheus (P. Berol. 9875) is an instance, and even without this
valuable document the fact could have been inferred from the tradition
that Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257-180 BCE) devised the colometry
which makes clear the metrical units of the poetry (Dion. Hal. de
comp.verb. 156, 221). It is to be noted that the difficulties facing the
reader of an ancient book were equally troublesome to the man who
wished to transcribe his own copy. The risk of misinterpretation and
consequent corruption of the text in this period is not to be
 underestimated. It is certain that a high proportion of the most serious
corruptions in classical texts go back to this period and were already
widely current in the books that eventually entered the library of the
Museum of Alexandria" (Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars ,
3rd ed. [1991] 4-5).

Herodotus, who wrote circa 450-420 BCE, expected his Histories to be

read aloud. He began his Histories with a sentence that has been
translated in various ways: "Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his
research so that human events do not fade with time." Another translation
reads, "What follows is a performance of the enquiries of Herodotus from
Halicarnassus." According to The Landmark Herodotus, Strassler (ed)
(2007) 3, Proem.b, from which the second translation was taken, "This
almost certainly implies that Herodotus performed (read aloud) his text, in
whole or in part, to an audience gathered to hear him." Whether or not
Herodotus himself "performed" his text, it is reasonable to assume that
since all reading was done aloud at this time Herodotus would have
expected his Histories to be read aloud in both private and public readings.
Such public readings could have been appropriately characterized as
performances.

In this transitional period in which oral and written cultures overlapped, it is

believed that Herodotus relied primarily on oral sources and oral tradition
for his Histories . He cites short inscriptions or epigrams mainly as
illustrations of his narrative rather than the basis for his narrative. 2.B.5 It is
also increasingly agreed by scholars that Thucydides, who followed almost
immediately after Herodotus, also relied primarily on oral sources, providing
summaries of speeches, rather than actual transcriptions of what was said,
throughout his history, and citing contemporary documents, chiefly point by
point citations of treaties, only in Book Five. Even by the late fifth and early
fourth centuries BCE, when both Herodotus and Thucydides wrote, much
of the literary activity, knowledge and discussion in Greece seems to have
been based upon oral communication rather than books, though books
were available. It seems that during this period written texts were often
viewed as aids to memory rather than the primary object of study. 2.B.6

Besides bookrolls on papyrus, Athenians maintained a wide variety of

written records on wood tablets, lead tablets, bronze tablets, wooden
boards, and stone inscriptions. 2.B.7 Apart from stone inscriptions, few
examples of these media surivived. Dramatic exceptions to this overall lack
of early Greek books and archival data are the Archives of the Athenian
Cavalry from the fourth and and third centuries BCE preserved on lead
tablets. 2.B.8 This archive was excavated in 1965 from a water well within
the courtyard of the Dipylon, the double-gate leading into the city of Athens
from the north. It included 574 lead tablets from the third century BCE.
2.B.9 Six years later another hundred or so lead tablets from the fourth and
third centuries BCE were excavated from a well at the edge of the
excavated section of the Agora in Athens. Historian of ancient archives
Ernest Posner characterized these as "by far the largest name file of
ancient times. Tightly rolled or folded up, they contain the following
information: the name in the genitive of the owner of a horse; the horse's
color and brand, if any; and its value stated in drachmas, with 1,200
drachmas as the highest valuation given. Normally, only the name of the
owner appears on the outside; the other data is relegated to the interior of
the tablet and could not be read unless the tablet was unrolled or unfolded.
A number of tablets are palimpsests; that is, the original entries were
erased and replaced by new data." 2.B.10. From the extensive information
available, John H. Kroll, author of the primary paper on the 1971
excavation, developed a theory of the purposes and operation of the
Athenian Cavalry Archives. 2.B.11

The persistent influence of the oral tradition is seen in fourth century

Athens with their continuing reliance on witnesses for the oral validation of
written contracts early in the fourth century, and the beginning phase out of
oral witnesses to written contracts much later in the fourth century.
Contracts were frequently written on wooden tablets.
 "The written contract first appears in our evidence in the first decade of
the fourth century (Isoc. Trapez. XVII 20) and more frequently thereafter.
But not till much later in the fourth century do we find a written contract
apparently made without witnesses (Hyp. Ag. Athenogenes , i.e. 320s).
Before this, witnesses were present as well and they duplicated the
proof of the written contract. As Pringsheim has put it: 'We are in a
transitional stage in which documents did not yet replace attestation, but
only helped to prove it'; and he recognizes that the oral agreement was
still felt to be the important element of the contract" (Thomas, Oral
Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens [1989] 41).

Books do not seem to have become common in Athens until the first
quarter of the fourth century. 2.B.12 In an era which so greatly valued
memory, Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus, written circa 380 BCE, provided
one of the most eloquent and frequently quoted discussions of the
advantages and disadvantages of writing. Notably, Plato's teacher Socrates
(d. 399 BCE) taught for his entire life without writing, and it was left to Plato
to record Socrates's teachings for the world. Thus the dialogues are a
blend of Socratic and Platonic thought. In Phaedrus 274 Socrates says that
"writing will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not
use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not
remember of themselves. . . ." He stated that writing represented "not truth
but only the semblance of truth." Written words "seem to talk to you as
though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they
say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the same thing for
ever." Even worse, once something is put in writing it "drifts all over the
place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but
equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to
address the right people, and not address the wrong." While documenting
Socrates's viewpoint-- aspects of which may have been widely shared at
the time -- Plato clearly recognized the importance of writing both for its
mnemonic value, and for creating, preserving, and distributing complex
expositions such as his dialogues. Works of such extreme literary elegance
and subtlety could not have been preserved in a strictly oral culture. Plato
and others in ancient Greece argued that all the sons and daughters of
Greek citizens should receive education in letters; however, as far as we
know, no city acted on this recommendation. 2.B.13

". . .the reputation of the written word in classical Greece was by no

means entirely positive. Even among the educated it often seems to
have generated suspicion: Greeks quite frequently perceived letters and
other documents as instruments of deceit. Together with the sort of
reasoned criticism of the use of writing which is put foward in the
Phaedrus (for which admittedly we have no close parallel), such views
may have operated on a conscious or unconscious plane to inhibit the
conversion away from oral culture" (Harris, Ancient Literacy [1989]
324-25).

(This section was last revised on September 17, 2018.)

2.C. The Transition from the Roll to the Codex : Technological

and Cultural Implications
The transition from the roll to the codex took place gradually over roughly
three hundred years, from the first or second through fourth or fifth
centuries CE. While this transition from one basic form of the book to
another is not difficult to understand conceptually, the problems involved
are unfamiliar to those whose background is primarily in the history of the
codex book and the history of printing.

"From the beginnings of Greek written literature until deep into the
Roman era, a 'book' was fashioned by taking a premanufactured
papyrus roll, writing out the text, attaching additional fresh rolls as the
length of text required, and, when finished, cutting off the blank
remainder. Needed were the papyrus rolls, ink, pen sponge, glue, and
 knife. . . . Books on papyrus in the form of rolls ('bookrolls') were the
norm from the beginnings through the early Roman era" (Johnson, "The
Ancient Book," The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology , Bagnall (ed) [2009]
256).

Considering the highly limited literacy rate in ancient society, and the elite
social aspects of reading in the ancient world, which I discussed in Section
2.B, we may reasonably assume that ancient books, which contained
literary, religious, philosophical, and to lesser extent scientific and other
non-fictional topics, represented only a small percentage of the information
recorded, most of which would have been government documents,
accounting and business records, and correspondence. We may also
assume that the number of surviving books is a very small percentage of
the information surviving from the ancient world. Of the 1 to 1.5 million
papyri-- mostly fragmentary-- that survive almost entirely from Egypt,
fragments of only somewhat more than "3000 bookrolls, 1000 papyrus
codices, and another 1000 parchment codices survive from antiquity"
(Johnson, op. cit., 268, citing data from the Leuven Database of Ancient
Books as of January 2006). It has also been estimated that, apart from
clay tablets with cuneiform script, somewhat more than 1,070 writing
tablets 2.C.1 have survived from the ancient world-- coincidentally a
quantity proportionate to the number of surviving bookrolls and early
papyrus and parchment codices.

Bookrolls having been the standard format of the book for 2000 years, the
question remains why the transition from the bookroll to the codex occurred
during the final centuries of the Roman Empire. The assumption, based on
the existence of early Christian documents in papyrus and parchment
codex form , has been that the transition from the roll to the codex was
promoted by early Christians. While the evidence certainly points in this
direction, other evidence, more recently considered, suggests that
"romanization" may also have been a factor. Both the Greeks and the
Romans used wooden tablets for relatively short documents such as legal
documents, and papyrus rolls or bookrolls for longer documents. These
tablets, sometimes coated with wax, were frequently tied together in the
form of diptychs and triptychs, or if more than three tablets were tied
together, polyptychs. The names for these tablets tied together are, of
course, Greek. As mentioned, examples of tablets survive from ancient
Greece, and from the Roman Empire . From the Byzantine empire, which
blended Greek, Roman and Christian traditions, examples of diptychs have
survived with deluxe commemorative bindings of carved ivory . One of the
oldest surviving tablets is a Greek example in bronze, with writing in
Greek/Phoenician, dating from near the origin of the written Greek
language, circa 800 BCE. ( Schoyen Collection MS 108 ). This is part of the
oldest surviving book in codex form, which is believed to have originally
consisted of at least five tablets. 2.C.2 Examples of later ancient tablets
(Latin: tabulae ) with holes punched for tying together, and a set of nine
tablets tied together, are illustrated in Wilhelm Schubart, Das Buch bei den
Griechen und Roemern . Dritte Auflage, Herausgegeben von E. Paul (1961)
p. 29. That the writing on wooden tablets was often done by a stylus in
wax, making the writing easily changable or erasable, led to the reasonable
assumption that tabulae were used primarily for temporary jottings or
note-taking rather than permanent or important documents:

"Ultimately, as its etymology indicates, the codex book evolved from

wooden tablets, often with wax-filled compartments, used in ancient
Rome for more or less ephemeral jottings and figurings. A group of such
tablets, tied or hinged together, was known as a caudex / codex , a word
originally indicating a tree trunk or block of wood (and, in Terence, a
blockhead). At some stage before the Christian era folded parchments
( membranae ) came to be used for the same ephemeral purposes, and
then were eventually adopted for permanent storage of written matter,
even literary texts; and by the third century A.D. the term 'codex' had
become assimilated also to these non-wooden objects" (Needham,
Twelve Centuries of Bookbindings 400-1600 [1979] 4).
The assumption that the Romans used tabulae primarly for temporary
jottings or notes seems to have influenced efforts to understand elements
of this transition in the form and function of the book. Yet examples of
tabulae used for legal documents have survived. A diptych dated 198 CE in
the Bodleian Library, Oxford, "contains the appointment of a guardian for a
woman by the prefect of Egypt. The main body of the text inscribed on the
wax is in Latin, followed by a subscription written in Greek by an
amanuensis on behalf of the woman, who was illiterate. On the outside
there are copies of these sections and a list of the names of seven
witnesses, all written in ink directly on the wood. The diptych was originally
tied shut and sealed with the seals of the witnesses to prevent tampering
with the inner text, the authenticated version, while the exterior text
remained available for consultation" (Hunt, R.W., The Survival of the
Classics , Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1975, no. 32.) The use of seven
witnesses attesting to the validity of the written document may reflect the
continuation of the tradition originating with the first written contracts in
fourth century Greece, and discussed in section 2.B., in which oral
witnesses to a written agreement were given weight equal to or greater
than the written agreement itself.

Besides their use for legal documents, tabulae were used for financial
documents. Bankers in Greece and Rome prefered the wood tablet to
papyrus because documents written on tablets were more difficult to falsify.
2.C.3 That tabulae were widely used in Greece and Rome for various
classes of important, though shorter documents, suggests that the
transition from the papyrus roll to the codex form of the book reflected a
conversion from one widely-used form to another rather than the
development of a new form. For the ancient, entrenched papyrus roll to be
replaced as the dominant form of the book by the papyrus or parchment
codex the presumption is that there were perceived advantages to the
codex form, yet these advantages were not perceived as so great or so
necessary that they caused any kind of rapid conversion: the transition
required about 300 years. What were the advantages of codices? Chief
among them were probably efficiency and portability. By efficiency I mean
that you could contain more information more conveniently in a papyrus or
parchment codex than a roll, and a single codex containing that relatively
larger amount of information would probably be easier to use, and easier to
carry, than the group of papyrus rolls that it might take to hold an equivalent
amount of information. The ability to keep long texts together in one
volume, rather than in a series of bookrolls, some of which could be lost,
would have been a significant factor in the preservation of texts.

In theory a papyrus roll could be of any length by the process of pasting the
end of one roll of papyrus to the end of the other, thereby extending the
length of the roll, but there is evidence to suggest that the standard papyrus
roll was twenty sheets of papyrus in length. One reason for maintaining
shorter rolls may have been that the longer the roll the more difficult it was
to find a specific place in a document. 2.C.4. The longest roll ever found in
Egypt is the Great Harris Papyrus , which extends to a length of 41 meters.
In contrast, we all know how easy it is, with the simple use of a bookmark,
to find a place in a codex with over 1000 pages.

Assuming an average papyrus roll held a text of moderate length, such as

a book of Homer or Vergil, the complete poems would have required
several rolls, and carrying them would have been awkward. A much longer
encyclopedic text, Pliny's Historia naturalis , occupied 160 rolls. Another
factor that made papyrus rolls less efficient carriers of information is that
they contained writing on only one side of the roll. Rolling and unrolling the
papyrus tended to cause writing on the outside surface of the papyrus to
wear off because of rubbing, discouraging the placement of writing on both
sides of the roll. When a number of rolls had to be carried they were put in
a box ( scrinium or capsa ) cylindrical in shape not unlike a modern hat box .
A bundle of 18 rolls found at Herculaneum had been kept in a similar
container. Carrying a large scrinium, or several of them, would not have
been a problem for a member of the Roman senatorial class who
undoubtedly travelled with slaves, but for ordinary people who might not
have owned slaves, should they have had the occasion to own books, it
might have been quite inconvenient. In addition, papyrus, which for the
most part, had to be imported from factories in Egypt where it grew on the
banks of the Nile, was subject to interruption of supplies from wars or other
issues, though probably not in Egypt itself, the location in which most of the
surviving papyri were found. It is difficult for us to determine the cost of
papyrus relative to other components in ancient book production, but since
the reading and writing of books was generally limited to the educated elite
and their slaves during the Roman Empire we may assume that books
were far more expensive than they are today. Whether papyrus was
considered expensive or not, its use was relatively inefficient since writing
was mainly done on only one side of the roll.

In the ancient world parchment was the primary alternative to papyrus for
long documents or books. Writing on prepared animal skins had a long
history. Some Egyptian Fourth Dynasty texts were written on parchment.
Though the Assyrians and the Babylonians inscribed their cuneiform on
clay tablets, they also wrote on parchment from the 6th century BCE
onward, and Jews wrote on parchment rolls. In spite of this, the invention of
parchment was associated with Pergamum, site of the second largest
library in the ancient world , which was constructed circa 197-159 BCE. The
Latin name for parchment is charta pergamena . It has been argued that the
Pergamene authorities were forced to fall back on parchment when
supplies of papyrus from Egypt were interrupted during the invasions of
Egypt by Antiochus IV Epihanes . During this period scholars from
Pergamum may have introduced parchment to Rome where the shortage
of papyrus would have had an even greater impact on the much larger
literate population. It has also been conjectured that the Pergamenes may
have improved the quality of the writing material through a new production
process. The added flexibility of parchment, as well as its greater strength,
made it a superior writing material for manuscripts in codex form.

The papyrus or parchment codex was a Roman innovation. The earliest

certain reference to a parchment notebook appears in the Institutio Oratoria
of Quintilian composed in the last years of the reign of the Emperor
Domitian, the final decade of the first century CE. 2.C.5 About 85 CE, the
poet Martial left the first surviving mention of literary works published in
parchment codices , emphasizing their compactness, their handiness for the
traveller, and providing the name of the shop where such novelties could be
bought. From this early period only a single leaf fragment of a parchment
codex has survived, with writing on both sides of the parchment--a
fragment of an anonymous work entitled De bellis Macedonicis found at
Oxyrthynchus (elephantnose fish), Egypt, and acquired by the British
Museum in 1900. The author of the S econd Epistle to Paul from Timothy ,
which is either a first or second century document, requests that Timothy,
should "bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books ( ta
biblia ) and above all the parchments (tas membranas )." On this Gamble
writes, "The Greek term membranai, translated by the R[evised] S[tandard]
V[ersion] as 'parchments,' is the Latin word membranae transliterated into
Greek. There was no Greek name for the intended object. If parchment
rolls had been meant, the standard Greek designation, diphtherai , would
surely have been used. The Latinism, membranai, has the specific sense of
'parchment codex' and its use in this Greek-Christian document indicates
that the object, like the word, had a Roman origin." 2.C.6

Momentum for the gradual transition from the roll to the codex was
traditionally credited to early Christians, who to a great extent, wrote the
books of the New Testament in codex form, on papyrus and on parchment.
This was in distinct contrast to the practices of the Jews who adopted the
codex form much later, circa 900 CE. 2.C.7

Assuming that Christianity was initially a religion of the common man and
the poor, it was suggested that the codex form became standardized with
the early Christians as the form of notebook used by the common
man--traders, small businessmen, freedmen or slaves-- who lived and
worked outside the world of professional scribes (who were sometimes also
slaves) and their standard roll-form. However, Gamble disputed this
viewpoint:
 "Studies of the social community of the early church have shown that,
especially in its urban settings, Christianity attracted a socially diverse
membership, representing a cross section of Roman society. Although it
certainly included many from the lower socioeconomic levels, it was by
no means a proletarian movement. Both the highest and the lowest
strata of society were absent. The most typical members of the Christian
groups were free craftspeople, artisans, and small traders, some of
whom had attained a measure of affluence, owned houses and slaves,
had the resources to travel, and were socially mobile. In terms of social
status, Christian communities had a pyramidal shape rather like that of
society at large. But since members of the upper classes were less
numerous, high levels of literacy--as a function of social status or
education, or both--would have been unusual. Still, moderate levels,
such as were common among craftspeople and small business persons,
may have been proportionately better represented witihin the early
church than outside it. Yet these insights offer no reason to think that the
extent of literacy of any kind among Christians was greater than in
society at large. If anything, it was more limited. This means that not
only the writing of Christian literature, but also the ability to read,
criticize, and interpet it belonged to a small number of Christians in the
first several centuries, ordinarily not more than about 10 percent in any
given setting, and perhaps fewer in the many small and provincial
congregations that were characteristic of early Christianity." 2.C.8

Christians may have also preferred the codex format for the Scriptures
used in liturgy since a codex is easier to handle than a roll, and one can
write on both sides of the leaves of a codex, allowing more information to
be recorded in less space. Perhaps an extreme example of the portability
of the codex is a remarkable survival: the smallest codex known from
antiquity, the Cologne Codex Mani, written in Greek on leaves measuring
3.5 x 4.5 cm or 1.3 x 1.18 inches, and originally the size of a small
matchbox. Assuming that most would have taken larger, more convenient
sizes, it seems that the codex would also have been a form of information
storage preferable for people on the move-- often necessary, perhaps, in
the period of persecution of early Christians by the Romans, before
Christianity was adopted by the Emperor Constantine in 313 CE. Some of
the best examples of early Christian papyrus codices in single quire Coptic
bindings are the Nag Hammadi Library discovered in Egypt in 1945.
2.C.9 As the form also allowed the development of bindings which were
protective as well as decorative, bindings would have increased the
longevity of codices versus the more delicate rolls, and over time this would
have been recognized as a significant advantage. From the economic
standpoint T.C. Skeat suggested that there may have been cost savings in
the production of information in codex form versus the traditional papyrus
roll . 2.C.10

By the late third or fourth centuries CE, as the codex form of the book
became more established, Christians may have also found codices
advantageous for their ability to contain long texts, which could then be
indexed or cross-referenced. After his arrival in Caesaria, Palestine, from
Alexandria, in 234 Christian scholar and theologian Origen (Ὠριγένης
Ōrigénēs or Origen Adamantius) undertook compilation of the Hexapla ,
an elaborate tool for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible containing the Old
Testament written in six parallel columns laid out across each page
opening, in a series of large, thick codices. The project is thought to have
taken roughly 20 years to complete, by Origen with a team of assistants
and scribes, some of whom may have been slaves. To undertake his
scholarly work Origen collected a very significant library , though we have
little understanding of its precise contents.

Origen was the first Christian biblical scholar, and the first Christian scholar
to undertake the study of Hebrew. His Hexapla was not only a massive
scholarly achievement in the early days of Christianity, but also a landmark
in book history, since the Hexapla was undoubtedly the largest scholarly
endeavor in the early history of Christianity—a work so large in terms of
sheer information quantity that it could only have been written in a series of
large codices, the format of the book that was gradually replacing the
papyrus roll between 100 and 400 CE. In papyrus roll form the Hexapla
would have occupied hundreds of rolls, and would have been virtually
impossible to use, a consideration which would have assured that the
codex format was employed. The volumes of the Hexapla were also
presumably the first codices to display information in tabular form– a form
that Origen appears to have invented.

It is estimated that the original Hexapla consisted of about 6000 folio pages
in perhaps 40 codices, and that because of the immense cost of its
production- perhaps 150,000 denarii based on Diocletian's price edict - it
probably existed in only a single complete copy. This copy may have been
preserved in the library of the bishops of Caesarea for several centuries,
but was lost in the Muslim invasion of in 638, if not earlier. The three
column page format of the large codices of the Hexapla is thought to have
been influential on the four column format of the other large codex
produced about a century later, which did survive— the Codex Sinaiticus . It
is, of course, also likely that the Hexapla was used in editing the Bible text
recorded in the Codex Sinaiticus . Origen's table format was also influential
on the development of Eusebius's table format in his Chronicon .

Because so little physical evidence survived from the transitional period

from the papyrus roll to the codex during first four centuries CE, details that
we have of Origen's Hexapla and its relationship to Eusebius's Chronicon
and to the Codex Sinaiticus are significant markers for this critical early
period in book history. Only a few small fragments of codices have survived
from the third century, and nothing from that date confirms the tabular form
of the Hexapla, or even that it was written in codex form. For confirmation
of the layout of the codex page openings of the Hexapla we depend upon
later evidence: two early manuscript fragments that survived. The first is a
palimpsest from the Cairo Genizah in which the 8th century Greek text of a
portion of the Psalms in the columnar form of the Hexapla was overwritten
in Hebrew. This leaf, preserved at Cambridge, was first reproduced by
Charles Taylor in Hebrew-Greek Cairo Genizah Palimpsests from the
Taylor-Schechter Collection, Including a Fragment of the Twenty-Second
Psalm According to Origen's Hexapla. (1900),plates 1 and 2 . (I discovered
this publication detail when I acquired a copy of Taylor's book in 2016.)
More recently the leaf was reproduced on p. 97 of Grafton & Williams,
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book. Origen, Eusebius, and the
Library of Caesarea (2006) On p. 99 of the same work the authors
reproduce a diagram showing the layout of the partial Hexapla leaf showing
its actual linear and columnar arrangement in white and a hypothetical
reconstruction of the original folio page opening in six columns in gray. The
other fragment, coincidentally also of the Psalms, preserved in the
Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan, was written in Greek minuscule circa 900,
and palimpsested with a 13th or 14th century Greek text.

The Eusebian canons or Eusebian sections, also known as Ammonian

Sections, are thought to have been invented circa 280-340 CE, and
attributed to Roman historian, exegete, and Christian polemicist and Bishop
Eusebius of Caesarea , became a standardized system dividing the four
Gospels used between late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The sections
are indicated in the margin of nearly all Greek and Latin manuscript codices
of the Bible, and usually summarized in Canon Tables at the start of the
Gospels. There are about 1165 sections: 355 for Matthew, 235 for Mark,
343 for Luke, and 232 for John; the numbers vary slightly in different
manuscripts. These numbers referring to sections within the text should not
be confused with pagination or foliation, practices which would have been
relatively meaningless and perhaps confusing in the early manuscript
codex era when most copies of the same text did not maintain identical
pagination. The Eusebian canon tables represent a way for the reader to
move back and forth between related sections in the texts, and are an early
organizational structure and cross-indexing system. That the Eusebian
canons became a convention of Christian Bibles was undoubtedly another
reason why Christians might have preferred the codex to the bookroll.

"(1) In the second century, when codices appear in any numbers,

bookrolls still account for more than 90 percent of surviving books; by
the fourth century codices account for 80 percent of the total, by the
 sixth century, the changeover is complete. (2) Early codices (from the
second or third century) in the main are more likely than bookrolls to be
written in workaday hands. . . .Calligraphic and pretentious scripts are a
rarity. (3) Christian texts are almost always written in codex form. Only
five of one hundred New Testament papyrus fragments listed in the
LDAB are written on bookrolls, and Christian writings in the broader
sense tend strongly to favor the codex form (in excess of 80 percent of
all examples.) Conversely, only a small percentage of classical texts
written in codex form in the early period (second or third century); pagan
texts written in codex form come into their own only from the fourth
century on. (4) Coincident to the changeover from roll to codex is a shift
of surviving book content from classical literature to Christian texts. Only
a tiny percentage of surviving books are Christian in the second century;
perhaps 10 percent in the third; about 40 percent in the fourth, and more
than 50 percent by the fifth. (5) Also coincident to the transition to the
codex is a change of material from papyrus to parchment. As early as
the fourth century, a quarter of the surviving witnesses are parchment;
by the seventh parchment predominates" (Johnson, op. cit. [2009] 266).

Another reason for the association of early Christian books with the
transition from the roll to the codex is that of the religious movements of
antiquity only Christianity and Judaism produced significant quantities of
religious literature, and Jews did not adopt the codex until roughly 900 CE.
Without surviving Pagan religious literature proportionate to the number of
Pagan believers, the Christian book and its evolution from the roll to the
codex may appear to the historian even more prominent among the
surviving literature than it was. 2.C.11 In Early Christian Books in Egypt
(2009) Roger Bagnall showed that the number of surviving Christian
documents in codex form relative to the number of surviving non-Christian
documents in codex form during the transitional period from the first
through fifth centuries CE is roughly proportionate to the overall percentage
of Christian versus non-Christian documents surviving from the period.
These statistics he correlated with the ratio of estimated Christian
population versus the non-Christian population in Egypt during the same
period. 2.C.12 He also documented the high cost of producing books by
hand during the first centuries of Christianity, showing that book ownership
would mainly have been limited to government, the moneyed classes, or
religious institutions, thus bringing into doubt the notion that Christians
adopted the codex form of the book because it was associated with a form
of notebook used by the "common man." One of the numerous examples
he used is the so-called Theban Magical Library, a collection of
non-Christian books, including many of the most famous magical papyri,
which was acquired by institutions in Leiden and London in the nineteenth
century, possibly from a single find in a tomb in the West Bank at Thebes,
Egypt . Five of the thirteen items in this library are fourth century codices;
eight are third century rolls. 2.C.13 Bagnall observed that the rolls in the
library date from the third century and the codices date from the fourth,
corresponding to the period in which the codex form is thought to have
become dominant. His other observation was that these collections of
Egyptian magical spells can in no way be called Christian documents. The
implications from this are that in their adoption of the codex book early
Christians may have been a part of a general trend rather than responsible
for the trend.

Regarding the transition from the roll to the codex, Bagnall drew attention
to the wide Roman use of the tablet book for solumn religious, public and
legal documents, as studied by Elizabeth A. Meyer in Legitimacy and Law
in the Roman World. Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice (2004). Meyer
wrote:

"Egyptian papyrus was the paper of the ancient world, inexpensive and,
in the East, ubiquitous. In parts of the Roman Empire where papyrus
could not be had cheaply, as in the cold camps on Hadrian's Wall, folk
might write instead on the bark of trees. But for certain types of
composition, Romans like Trajan--although their world rustled with
papyrus--preferred to write instead on thick wooden boards, on tabulae ,
on tablets. Yet tabulae were objects of complex manufacture, and so
 expensive; writing on a tablet--usually with a stylus on a coating of wax
set into a rectangular depression in the board--was more laborious than
writing with a pen on papyrus and tabulae were heavy to carrry and
awkward to store. So the frequent Roman choice of the tablet as a
medium for writing is a curious one. . . " (Meyer p. 1).

Like the Greeks, the Romans perceived writings on wax tablets as more
permanent, or at least more difficult to falsify, than writings on papyri:

"As a medium for writing tablets had practical attractions, especially for
preserving important documents and preventing fraud: writing on wax
showed evidence of tampering ; folded together, wax tablets were hard
to damage; sealed up with string they were difficult for malefactors to
break into unnoticed " (Meyer p. 2).

The important role of tablets in Roman law and culture was, along with
other elements of "romanization," gradually transferred to the wide reaches
of the Roman Empire:

"As the power of Romans grew they took their characteristic ways of
doing things-and so their tablets-with them out into the provinces of the
empire and used them not only between each other but as the
preceptible voice of government. Provincials who sought the ear of
Roman officials in some places hastened to mimic this Roman
form-even if only by writing on and folding their papyrus differently-and in
others left it strictly alone. This significantly uneven pattern of cultural
influence illuminates the process by which subjects were introduced to,
and adopted, the ways of their Roman overlords, and so helps us to
understand the complex process of exchange and acculturation we have
come to know as romanization. At the same time it allows insight into the
impact of the Roman government in the provinces: Roman officials, for
example, interested themselves acutely in the treatment and
preservation of documents, an exception to the otherwise hands-off
 Roman style of ruling. And whatever the effect of their furious edicts it is
possible to trace indirect influence out from Rome (what the emperor
did) to the provinces (what the governors did) to the subject, in how he
or she made his or her documents conform to Roman expectations"
(Meyer pp. 5-6).

Based on these interpretations, the transition from the papyrus roll to the
codex would appear to have three main causes: (1) An evolution and
expansion of the tabula or codex form, traditionally used for shorter
documents, to write, preserve, and distribute longer documents including
books. This required the expansion of the codex form from leaves of wood
or metal tied together to folded leaves of papyrus and parchment sewn in
gatherings. The transition may well have started, as Meyer suggests, by
the process of "writing on and folding . . . papyrus differently" so as to
imitate the wooden codex form. (2) The distinct preference for the codex
form by early Christians, who would have been influential in promoting the
form as Christianity spread. (3) Preference for the codex form over the
bookroll for technological and economic reasons, which may have
influenced both educated Roman society as well as early Christians in their
adoption of the codex and the phase out of the bookroll. These three
explanations interacting together, rather than any one of them by itself, may
provide a more balanced explanation of this significant early transition in
the history of the form and function of the book. 2.C.14

(This section was last revised on October 12, 2018.)

2.D. An Achievement in Book Production That Some Have

Compared to the Gutenberg Bible
Even though the transition from the roll to the codex in the format of book
production overall was not yet complete, and papyrus rolls were still in wide
use, by about 350 CE the codex form of the book had advanced to the
point where the entire Old and New Testaments could be incorporated into
single codices that were monumental in size and scope. Two surviving
codices from Late Antiquity accomplished this feat: the Codex Sinaiticus
and the Codex Vaticanus . Of these, the Codex Sinaiticus remains the most
monumental achievement in book production of all codices surviving from
this transitional period-- the significance of which some have compared to
the Gutenberg Bible, which initiated the transition from manuscript to print
eleven hundred years later. Of course, because of its ancient age, there are
many differences between our knowledge of the accomplishments entailed
in the Codex Sinaiticus and those of the Gutenberg Bible; the place of
production of the Codex Sinaiticus , its exact date of production, and the
patron or patrons, scribes and editors involved with the production of the
Codex Sinaiticus are all unknown. Furthermore, unlike the invention of
printing by movable type and the Gutenberg Bible, which were the
inventions within a known time frame in the fifteenth century primarily by
one man, Johann Gutenberg, fourth century CE producers of large codices
built upon book production technologies which had evolved through
continuous development by countless unknown hands for at least two
hundred years.

Formerly known as the Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus , the Codex

Sinaiticus was written in Koine Greek in the mid-4th century by at least
three scribes. What we know about this book has been reconstructed from
its physical characteristics and its content. The book is so ancient that no
other documented details of its origin have survived. The translation of the
Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek was accomplished by Jews,
possibly in the port of Alexandria, where Greek was spoken, or in some
other city where Jews would have become fluent in both Greek and
Hebrew, but the identity of the translators, their location, and the date of the
translation remain unknown. The codex includes the complete text of the
Septuagint , a translation of the Hebrew Bible made into Koine Greek from
circa 250 BCE to 50 CE. Among the earliest Greek texts of the Hebrew
Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus text is of fundamental significance for the text of
the Old Testament in general, since only fragmentary Hebrew versions of
the Bible survive from this period, and the translation was undoubtedly
based on even earlier Hebrew and Greek manuscripts which are no longer
extant. The translation has been called one of the lasting achievements of
Jewish civilization, without which Christianity might not have spread as
quickly and successfully. The Codex Sinaiticus was written in Biblical
majuscule in scriptio continua (also called scriptura continua ), without
word division, punctuation or pagination; it incorporates two ancient
methods for numbering its quires, and it also incorporates a version of the
system of numbering the paragraphs of the Gospels developed by
Eusebius of Caesarea . It was written in a four-column format except for the
poetical and wisdom literature in which a two-column format was used. This
is the only surviving biblical manuscript employing the four-column page
format, and it has been suggested that this format is reminiscent of the roll
format rather than the codex. Without any evidence for more precise
localization, it is thought that the codex was written somewhere in Asia
Minor, Palestine (Caesarea?) or Egypt.

The Codex Sinaiticus is unique among ancient manuscripts for the number
of corrections that were made to it by at least six different ancient
correctors, roughly from 400 to 600 CE, though some corrections may be
later. In his monograph on the codex D. C. Parker states that there may be
as many as 27,000 corrections to the text, The number of
corrections--greater than other ancient manuscripts--and the care in which
they were made, confirms, according to Parker, the importance that must
have been given to this manuscript early in its history. The nature of the
corrections, and how they were made, provides insight into how the text
was copied, how it was studied in the first centuries after its creation, and
may provide variant readings from other manuscripts which are no longer
extant. 2.D.1 .

Originally the Codex Sinaiticus contained the Old Testament, according to

the canon of the Greek Septuagint , including the books known in English
as the Apocrypha , (but without 2 and 3 Maccabees) along with the New
Testament and two other early Christian books—the Shepherd of Hermas
and the Epistle of Barnabas . The complete codex originally incorporated
743 parchment leaves (1486 pages) with a page size of 43 cm. wide by 38
cm. high (16.9 x 15 inches). In size and extent the complete Codex
Sinaiticus represented a quantum leap from the papyrus rolls of the
Romans, and the papyrus codices in which early Christian documents were
most typically written. Most papyrus codices are thought to have contained
only one of the Gospels, and the most it is thought that could have been
incorporated in the largest papyrus codex would have been the Gospels
and Acts. However, just over half of the original Codex Sinaiticus survived,
now dispersed between four institutions: St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai,
the British Library, Leipzig University Library, and the National Library of
Russia in St. Petersburg. At the British Library the largest surviving
portion - 347 leaves, or 694 pages - includes the whole of the New
Testament. This is the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. The
other institutions hold portions of the Septuagint, which also survived
almost complete, plus the Epistle of Barnabas , and portions of T he
Shepherd of Hermas . The surviving portions of the manuscript have been
assembled virtually in a digital edition at codexsinaiticus.org , and were
published in a new color printed facsimile in 2010. The story of how the
surviving portions were rediscovered and dispersed in the mid-nineteenth
century by biblical scholar Constantin von Tischendorf has all the elements
of international intrigue and romance.

Were it not for the preservation of the bulk of the Codex Sinaiticus in the
oldest and most remote Christian monastery-- St. Catherine's Monastery in
Sinai , after which the codex was named, or in some other monastery or
monasteries over the centuries, it probable that this manuscript would have
been lost, especially after the style of writing in scriptio continua became
archaic and illegible to readers, perhaps by the eighth century. To say that
the monks in the monastery preserved the manuscript may imply a more
active role than was actually taken after it ceased to be actively used;
existence of the manuscript in the monastery may be a more appropriate
designation. How long the manuscript was preserved at St. Catherine's is
unknown, but Tischendorf told of finding the manuscript in a most neglected
state in the monastery library there in 1859. On the one hand neglect could
be responsible for the loss of portions of the manuscript; on the other hand,
neglect could also be the reason why so much survived in its original state
rather than, for example, as palimpsests. Assuming that the manuscript
spent many centuries at St. Catherine's, we may attribute survival to the
protected location, to the constancy of operation of the remote monastery
over the centuries, which in itself is a remarkable survival, and probably
also to the benign climate of the region. Undoubtedly an element of luck
was also involved.

By circa 500 CE the transition from the papyrus roll to the codex was
essentially complete, and with it came other changes in the form and
function of the book. In papyrus bookrolls the author and title were
customarily named in a colophon at the end of the roll, as that portion was
better protected when the papyrus was rolled up. The colophon was often
set out with larger script or ornamentation. Initially this style of drawing
graphic emphasis to the information in the colophon at the end of the text
was continued in the codex form, but by about 500 CE the ornamentation
of codices, including the author's portrait, and for the gospels the canon
tables, shifted towards the opening pages of the codex. 2.D.2

(This section was last revised on September 21, 2018.)

2.E. Loss of Information from Late Antiquity to the Thirteenth

Century
So many books and so many texts of all kinds- especially from the ancient
world- were lost between Late Antiquity and the thirteenth century that
when we contemplate the unknown extent of this loss we face the
likelihood that what was lost, impossible as it may be to quantify, may
nevertheless overshadow the immense body of knowledge accumulated by
scholars from traditional study of the period, concentrating on the physical,
paleographic and textual analysis of surviving Late Antique and Medieval
codices, charters , and other documents. As a result of this immense loss,
in the most general terms what is known is likely much less than what may
never be known. The survival or loss of specific documents may be
researched on a case by case basis. From time to time discoveries are
made, expanding slightly the limitations of our knowledge. Nor can
surviving texts adequately explain the extent or causes of what was lost.
For example, Pliny's Historia naturalis, an unusually long Roman
encyclopedic text which remained in circulation, though usually not in
"complete" form, through the Middle Ages, refers to a great many Roman
authors whose texts did not survive, and it might be tempting to investigate
why certain texts survived rather than others. But as much as we might
seek causes specific to the loss of a certain text or a library that preserved
many texts, the gradual overall deterioration of institutions, and the waning
of traditional education in the classics during the decline of the Roman
Empire and the Early Middle Ages, were primary causes of the loss of
many ancient manuscripts, and causes of the fragmentary nature of so
much of our knowledge of ancient civilization and literature. We know that
an enormous amount was lost, but we cannot quantify the loss accurately
or qualitatively. Estimates of the percentage of classical literature that is
thought to have survived to the present vary; one widely used estimate is
only ten percent. 2.E.1.

The problem was not so much large-scale physical destruction of books,

though there was enough of that from fires, and from repeated sackings
during the Barbarian Invasions , but as the Roman army, government
officials, and business classes assumed the styles and customs of the
conquering Ostrogoths and later the Lombards, Roman civilization faded,
Roman education slowly diminished, and the body of literature studied and
revered by the educated in Antiquity ceased to be read, cherished, and
most of all, ceased to be copied, distributed and preserved. With the
dwindling of the senatorial class or Roman upper class, which had been the
traditional Roman audience for books, the market for new books
diminished, and the production of new books ceased. Scribes and artisans
who had previously created new books, and the booksellers who hired
them, had to look elsewhere for work. Gradually, and at varying rates in
different regions, many of the functions of writing lost importance in society
or disappeared altogether, especially in the use of writing for governmental
purposes. Religious practice was the great exception. Though Christianity
did not require ordinary believers to read, and it may have had a negative
effect overall on literacy of the general populations with which it was
concerned at this time, 2.E.2 , Christianity did make reading the sacred
texts central to the lives of men and women whose lives were devoted to
the faith.

Over time the Roman senatorial class, diminished in size, recycled into a
Christian ecclesiastical class based in monasteries with scriptoria for the
production of the relatively small number of primarily religious manuscripts
needed by the early monastic communities. 2.E.3 Amidst this overall
cultural decline and decay there is evidence of the origins of a papal library,
ancestor of today's Vatican Library, organized at the Lateran Palace,
principle residence of the popes in Rome, in the mid-fourth century. The
relative stability of the early church as an institution throughout these
periods of social instability, and church's need to maintain institutional
records, as well as to maintain monastic libraries for preaching, study and
teaching, was both the motivation for most of book production in Europe
and the cause of its survival between Late Antiquity and the Carolingian
Renewal that would take place in the ninth century. 2.E.4.

As an example of the Roman senatorial class recycling into an

ecclesiastical class, the foundation of the scriptorium and library at the
Vivarium by Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, was a notable development in
Late Antiquity. A Roman Senator, and former magister officiorum to
Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic ruler of Rome, Cassiodorus
retired and formed a school and monastery at his estate at the port of
Squillace on the southern sole of Italy's boot in the region called by the
Romans Magna Graecia . It received this name after its intensive
colonization by Greeks in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.
Cassiodorus named his monastery the Vivarium after the fishponds which
were a "feature of its civilized lifestyle." The monastery included a
purpose-built scriptorium, intended to collect, copy, and preserve texts. At
the very close of the Classical period this monastery in a Greek-speaking
region of Italy has been called the final effort to bring Greek learning to
Latin readers. Even so, most of the writing in the monastery was in Latin. At
the Vivarium Cassiodorus had monks produce a vast pandect of the bible
called the Codex Grandior . He also had them copy out his own work,
Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum . Along with detailed
instruction for a religious routine, this work explained how manuscripts
should be handled, corrected, copied, and repaired, and included what
amounted to an annotated bibliography of the best literature of the time.
Cassiodorus also stated "that biblical manuscripts should be bound in
covers worthy of their contents, and he added that he had provided a
pattern book with specimens of different kinds of bindings" 2.E.5. This may
be the earliest detailed reference to bookbinding.

From Cassiodorus's writings we know that the Vivarium library possessed

231 codices of 92 different authors, pagan works as well as Christian
studies, apparently arranged by subject in at least ten armaria (book
cupboards). It included five codices on medical subjects, including the
works of Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, Celsus and Caelius Aurelianus.
2.E.6. Much attention is always given to the library of Cassiodorus in
discussing the book history of this period because his is the only library of
the sixth century of which we have definite knowledge. After the death of
Cassiodorus the manuscripts at the Vivarium were dispersed; some of
them found their way into the library maintained at the Lateran Palace in
Rome by the Popes. As the Middle Ages advanced, knowledge of Greek
became less and less common in European monasteries, though it
flourished under Byzantine rule.

As the educator and civil service for the medieval tribal kingdoms of
Europe, the church maintained almost a complete monopoly on education
and book production until the development of universities in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. This production was virtually entirely in Latin, with only
a very few manuscripts in Greek present in the libraries of Western Europe
until the thirteenth century. 2.E.7. As one would expect, most of the books
produced in monasteries concerned religion, but works of a secular nature
were also required for the functioning of a monastic community. Partly
because so few early codices survived from Late Antiquity to the year 799,
between 1934 and 1992 paleographer E. A. Lowe, and his successor to the
project, Bernhard Bischoff, were able to publish a comprehensive catalogue
of 1884 surviving codices and fragments written in Latin from 350 to 799 in
Codices Latini Antiquiores and its supplements. In 1954 Albert Bruckner
and Robert Marichal began publication of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores ,
which was intended as a supplement to Lowe's work. The Chartae Latinae
Antiquiores constitutes a catalogue of the significantly larger number of
Latin manuscripts other than codices, written on papyrus or parchment,
which antedate 800 CE. The 49th and last volume in this series appeared
in 1997. Statistics from Lowe's Codices Latini Antiquiores were compiled in
the German Wikipedia article on Codices Latini Antiquiores and
presented in four graphics posted on that site.

From the graphic showing " Distribution of Transmitted Codices by Time and
Content " we we may make certain observations:

In the Late Antiquity of the fifth century, and the afterglow of Roman culture,
pagan texts represent 31 out of 113 surviving codices, or about 25%. By
the year 500, which has been called the beginning of the Middle Ages, as
the production of manuscripts moved exclusively to monasteries, very few
classical or pagan texts were being copied: 12 out of 157 in the sixth
century. The percentage of classical or pagan texts copied declined even
further in the seventh century to 22 out of 198, even further still in the
eighth century to 9 out of 834. The statistics for secular works remained
fairly consistent at around 10% throughout the period studied, with 12 out
of 113 for the fifth century, 20 out of 157 for the sixth century, 22 out of 198
for the seventh century, and 91 out of 834 for the eighth century.
Throughout the period, as we might expect, the vast majority of book
production concerned theological works. From this we may conclude, along
with L. D. Reynolds, that the basic arts of life continued; "education, law,
medicine and the surveying necessary to administration and the levying of
taxes still required manuals and works of reference, and these needs are
duly reflected in the pattern of manuscript survival.” 2.D.8.

From the graphic entitled " Origin of Codices " we may observe:

Italy, seat of the church, was responsible for the greatest number of
codices: 502 out 1884, and its rate of production, based on surviving
manuscripts, appears to have been relatively consistent throughout the
period beginning in 350 CE. Following Italy, production of manuscripts in
France originated in the second half of the fifth century, and though it began
slowly with the foundation of the first monasteries in Gaul, by the seventh
century production increased to the point where it was second only to Italy,
with 440 manuscripts surviving out of the 1884. These countries were
followed by Germany where production began late, about 700 CE, and
grew rapidly, with 335 manuscripts surviving from the eighth century. Great
Britain also began production late, in the mid-seventh century, from which
only 148 codices survive. Only 32 manuscripts survive from Spain,
reflective of very small production beginning in the sixth century. Production
in Ireland began in the sixth century but was low until the eighth, of which
81 codices are recorded. Switzerland, with its small population but
historically stable environment, did not begin production until the eighth
century, from which 84 manuscripts survived. From the Byzantine empire,
in which Greek was by far the predominate language, only Latin codices
survive from the fifth to the eighth century. Finally, only six codices
produced in Africa survived, though some may be among the earliest
survivals.

From the graphic entitled " Migration of Codices " we may draw some
general conclusions:
Roughly half of the production of each of the main producing countries,
except Switzerland, remained in those countries; the rest migrated to other
countries in Europe. Only Switzerland appears to have been sufficiently
isolated from the other countries during its single century of production that
none of its manuscripts found their way to monasteries beyond its own
borders.

(This section was last revised on October 7, 2018.)

2.F. The Carolingian Renewal and the Recopying of Codices in

Minuscule
"The secular and ecclesiastical administration of a vast empire called for
a large number of trained priests and functionaries. As the only common
denominator in a heterogeneous realm and as the repository of both the
classical and the Christian heritage of an earlier age, the Church was
the obvious means of implementing the educational program necessary
to produce a trained executive. But under the Merovingians the
Church had fallen on evil days; some of the priests were so ignorant of
Latin that Boniface heard one carrying out a baptism of dubious
efficacy in nomine patria et filia et spiritus sancti (Epist. 68) , and
knowledge of antiquity had worn so thin that the author of one sermon
was under the unfortunate impression that Venus was a man. Reform
had begun under [Charlemagne's father] Pippin the Short ; but now the
need was greater, and Charlemagne felt a strong personal responsibility
to raise the intellectual level of the clergy, and through them of his
subjects. . . . (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars 3rd ed [1991]
92-93).
Besides Gutenberg, people who would be called among the most influential
in the early history of the book are the Emperor Charlemagne and the
director of Charlemagne's education program, the monk Alcuin. It has also
been said that a part of Charlemagne's success as a warror and
adminstrator was due to his admiration for learning, even though he never
truly learned to write, and his ability to read has been called into question.
2.E.1. Facing the challenge of raising the standard of education in both his
clergy and his government, Charlemagne first attracted a group of scholars
to his court, some of whom were expected to educate the emperor, himself.
Charlemagne undoubtedly recognized the enormous progress that the
church had made in educating the Anglo-Saxons. Since the arrival in
England of Augustine of Canterbury in 597, the church had created an
educated class out of a population that had deteriorated into virtually
complete illiteracy after the departure of the Romans from Britannia in the
mid-fifth century. By the eighth century the school at York directed by Alcuin
was the educational center of England. Appreciating Alcuin's success at
York, Charlemagne shrewdly recognized that Alcuin was the most
appropriate person to reform education in Germany. He induced Alcuin
to become Master of the Palace School at Aachen, where Alcuin remained
from 782-796. This school was attended by members of Charlemagne's
court and the sons of noble families.

It is understood that Alcuin established a great library at Aachen, even

though there is little record of what this library contained. To collect the
manuscripts in the library at Aachen Charlemagne undoubtedly obtained
manuscripts from monasteries under his rule. It is also possible that
Charlemagne obtained manuscripts from the Imperial Library of
Constantinople . Traditionally it has been assumed that in Charlemagne's
time the Imperial Library of Constantinople, which would in theory have
preserved, among other things, many texts copied from papyrus rolls in the
Library of Alexandria, was preserved in the then-stable Byzantine Empire
well after the decline of Roman institutions. However, perhaps as a result of
earlier or later destruction of this institution, our knowledge of the Imperial
Library of Constantinople and its contents is remarkably and extraordinarily
limited.

Also at Aachen, Alcuin taught the Carolingian minuscule , which

introduced the use of lower case letters, and became the writing standard
in Europe for the eighth and ninth centuries. Efforts at reforming the
crabbed Merovingian and Germanic hands had been attempted without
great success before Alcuin arrived at Aachen. The new minuscule was
disseminated first from Aachen, and later from the influential scriptorium at
Tours , where Alcuin retired as an abbot. With its upper and lower case
letters, Carolingian minuscule was not only more legible, but by allowing
more characters to be written on a page, was also more economical in its
use of the very expensive parchment, and it may also have been written
more rapidly than the traditional majuscule by experienced scribes. Though
it was eventually superceded by Gothic blackletter hands, Carolingian
minuscule later seemed so classical to early Renaissance humanists that
they mistook Carolingian manuscripts for ancient Roman originals and
based their handwriting styles on the Carolingian model. Those
Renaissance hands, in turn, became the models for early Roman typefaces
with their upper and lower case letters, the other models for the typefaces
being Roman stone inscriptions which were entirely in capital letters.

In addition to reforming handwriting, Alcuin revised the church liturgy and

the Bible and, along with another scholar, Theodulf of Orleans , was
responsible for an intellectual movement within the Carolingian empire in
which many public schools were attached to monasteries and cathedrals.
For these schools Alcuin was responsible for writing textbooks, and
establishing a curriculum that included the trivium and quadrivium .
Latin was restored as a literary language in a standardized form that
allowed for the coining of new words while retaining the grammatical rules
of classical Latin. Medieval Latin became a common language of
scholarship, and an early international language, allowing the educated to
make themselves understood across Europe. Along with these schools
there was a flowering of libraries and manuscript book production. During
this period of "enlightenment" and relative stability of educational and
political institutions scholars sought out and copied in the new legible
standardized Carolingian minuscule many Roman texts that had been
wholly forgotten. As a result, much of our knowledge of classical literature
derives from copies made in the scriptoria of Charlemagne and during the
Carolingian Renewal . The exemplars on which the Carolingian copies
were based were discarded after copying, or otherwise lost. Possibly
because of the enhanced durability of these parchment copies relative to
the earlier exemplars, which may have been papyrus rolls or papyrus
codices, but primarily because of the comparative stability of institutions
after Charlemagne, even though many of Charlemagne's political
achievements and educational reforms did not long endure, roughly 7000
manuscripts written in Carolingian script survive from the 8th and 9th
centuries alone. 2.E.2.

Even though the damp European climate was not conducive to the
preservation of papyrus, papyrus was used for writing in Europe as late as
the 11th century. Among the earliest surviving European papyrus codices is
a copy of the writings of Saint Augustine, written in uncial script circa 550
CE, and divided between the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris no.
664 du fonds St-Germain latin or no. 11641) and the Bibliothèque de
Genève. Interleaved parchment leaves protect the middle and the outside
of the gatherings. These may have contributed to its survival. 2.E.3

"After A.D. 677 the Merovingian chancellery used only parchment, but
otherwise papyrus continued in use in France at least till 787. In the
ninth century the papal chancellery was still being supplied from Arab
Egypt, whence the latest extant papyri bear dates equivalent to A.D.
981, and possibly 1087. A tenth-century gloss refers to the Romans in
the present tense as 'customarily writing on papyrus'. An extant papyrus
codex of c. A.D. 970 contains an inventory of the land holdings and
leases of the Ravenna church, while a papal parchment from Ravenna
bears the date of A.D. 967. From Paris come instances of older papyrus
reused in the tenth and late eleventh centuries. The latest papyrus
 document from Spain, a papal bull on papyrus is one of Victor II dated
A.D. 1057. But the papal chancellery was still using papyrus some
twenty-five years later, and in Sicily and southern Italy books and
documents written on papyrus are found through the eleventh and
perhaps into the twelfth century. There is also evidence which, if it can
be taken at face value, attests that papyrus was still in use at
Constantinople as late as c. A.D. 1100. Thereafter the use of papyrus
ceases altogether. The Latin word papyrus was retained to designate
paper, but the writing material made from the papyrus plant passed
completely out of common experience. "It has been suggested that the
papal chancelleries toward the end drew their supplies of papyrus from
Sicily. This is a possible inference, though not a necessary one, for a
flourishing trade in papyrus from Egypt, exporting not only to eastern
cities like Baghdad but also westward as far as Spain, is attested in Arab
sources at least through the tenth century. The export trade and the
manufacture of papyrus received their death blow in the course of the
next hundred or so years. The East turned to rag paper, made by a
process obtained from the Arabs from China, the West to parchment,
which been used increasingly since late antiquity. Eustathius , who
wrote in Constantinople in the third quarter of the twelfth century has the
final word: 'Papyrus making', he remarks, 'has lately become a lost art' "
(Lewis, Papyrus in Classical Antiquity [1974] 92-94).

Approximately coincident with the Carolingian renewal, from around the

mid-eighth century, scribes in Greek orthodox monasteries, or in the
Byzantine capital of Constantinople, began copying old uncial manuscripts,
most of which were probably written on papyrus, in Greek minuscule on
the more permanent, though more expensive medium of parchment.
Besides greater permanence, another advantage of writing on parchment
was that the material, as expensive as it was, could be produced locally,
thus ensuring a constant supply, while papyrus, which had to be imported
from factories in Egypt, was subject to supply interuptions as a result of
wars or politics. The Greek minuscule hand, with its capital and lower case
letters and much higher character count per page, also enabled a more
economical and perhaps more legible use of the expensive writing material.
The earliest surviving dated example of a manuscript written in Greek
minuscule is the Uspensky Gospels . This codex was probably written in
Constantinople by monk named Nicholas. Later it belonged to the
monastery of Great Lavra of St. Sabas, known in Arabic as Mar Saba
(Hebrew: ‫) מנזר מר סבא‬, a Greek Orthodox monastery overlooking the
Kidron Valley in the West Bank east of Bethlehem in Palestine. In 1844 bp
Porphiryj Uspienski took it along with other manuscripts, including a
portion of the Codex Coislinianus , to Russia. The Uspensky Gospels is
preserved in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg (Gr. 219.
213. 101).

Throughout the ninth century scholars undertook transcription of the earlier

uncial manuscripts into the new Greek minuscule, and nearly all of the
earliest surviving Greek texts that have come down to us are from the ninth
century or shortly thereafter, written in minuscule. Perhaps because the
earlier uncial manuscripts from which these manuscripts were copied were
deteriorating by the ninth century, relatively few Greek manuscripts prior to
this date have survived. It is also possible that because the earlier
manuscripts were written in hands that had become increasingly unfamiliar,
and were difficult to read, they were considered obsolete after they were
copied, and were discarded. 2.E.4. An example is the earliest surviving
manuscript of Plato, the so-called " Clarke Plato " preserved in the Bodleian
Library at Oxford. From information within the codex we know that the
scribe Johannes calligraphus of Constantinople copied the Plato for
Arethas of Patrae , later Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (central
Turkey) and owner of the best-known private library of the tenth century.
Johannes completed the manuscript volume in November 895. The cost
was 21 nomismata, or gold coins, for the copying and the parchment--a
very high price, confirming that book collecting was the preserve of the rich
at this time. Arethas and other contemporaries added scholia in uncial. The
manuscript also contains annotations by many later hands. It is thought that
this may be the first volume of a two-volume copy of the whole of Plato, the
second volume of which has not been identified, or may be lost. Arethas is
thought to have owned a few dozen volumes, of which, remarkably, eight
volumes survived, and have been identified. 2.E.5. Sometime between the
inventory of 1382 and 1581-1582 the manuscript was purchased by the
monastery of St. John on the Island of Patmos . In 1801 E. D. Clarke
purchased it from the monastery. (This section was last revised on October
7, 2018.)

2.G. Secularization of Book Production and Widening of the

Market, Helped by the Invention of Spectacles, Causes Advances
in the Form, Function, and Production of the Manuscript Book
Toward the end of the eleventh century, with the development of the first
universities, monastic culture gradually began sharing its centuries-old
monopoly on education and book production with the secular world. Laying
claim as the oldest university, the University of Bologna was founded in
1088. Oxford was founded about 1096, Cambridge in 1209, the University
of Paris in 1257 . As intellectual life began to be increasingly centered at the
universities rather than monasteries, book production moved from the
monastic scriptoria to the secular communities near universities where
scholars, teachers and students, in cooperation with booksellers, artisans
and craftsmen, organized an active book trade. Paris became the leading
cultural center of thirteenth century Europe. Of the medieval centers for
book production, Paris was the largest, and also the site for which the
largest amount of relevant archival material has been preserved. 2.G.1.

Though it tends not to be emphasized in studies of book history, along with

the development of universities, a technological development during the
thirteenth century that probably stimulated the demand for reading material
more than any other, and also stimulated advances in the form and function
of books, was the invention of spectacles . Spectacles would have allowed
a significant number of far-sighted people to read and write, and would
have allowed older people, including more learned and experienced
scholars, who had become far-sighted as a result of the aging process, to
read and write just as they do today. This would have resulted in a
significant widening of the book market, a greater demand for reading
material, more productive teaching, scholarship, and an increase in
writing.Various unsustantiated theories concerning possible inventors of
spectacles were proposed over the centuries--none supported by
satisfactory evidence. An ordinance dated April 2, 1300 confirms that
lenses for spectacles were being produced by the Venetian glass industry
by this date. 2.G.2.

For the sake of this general discussion we may divide thirteenth and
fourteenth century book production into two categories: the relatively
expensive works produced for the luxury market, and the relatively less
expensive books produced for the scholarly market, recognizing that almost
any hand-produced book would have been significantly more expensive to
produce, in terms of time and materials, than books later produced through
the medium of printing. For the first half of the thirteenth century Bibles and
psalters in Latin and other devotional works accounted for the bulk of high
quality luxury manuscript book production in France. As the century
unfolded, a much wider demand for books for individual use encouraged
the production of increasing numbers of picture books, including romances
and histories, lives of popular saints and other historical characters, for the
instruction and entertainment of the royal family, the nobility and the
growing bourgoisie. A new feature of these manuscripts was that they were
written or translated into French, taking their place alongside religious
manuscripts in Latin as important commissions and regular business of the
Paris book trade. The new expanding clientele of literate laymen, only
some of whom were probably tutored in Latin, also desired translations of
the Old Testament as it was seen as an important source of historical
information. To meet the demands of the new market for vernacular history
and romance, artists who had been trained to illustrate religious texts found
new ways of adapting patterns of illustration to secular historical texts,
which necessitated creating series of images that would effectively tell
stories. A very early example of secular manuscript illumination before the
semiotics of secular illumination were well-established is shown in a
manuscript of classical works made around 1200 (Paris, BnF, Ms. lat.
7936). This includes illuminations borrowed from traditional biblical imagery.
As the patterns of iconography evolved with this genre of manuscripts,
religious iconography could be inserted in secular stories with the intent of
transfering religious meaning to the historical events. "The variety of these
solutions and the successful and complicated ways the images interacted
with the text are a testament to the artists' ability and their willingness to
experiment with divided historiated initials, multicompartment miniatures,
full-page minatures, and divided minatures that extend across more than
one column of text. By the second third of the fourteenth century, however,
a traditional format for secular manuscript illumination had largely been
established, in which single-column minatures indicated the major divisions
of the text, usually illustrated an event located near the beginning of the
chapter, and were often drawn from a stock of patterns--battle, letter
delivery, love scene--that could be easily inserted." 2.G.3.

By the early fourteenth century Paris was so closely associated with the
trade and production of illuminated manuscripts that in his Divine Comedy
, written between 1308 and his death in 1321, Dante coined the term
"illumination" in his Purgatorio (Canto XI) with reference to the Parisian
style of illustrating and embellishing manuscripts. By the second quarter of
the fourteenth century the market for secular literature had expanded
sufficiently that artists were beginning to specialize in illuminating either
secular or religious works. Through the end of the fifteenth century the
most important and original work done in secular illumination was in
manuscripts featuring historical stories. The pattern of production of these
manuscripts was often that patrons would negotiate with a bookseller
regarding the text and style of writing, quality and quantity of images and
decoration they desired in a manuscript. The bookseller would then
commission a scribe to do the writing, leaving space on each page for the
chosen illuminator to fit the images and other kinds of decoration into the
manuscript. Sometimes the bookseller would provide written instructions to
the artist regarding specific images and the details in each that were
desired. Over time certain details of costume in particular were associated
with aspects of characters depicted, such as wealth, power, or virtue or lack
thereof:

"A rare surviving example of written directions to artists and of the

images based on those written directions offers insight into the
communal nature of this voaculary of dress. In 1417 the humanist Jean
Lebegue [Le Begue] wrote directions in French (Oxford, Bodleian
Library, D'Orville Ms. 141, fols. 42v-55v) on how to illustrate Sallust's
Roman histories of the Catiline conspiracy and the Jugurthine wars, and
around 1420 he acted as libraire for the production of the illuminated
manuscript (Geneva, Bibliotheque de Geneve, Ms. lat. 54) that followed
them. Comparison with earlier manuscripts reveals that the images
made for Lebegue in 1420 drew on a visual rhetoric that was well
established before he wrote his directions; Lebegue tapped into this
rhetoric when he described the miniatures he wanted, and the artists
employed it when they visualized them."

This quote ,which comes from p. 78 of Anne D. Hedeman's "Presenting the

Past: Visual Translation in Thirteenth- to Fifteenth-Century France," and
much of this information regarding French vernacular historical illuminated
manuscripts, is adapted from an extraordinary volume published in
December 2010 by Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman entitled
Imagining the Past in France. History in Manuscript Painting, 1250-1500 .
This is the splendidly designed, illustrated and produced catalogue for an
exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Besides the
wonderful manuscripts, a fascinating aspect of the exhibition is the
inclusion of non-book objects which contain historical iconography such as
ivory caskets, tapestries, and even a lady's purse, showing how interest in
the past went beyond the book in the Middle Ages, perhaps a bit like it
does today. The catalogue, which is a richly illustrated study of both
manuscript book illustration and manuscript book history, combines
historical interpretation with sophisticated curation, and one could not ask
for a more exquisite catalogue as a physical object. When we think of
substituting digital books for physical books here is an excellent example of
a physical book, for which an electronic version or website will never be a
satisfactory equivalent.

The market for scholarly books for university teachers and students in the
Middle Ages was quite different from the market for expensive illuminated
manuscripts, though some of the same scribes and booksellers were
involved in both markets. Even the most basic manuscript books without
illumination of any kind and quickly penned out were relatively expensive
because parchment was expensive. Paper, which was first produced in
Europe at Xativa, near Valencia in Al-Andalus in 1151, only very gradually
became widely available, and probably did not help lower the cost of book
production until production increased in order to meet demand after the
introduction of printing. 2.G.4.

Though higher education had moved out of the monasteries to the

universities, most of the teachers at the early universities came from
religious orders, and some developments in the history of the scholarly
book occurred in both monastic and university settings. In monasteries
reading was primarily a spiritual exercise which involved steady reading to
oneself interspersed by prayer and pausing for rumination about the text as
an act of meditation. At the universities reading was a process of study
which required a more reasoning scrutiny of the text and consultation for
reference purposes. These two kinds of reading required different kinds of
presentation of texts, and this was reflected in new formats and features of
scholarly books developed outside the monasteries.

Another aspect of university teaching was the expectation by lecturers that

students would be able to follow the text by silently reading their own
books. This would, of course, have created a market for comparatively
inexpensive copies of widely studied texts. "In 1259 the Dominican house
of the University of Paris required that students bring to class a copy of the
text covered in public lectures, if possible. . . Similar regulations existed in
Paris at the College of Harcourt and at the universities of Vienna and
Ingolstadt. In 1309 Pierre Dubois , French publicist in the reign of Philip IV
of France , observed that students who did not have a copy of the text
before them could profit little from university lectures. Students too poor to
purchase their own copies could borrow them from libraries like that of the
Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris, or they could copy out texts for their
personal use. The statutes of the Sorbonne stipulated lending books
against security deposits" (Saenger, Space Between Words. The Origins of
Silent Reading [1997] 259).

Other changes in manuscript format and organization evolved in the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, partly because of the needs of silent
reading. It is understood that oral reading had traditionally consisted of a
continous reading of a text, or a substantial section of it, from beginning to
end. For this reason many Carolingian codices, like ancient papyrus rolls,
had not been divided into sections shorter than the chapter. From the
thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries subdivisions were introduced in classical
and early medieval texts; some works that had already been subdivided
into chapters in later antiquity were more rationally subdivided by university
scholars. Thirteenth century scribes and illuminators also developed and
extended the use of running titles-- a feature of some of the most ancient
surviving codices. They also introduced the analytic table of contents. As
early as the sixth century chapter headings were a feature of codices; in
the thirteenth century these headings were brought together in one place
and arranged in tabular form. The manner of indicating sources became
the ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes. 2.G.5

As the market for books widened, booksellers in the vicinity of at least

eleven universities, including those in Bologna, Padua, Florence, Naples,
Salamanca in Spain, Paris, and Oxford, introduced a system called “pecia”
in which they divided the copying of a single manuscript book between
various scribes in order to speed up production of reliable copies of works
of contemporary scholastic authors in law, theology, philosophy, and aids to
preaching. The pecia system might be viewed as a small step toward the
mass production of books that would later be introduced in the process of
printing. The earliest surviving evidence of this system of providing
“certified texts” of manuscripts in university bookstores is the Vercelli
contract of 1228 from the University of Padua . Under the pecia system, the
university bookseller ( stationarius ) first obtained a reliable exemplar of the
work. From this exemplar the bookseller made a copy or exemplar of his
own on equal quires or pieces ( peciae ), each of which was numbered in
sequence, so that he could hire out these pieces for copying to professional
scribes. Once the copies of the set of peciae were completed by the
various scribes the bookseller would have them bound in the numbered
sequence, and the finished book would be sold to the customer who had
placed the order. The bookseller would retain his original peciae so that he
loan them out again when another copy of the text was ordered. 2.G.6

By the mid-15th century, when Gutenberg introduced printing by movable

type, the production and sale of manuscript books had been systematized,
and many of the elements of the book, as we know it, were
well-established. Through the technology of printing-- the first
widely-applied process of mass production-- the production of books would
be further systematized, and new distribution methods would evolve for the
sale of editions rather than for individually commissioned manuscripts. As
we have seen, the transition from manuscript to print was one of a series of
transitions in the form and function of the book, in which innovations were
introduced while usable elements of prior book technologies remained in
place to a greater or lesser extent, either because of resistance to change
or because the prior technologies were effective enough for their intended
purposes. Because of the cumulative nature of information, and our desire
to understand and preserve our past, no matter how fast technologies
advance, usable prior technologies of the book, such as medieval
manuscripts, early printed books, and even Egyptian papyri, continue to
co-exist, if only as historical records, along with the latest innovations in
recording, distribution, and storage, much as print co-exists with digital
today. (This section was last revised on September 16, 2018.)

3. From Cuneiform Archives to A.I. Applications: The

Development of Bibliographical Control, Indexing
and Searching
Over the centuries humans controlled large quantities of information
through its organization and classification. As a bibliographer I have
followed this organization and classification process in writing
HistoryofMedicineandBiology.com . Organizing information involves
description and indexing of the information so that it can be searched . Until
computing provided the capability of full text searching, bibliographical
searching was limited to bibliographical details and whatever metadata
might also be provided in the entry, including subject information.
Depending upon the quality of organization, bibliographical searching may
provide a certain level of understanding, including subject relationships
between certain components of information, though that level of
understanding does not equate to understanding in depth. For example in
HistoryofInformationandBiology.com I have built a database that in
October 2018 showed the interrelationships between 12488 bibliographical
entries, 10202 authors, and 1001 subjects. That could not possibly equate
to my having in-depth understanding of all the content of objects in the
database. Controlling information, and making it searchable by machine or
artificial intelligence may mimic human decision-making processes, or
possibly improve upon them. To the extent that the artificial intelligence,
neural networks, and machine learning applications are successful, the
ultimate difference between the human and machine approach should be
that the machine can process almost infinitely more information almost
instantaneously, as compared to the far, far slower and much more limited
human capability. This is a point important to keep in mind when
contemplating searching quantities of information too great for human
understanding.

Partly because of my experience as a human using my own intelligence

working with bibliographical control and indexing, both in
HistoryofInformation.com and other projects, I have long been particularly
interested in these subjects and their histories. This section will trace the
history of describing, indexing and searching information up to and
including the present successful application of artificial intelligence, neural
networks and machine learning to these tasks. As of October 2018 various
newspaper articles and books had appeared regarding numerous
applications of artificial intelligence that were considered successful,
strategic or extremely promising. Artificial intelligence and related fields
have evolved over roughly the past 65 years; their current "success" is
recent. On October 17, 2018 at Stanford Michael Keller showed me the
Yewno application running on Stanford's very advanced library catalogue.
This was the first productive application of AI, neural networks, and
machine learning to bibliographical information, metadata, and in some
cases full-text, that I had seen. It produced very impressive visualizations,
and even more remarkably, the program is dynamic and constantly
learning. What I learned through that brief introduction to Yewno
confirmed that aspects of what you may read below should be updated,
especially to include developments in A. I. and their applications, when I
have the time. At present the arrangement of the material is roughly
chronological. When time permits I expect to organize it in a different
manner.

A. The Ancient World

Considering how little we we know about ancient libraries, it should not be
surprising how little we know about their organization and cataloguing.
Nevertheless, surviving evidence shows that even in ancient Mesopotamia
efforts were made to describe and organize cuneiform archives. Two
cuneiform tablets found at Nippur, (Mesopotamia; now Iraq) are inscribed
with a list of Sumerian works of literature in no apparent order. One has 68
titles, the other 48 works. These represent the earliest surviving literary or
library catalogues.

Cuneiform tablets discovered at Hattusas (Hattusa), capital of the Hittite

Empire in the Bronze Age, near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, contain
detailed bibliographical entries.

"Each entry begins by giving the number of tablets that made up the work
being recorded, just as modern catalogues give the number of volumes in a
multi-volume publication. The entry identifies the work itself by giving the
title, which may take the form of citing its first line, or by giving a capsule
description of the contents. Then it tells whether the table marked the end
of the work or not. At times the entry includes the name of the author or
authors, or adds other useful information. . . .

"In addition to noting missing tablets, the entries now and then provide
information about shelving. There is an entry, for example, which in listing a
work that happens to be in two tablets notes that 'they do not stand upright';
presumably, in the part of the palace holdings represented by this
catalogue, most tablets were stored on edge while these two, exceptionally,
lay flat. . . . The catalogue, it would seem, was of one particular collection
that, to judge from the contents, was for use by the palace clergy. It would
have been an invaluable tool: any priest who needed a ritual for a given
problem, instead of picking up tablet after tablet to read the colophon if
there was one, or some lines of text if there was not, had only to run an eye
over the entries in the catalogue. It was a limited tool; the order of the
entries is more or less haphazard (alphabetization, for example, lay over a
millennium and a half in the future) and they give no indication of location.
But it was, no question about it, a significant step beyond the simple listing
of titles of the Nippur tablets.
"The finds at Hattusas, in short, reveal the development of procedures for
organizing a collection of writings. The palace holdings were certainly
extensive enough to require them; the catalogue alone, representing as we
have seen, just the clergy's working library, lists well over one hundred
titles. . . ." (Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World [2001] 5-8).

In ancient Alexandria, Egypt, beginning circa 200 BCE according to the

very fragmentary surviving records, the poet, Kallimachos (Callimachus),
head of the Royal Library of Alexandria , sought control over the presumed
hundreds of thousands of papyrus rolls his library contained by writing
tables or lists. These lists, called pinakes in Greek, supposedly extended
to 120 papyrus rolls, and amounted to a systematic survey of Greek
literature up to its time. The Pinakes also represented the beginning of
bibliography. Only eight fragments of the Pinakes survived the eventual
destruction of the library, together with a scattering of references to it in
other ancient works. So great has interest remained in the Royal Library of
Alexandria that from these few fragments scholars have determined that
Callimachus’s bibliographical methods would not be out of place in a
modern library; an analysis of the eight remaining fragments of the Pinakes
shows that Callimachus

"1. divided the authors into classes and within these classes if necessary
into subdivisions;

"2. arranged the authors in the classes or subdivisions alphabetically;

"3. added to the name of each author (if possible) biographical data;

"4. listed under an author’s name the titles of his works, combining works of
the same kind to groups (no more than that can be deduced from the eight
citations); and

"5. cited the opening words of each work as well as

"6. its extent, i.e., the number of lines" (Blum, p. 152).

It is believed that Callimachus used an alphabetical arrangement by author
as part of his organization scheme, and though we cannot credit
Callimachus with the invention of the alphabetic system, it is believed that
the system may first have been put to effective use at the Alexandrian
Library. 3.1

"The Pinakes were neither an inventory nor an exhaustive catalog of the

works in the library: they did not list all the copies of a work that the library
owned and did not give an indication of how to locate a book in the
library—actual access would have required consulting the librarian. The
Pinakes built on preexisting practices of list making (including Aristotle's
pinakes of poets), sorting (such as Theophrastus' doxographies sorted
topically and chronologically), and alphabetizing, the principles of which
were likely already understood although they had never been put to such
extensive use before" (Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly
Information before the Modern Age [201] 17).

Regarding the content, arrangement, and shelving of the Alexandrian

Library we know remarkably little, just as we know almost nothing about the
organization of the library at Pergamum . We know that papyrus rolls were
stored in Greek and Roman libraries in book cabinets with or without doors,
often called armaria , in a system known as “ pigeon holes .” We could
surmise that these armaria might have been arranged in some subject
order, but we have little or no documentation concerning this. Available
information suggests that after the fall of the Roman empire early medieval
European monastic libraries, intended for the use of members of their
monastic communities, continued to store papyrus rolls and papyrus or
parchment codices in armaria , even as the papyri gradually disintegrated in
the damp European climate, and were eventually copied onto more
permanent parchment codices. These cabinets and chests, probably little
different than what were used in ancient Greece or Rome, were used for
book storage well through the thirteenth century and later.
One of the earliest and most widely used cross-indexing systems
originating in Late Antiquity was the Eusebian canons or Eusebian
sections, also known as Ammonian Sections, implemented circa 280-340
CE during the transition from the roll to the codex that paralleled the rise of
Christianity. The Eusebian canons were a system of dividing the Four
Gospels used from late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. The sections
are indicated in the margin of nearly all Greek and Latin manuscripts of the
Bible from the mid to late fourth century onward, and they are usually
summarized in Canon Tables at the start of the Gospels. There are about
1165 sections: 355 for Matthew, 235 for Mark, 343 for Luke, and 232 for
John; the numbers, however, vary slightly in different manuscripts.

"The tables themselves were usually placed at the start of a Gospel Book
, and in illuminated copies were placed in round-headed arcade-like frames
of which the general form remained remarkably consistent through to the
Romanesque period. This form was derived from Late Antique
book-painting frames like those in the Chronography of 354 . In many
examples the tables are the only decoration in the whole book, perhaps
other than some initials. In particular, canon tables, with Evangelist portraits
, are very important for the study of the development of manuscript
painting in the earliest part of the Early Medieval period, where very few
manuscripts survive, and even the most decorated of those have fewer
pages illuminated than was the case later" (Wikipedia article on Eusebian
Canons, accessed 11-26-2008).

These tables represent a way for the reader to move back and forth
between related sections in the texts, and are an early organizational
structure and cross-indexing system.

B. The Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, with diminished resources and intellectual interest
mainly in monasteries tending to be intensely focused on comparatively few
texts, monastic and church libraries typically held fewer manuscripts than
might have been held by Roman public libraries, but the quality of medieval
manuscripts, especially in their miniature paintings, frequently exceeded
what we associate with the papyrus roll or the codices of late antiquity. For
a monastery or church library used by a few monks or priests, and holding
a relatively small number of books, access to information would have been
solved by a simple inventory of the authors and titles of the few
manuscripts in the library.

"The evidence for the arrangement and contents of libraries in and before
the ninth century is sparse. In the earliest times the numbers to be stored
were small. As there was no pressing problem of storage or access, the
need for elaborate finding aids did not arise. Between 300 and 400
manuscripts—most with two or more works within them—was a good-sized
collection for a Carolingian monastery: St. Gall owned 395 codices in 835
and the Cologne cathedral had 108 in 833. From the most prolific
scriptorium of the age, that of Tours , 350 manuscripts still survive. The
oldest library catalogs, such as that of Fulda in the mid-eighth century,
are no more than lists of titles, often imperfect and for the most part simple
inventories of the books as they stood on the shelf. The order of the lists
reflects the usual subject arrangement: Bibles first, followed by glosses,
liturgies, patristic works, philosophy, law, grammar, sometimes with
historical and medical works at the end, and classical works scattered
among the relevant headings. The Lorsch catalogs of the earlier part of
the ninth century are a good deal lengthier and more detailed, with 590
titles arranged in 63 classes. Since monasteries were places of education
as well as worship, many of the classical texts and nearly all the
grammatical works would have been used as school texts. Books were
usually stored in cupboards, either in the church or in the cloister closest
adjoining it, sometimes in the refectory (for communal reading) as well. The
separate library room was, in general, a later development, but in an early
ninth-century plan believed to be an idealized scheme of a monastery with
a bibliotheca and scriptorium attached to the church, survives in St. Gall"
(M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) The International
Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 106).

Nevertheless, because of the wide diversity of libraries throughout the

thousand years of the Middle Ages, the scholarship on medieval libraries
and their catalogues is extensive, and much of it dates to the nineteenth
century. Determining the age and authenticity of medieval documents
caused paleography to develop earlier. Scholarship on medieval
paleography dates back at least to the seventeeth century writings of
Mabillon on Latin charters and the writings of Montfaucon on Greek
paleography . Useful guides online are C. D. Wright, Medieval & Modern
Manuscript Catalogues . Much more extensive is Paul O. Kristeller, Latin
Manuscript Books before 1600: A List of the Printed Catalogues and
Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections , 4th ed. by Sigrid
Krämer, MGH Hilsmittle 13 (Munich, 1993). The on-line version is
searchable, and divided into sections: A: Bibliography and Statistics of
Libraries and Their Collections of Manuscripts; B: Works Describing
Manuscripts of More than One City or Groups of Libraries; C: Printed
Catalogues and Handwritten Inventories of Individual Libraries, by City; D:
Directories and Guides to Libraries and Archives. Much of this material may
be available in microform or online. A work which I have found useful is
Christ, The Handbook of Medieval Library History . Translated and edited by
T. M. Otto from the Handbuch der Bibliothekswissenschaft. . . (1984).

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, when the centers of scholarship
and book production moved out of the monasteries to the first universities,
to make books more accessible to increasing numbers of students,
librarians at the University of Paris and other universities took some books
out of the armaria , in which, following Roman models, they had previously
been arranged in monastic libraries, and arranged them in desks by subject
matter, chaining many of the books to the desks where students could read
them. They also arranged the books remaining in armaria by subject matter,
and provided a subject catalogue of their holdings. 3.2 In 1289, the library of
the University of Paris, then probably the largest and best library in Europe,
was organized into two collections: the magna libraria in which the most
frequently used books were chained and made available for general use for
teaching and course work, and the parva libraria which contained
duplicates, and more specialized works needed for research, which could
be loaned out to qualified users. The library included 1017 books at this
time. This information comes from a catalogue of the library written in 1338
which incorporated a catalogue of the library written in 1290, of which only
two leaves partially survived as pastedowns. 3.3 As primitive as the system
may seem to us, chaining codices to desks with iron chains was a new
development in library management, made feasible by the heavy bindings,
usually of leather over wooden boards, which made it practical to attach a
chain to a binding. Such an aggressive security system was a reflection
both of the high cost of the codices and the great difficulty of replacing a
manuscript that might be missing or stolen. The system remained in use in
certain libraries well through the fifteenth century, and was preserved in a
few libraries, such as that at Hereford Cathedral , even later, but seems to
have been abandoned with the expansion of libraries after printing was well
established. One of the only monastic humanistic chained libraries that
remains intact, with its original manuscript codices chained to its original
desks, is the Biblioteca Malatestiana founded just before the introduction of
printing, in Cesena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, in the mid-fifteenth century.
Prior to the development of the codex, it may have been equally expensive
and difficult to replace lost papyrus rolls in Greek and Roman libraries but
there was no practical secure way to attach a papyrus roll to a desk.

By the end of the thirteenth century there were as many as twenty

thousand foreign students resident in Paris. Such a large community of
students and their teachers contributed to significant developments in the
history of the book. The first alphabetical indexing tools for books were
developed in Paris by university teachers and members of religious orders
as reference tools for preachers. Both groups shared responsibility for
preaching to the laity. Besides indices prepared for preachers, Paris
schools developed the first reference works designed to facilitate access to
texts for strictly scholarly purposes, without any application in the
preparation of sermons.

"In the course of the thirteenth century a flood of texts appeared that
belonged to a genre virtually unknown before, works such as the
alphabetical collections of biblical distinctiones , the great verbal
concordances to the scriptures, alphabetical subject indexes to the writings
of Aristotle and the Fathers, and location lists of books. These are works
designed to be used, rather than read. Moreover, in many cases -- for
example, the concordance, or subject index to the works of Augustine --
these new tools helped one to use, rather than to read, the texts to which
they were devoted. Tools such as these are unknown in classical antiquity.
They are alien to the Hebrew and Byzantine traditions until imported from
the Latins. And they emerge with striking suddenness in the West, to the
point that one may say that before the 1190s such tools did not exist, and
that by 1290 the dissemination and new creation of such tools were
commonplace. . . .The development of the concordance should be
examined in the context of the methods used to 'distinguish' words found in
the text of the Bible. The collections of biblical distinctiones that abound in
western Europe from the end of the twelfth century are the earliest of
alphabetical tools save the dictionaries. Distinction collections provide one
with the various figurative and symbolic means of a noun that is found in
Scripture, illustrating each meaning with a scriptural passage" (M. Rouse &
R. Rouse,"The Development of Research Tools in the Thirteenth Century,"
Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts
[1991], 221-23).

From 1230 to 1239 the first concordance of the Bible was compiled in Paris
under the guidance of Dominican Hugo, or Hugues, de Saint-Cher (Hugo
de Sancto Charo) . In this project Hugo was assisted by as many as
500 Dominican friars. Because Dominicans were required to preach they
had need for a reference that correlated a word or subject with specific
books and chapters in the Bible.
The first concordance contained no quotations, and was purely an index to
passages where a word was found. These were indicated by book and
chapter. The division into chapters had recently been invented by Stephen
Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury. Verses were introduced much later, by
Robert Estienne in 1545. In lieu of verses, Hugo divided the chapters into
seven almost equal parts, indicated by the first seven letters of the alphabet
A-G. The first concordance gave only a list of passages, and no idea of
what the passages contained. Thus was of little service to preachers. In
order to make it more useful three English Dominicans added around
1250-1252 the complete quotations of the passages indicated. The work
was somewhat abridged, by retaining only the essential words of a
quotation, in the concordance of Conrad of Halberstadt, a Dominican
(1310), which obtained great success on account of its more convenient
form.

"The production of this major work over a period time required an

impressive organization of man-power. There survive, in the
fifteenth-century bindings of manuscripts from Saint Jacques, four quires of
what must be the penultimate draft of this concordance, revealing
something of their methods: each quire was written by a different copyist
responsible only for a fixed portion of the alphabet, as one can see from the
blank space each left when he had finished his assigned task. Corrections
were then noted, so that it would be ready for the final copy. A drawback of
Saint Jacques I is the fact that its words are not cited in context. This
version survives in eighteen manuscripts, thirteen of which date from the
thirteenth century" (Rouse & Rouse, op. cit. , 224-25.)

"By mid-century, there were alphabetical indexes to the majority of works in

the Latin Aristotelian corpus, Old Logic, New Logic, the Ethica , the Libri
naturales . Since these reference tools are anonymous, it is obviously
impossible to prove that they originate at Paris; but the combination of the
two activities, Aristotelian studies and creation of indexes, can point
nowhere else at this period." 3.4
Index tools for books were invented in Paris, but the first union catalogue of
manuscripts was compiled about 1320 by Franciscans working in Oxford,
England. Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum ueterum — a
manuscript union catalogue of some 1400 manuscript books in England,
Scotland and Wales. It listed the works of 98 authors owned by 189
monastic or cathedral libraries. The concentration on such a small number
of authors seems reflective of the typically intense medieval concentration
on relatively few texts.

"Although none of these libraries is Franciscan, the master list is organized

geographically according to the division of Great Britain into the custodiae
of the Franciscan order. The three surviving manuscripts of the Registrum
date from the beginning of the fifteenth century; it is nevertheless possible
to establish from external evidence that the Registrum must date from the
first or second decade of the fourteenth century" (Rouse & Rouse,
Authentic Witnesses. Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts
[1991] 237-38).

Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum . Edited with an

introduction and notes by Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse. The Latin
text established by R. A. B. Mynors (1991).

"The high point of medieval library cataloguing is found in the three-part

catalog of Dover Priory in England, made in 1389. Here every volume is
listed and every tract identified, the tract's position within a volume entered
by leaf number, the opening words (the incipit) of each quoted, and the
whole rendered accessible by a shelf list and an alphabetical index of all
the works in the library" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.)
International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 107).

As we have seen, the production techniques and features of manuscript

books evolved slowly. Advances originating in the thirteenth century,
including the pecia system, indexing, and other accessibility tools such as
library arrangement, remained operational, and represented essentially the
state of the art when the mass production method of printing was
introduced to European book production in 1455. The rate of change from
the very slow transition from the roll to the codex, from majuscule to
minuscule, and from the introduction of indexing and other organizational
features of manuscripts in the thirteen century and prior, hardly increased in
velocity before the history of printing. Centuries were usually involved in
each transition. It was only after the invention of printing that the rate of
change and social disruption accelerated with the growing availability of
books. And yet even though artisans involved in manuscript production
were sometimes forced by economic necessarity to adopt the new
technology-- to switch to the creation of woodcuts or engraved illustrations
from the creation of miniature paintings, for example, or a scribe such as
Peter Schoefer, who switched from manuscript copying to printing-- the
overall disruption from printing was not primarily within book production
trades. Instead, the main impact of the new technology was on society as a
whole through the increasing availability, lower cost, and more rapid
distribution of information.

In the last three decades of the fifteenth century the exponential increase in
the number of books being printed created an important and lucrative new
market for miniaturists, since many printed books contained areas left blank
for the addition of illuminated initials and rubrications. The quality of
illumination or rubrication that might have been added to printed books
depended, of course, on the taste and budget of their purchasers. In Italy
where antique monuments were most often seen and appreciated during
the Renaissance, patrons generally favored the concentration of decoration
at the beginning of volumes. This preference culminated in what has been
called the "architectural frontispiece", in which lines of text, title and author
of the book, or combinations of these were incorporated by the miniaturist
into an imaginary antique monument resembling a triumphal arch or an
epitaph. In the sixteenth century, when printed title pages and printed
frontispieces for printed books became the convention, architectural
borders and architectural designs, either engraved in wood or on
copperplates, became a widely-used format for frontispieces and engraved
title pages.

Between February 1 and October 25, 1483 printers Andreas Torresanus,

de Asula (Andrea Torresani di Asolo) and Bartholomaeus de Blavis, de
Alexandria of Venice issued in eight parts an edition of the Opera
(Collected Works) of Aristotle, together with the Liber quinque
praedicabilium (also known as the Isagoge ) of the Neoplatonic philosopher
Porphyri . It was edited by the Paduan scholar Nicoletus Vernia (Nicoleta
Vernia) with commentary by the Moroccan Andalusian Muslim
polymath, and master of Aristotelian philosophy Averroes , (ʾAbū l-Walīd
Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd, commonly known as Ibn Rushd). It was
largely through the commentaries of Averroes that the writings of Aristotle
were re-introduced to European culture after the Middle Ages. The printer,
Torresani, who undertook this huge edition with partners, had acquired the
fonts and punches of Nicolas Jenson , from whom he learned the printing
trade.

A copy of this work printed on vellum, and preserved in the Morgan Library
& Museum, contains a particularly spectacular tromp l'oeil frontispiece in
volume one by Girolamo da Cremona and his assistants. Girolamo was a
manuscript illuminator who worked first in the North Italian courts of Ferrara
and Mantua, then in Siena and Florence. By the 1470s he worked in
Venice, primarily illuminating frontispieces for deluxe copies of printed
books. These miniatures are known for their playful and extravagant
trompe-l'oeil conceits. In Girolamo's frontispiece for volume one the vellum
of the page appears to have been torn away to reveal Aristotle conversing
with a turbaned figure, possibly the commentator Averroes. A Latin
inscription beneath the text on this opening page states "Ulmer Aristotilem
Petrus produxeat orbi" (Petrus Ulmer brought this Aristotle to the world.)
Some scholars have identified Ulmer as Peter Ugelheimer, a Frankfurt
merchant resident in Venice who owned some shares in Nicolas Jenson's
printing shop, and sold Jenson's fonts to Torresani. Other magnificent
vellum copies of books printed by Jenson and illustrated for Ugelheimer are
preserved in Gotha.

"It is unsurprising that one of the most illusionistically complex images of

the late fifteenth century, the frontispiece for an edition of Aristotle’s Works
probably owned by Peter Ugelheimer and painted by Girolamo da
Cremona, should accompany a written discussion of cognition. Framing
the beginning of the first chapter of Aristotle’s Physics, the miniaturist has
constructed a remarkably multilayered image, incorporating the text block
itself into an elaborate illusionistic game. Similar to Aristotle’s text, the
image invokes several orders of observation interacting within a cohesive
whole. On a primary level, the surface of the folio acts as an unframed
two-dimensional support, explicitly emphasizing the terms of the illusion
while challenging the notion, first codified by Leon Battista Alberti about half
a century earlier, of the pictorial field as a finite, unified space within a
framed window. Inside the three-dimensional world of the painted page,
mounted clusters of jewels, pearls, and antique cameos hanging by red
strings before the surface of the parchment, casting an ethereal blue
shadow upon it. These objects are nearest to the viewer, their weight and
precarious placement made apparent by the tears in the parchment they
seem to have produced. Receding further back, the parchment itself
constitutes a second visual layer. Girolamo’s skillful shading has given it the
appearance of an extensively torn sheet of vellum that curls toward the
viewer. Significantly, the physical corners of the page, too, are integrated
into the illusion; the central text block does not simply float in
three-dimensional space but is connected to the seemingly dog-eared
edges of the page. This aspect further problematizes the convention of the
pictureplane as an unruptured space and is perhaps the most original
device employed by the illuminator. Visible through the lacerations in the
vellum, an entirely separate scene takes place; in an antiquizing border-like
space, the confines of which are hard to judge, playful satyrs and fawns
jostle in front of what appears to be an ornately sculpted antique
monument. Finally, in the upper area of the page yet another seemingly
unconnected andspatially ambiguous event is depicted — Aristotle’s
disputation with Averroës.

"These pictorial layers, their distance relative to the viewer, and their
progression from literal presence (the clusters of jewels) to imaginary
presence (the temporally impossible encounter between Aristotle and
Averroës) parallel themes present in the introductory chapter of the
Physics. According to Aristotle’s text, the study of nature must proceed
along a path that moves from ‘concrete and particular’ things immediately
cognizable to more ‘abstract and general’ ideas that can be derived from
analysis of the former. Likewise, the beholder of this particular frontispiece
must move from the immediate sensory tactility of precious stones and
metalwork, through the semantic understanding of the text itself, toward a
visualization of the text’s argumentative content, in this case represented
by a conversation between its author and chief commentator. The
frontispiece thus provides a visually appealing, accessible, and
conceptually apt ‘concrete whole,’ a prolegomenon for a dense and difficult
Aristotelian text that proceeds by the very method the philosopher
recommends. Although the variety of visual and epistemological themes
that condense in this frontispiece is unprecedented, its imagery does not
simply constitute a unique pictorial gloss of Aristotle’s text by means of a
particularly erudite miniature painter. Girolamo, who at this point had
already been active for three decades, was making use of a visual device
that had been employed by other book illuminators numerous times before
and in a variety of circumstances. Namely, he undertook to reconcile the
visual role of the patently two-dimensional text block (which in practice was
nearly always written or printed before any illustration occurred) with a
lavishly painted, illusionistically convincing scene. Responding to the
inquisitive nature of the text he was asked to illustrate, Girolamo pushed
several of the solutions derived by his predecessors to the point of rupture,
where the illusionism of the composition collapses in on itself and raises
more questions about the nature of representation than it answers"
(Herman, " Excavating the page: virtuosity and illusionism in Italian book
illumination, 1460-1520 ", Word & Image, 27:2, 190-211, quoting from p.
190).

The frontispiece for volume two of the Morgan Library copy of the Torresani
Aristotle was also illuminated by Girolamo da Cremona together with
Antonio Maria da Villafora, and Benedetto Bardon. An excellent
reproduction of this and the frontispiece for volume one appear in Walther
& Wolf, Codices illustres. The world's most famous illuminated manuscripts
(2005) 386-7.

C. The Introduction of Printing and its Aftermath

After the introduction of printing, for librarians and bibliographers the
challenge became one not only of protecting and organizing their valuable
collections of manuscripts, which because of scarcity and high cost had
grown relatively slowly, if at all, before the introduction of printing, but for
the first time of managing the rapid growth of information which became
much more readily available, and at comparatively lower cost. At least
partly because of the increased availability of information after the
development of printing, by 1505, when he left the Abbey at Sponheim,
polymath Johannes Trithemius had expanded its library to 2000 volumes
of printed books and manuscripts from the 40 works present in the library
when he became Abbot in 1482. Two thousand volumes represented an
exceptionally large library for the time, so its accomplishment was also due
to Tritheim's skill and tenacity as a book collector. For librarians, managing
the physical space required for storage, and organizing books and
manuscripts, both in their physical location and subject/author classification
and cataloguing, have remained relatively constant challenges ever since.
Efforts to solve these organizing, indexing, and accessibility problems led
eventually, through centuries of effort and many incremental steps, to
today's virtually instantaneous searchability of digital information.
Earlier in this essay I discussed the development of title pages in the latter
part of the fifteenth century as an innovation resulting from the desire of
printers to identify and sell their editions. By the early sixteenth century
standardization, for the most part, of title page information in printed books
to include the author’s name, title, place, publisher and date, made it easier
to identify books. Of course, for every book that may have supplied this
basic bibliographical information there were others published under
pseudonyms, or anonymously, or with bogus imprints or inaccurate dates,
or with elements of the imprint information printed on the colophon leaf
rather than on title page. More significantly, perhaps, the rising tide of
printed information made selection of appropriate books on the expanding
range of subjects increasingly complicated. Moreover, it was becoming
difficult to understand and classify books by subject.

Prior to the invention of printing, and probably prior to the mid-16th century,
scarcity of information, if it was noticed, or the high cost of books, might
have been perceived as greater problems than overload. We might
tentatively observe that by the time of Conrad Gessner in the mid-sixteenth
century information overload was just beginning to be experienced by those
who could afford books, or who had access to good libraries. To list the
most useful and authoritative books by subject, physician and bibliographer
Gessner published a “universal” classified bibliography (1545-55), and index
of knowledge in “all” printed books (1548-49). Compiling the Bibliotheca
Universalis was such a challenge that Gessner confessed the profound
sense of freedom he experienced when he finished the massive work in
1545: "In truth I rejoice and thank God because I have finally gotten out of
the labyrinth in which I was trapped for almost three years." 3.5 Still, roughly
ninety years after the introduction of printing, completion of a relatively
complete universal bibliography and knowledge index remained within the
grasp of one very talented and driven man.

As helpful as some consistency in bibliographical information such as

provided by Gessner, and as much improved as indices to printed books or
sets of books could be, speed of access to data in analog indices was
always limited. Accessing data in library catalogues presented greater
problems, especially as the amount of information indexed in many library
catalogues continually increased,eventually resulting in the perception of
information overload from excessive numbers of printed books, to which
Denis Diderot referred in 1755 :

"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will
grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will
be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct
study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for
some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in
an immense multitude of bound volumes. . . ."

D. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution

Organizing some of that knowledge, and making it readily available, were

challenges and purposes of Diderot and d’Alembert ’s Encyclopédie ou
dictionnaire des sciences , des arts et des métiers, par une société‚ de
gens de lettres . Along with writers such as Diderot and d'Alembert,
librarians, library cataloguers, bibliographers and publishers of reference
works traditionally shared the goals of organizing information, and making it
accessible. The business of indexing and searching information, today
conducted on previously unimaginable scale at electron speed in the
“universal library without walls” by web search engines, evolved through
the history of books and libraries.

The first national code for descriptive cataloguing was implemented circa
1789-1791 after the new French Republic nationalized numerous libraries
and archival repositories. Seized books were brought to literary depots at
several locations in Paris. The staff at each depot was ordered to record
the basic details about each item on cards. These cards were then bound
up in bundles and sent to the Paris Bureau de Bibliographie. Because of
wartime shortages, the blank backs of confiscated playing cards were used
to record the information. The title page was transcribed on the card and
the author’s surname underlined for the filing word. If there was no author,
a keyword in the title was underlined. A collation was added that was
supposed to include the number of volumes, size, a statement of
illustration, the paper or parchment on which the book was written or
printed, the kind of type, any missing pages, and a description of the
binding if it was outstanding in any way. The collation was partly for the
purpose of identifying valuable books that the government might offer for
sale in order to increase government revenue. After the cards were filled in
and put in order by the underlined filing word, they were strung together by
running a needle and thread through the lower left hand corners to keep
them in order. This was one of the first recorded uses of cards for library
cataloguing.

Although the French revolutionary government attempted to impose some

order in the chaotic redistribution of library holdings, if only for monetary
gain, most French libraries which were not confiscated after the revolution,
including some which were founded during the Middle Ages, continued to
maintain their traditional hand-written catalogues in book form, some of
which were imprecise or had accumulated errors, or listed books which
could no longer be found. Following medieval subject arrangements, many
early library catalogues in various countries simply listed books and their
physical locations within libraries. Partly because of vagueness in
cataloguing, library security, if any, was often extremely lax, sometimes
resulting in additional clandestine redistribution of books by thieves, of
whom the most notable in the nineteenth century, if not for all time, was the
mathematician, paleographer, and pioneer historian of science, Guglielmo
Libri . Reorganization of the French library and archive system after the
French Revolution required the better part of the nineteenth century.

E. Standardizing Library Cataloguing

If the early hand-written library catalogues were not very helpful,
researchers could, of course, consult numerous specialized printed subject
bibliographies , or the limited printed catalogues of certain libraries , to
determine what they might be looking for. The first widely appreciated rules
for standardizing library cataloguing were promulgated by Antonio Panizzi
in 1841. As these, and other cataloguing and classifying rules , such as the
Dewey Decimal Classification (1876), were gradually implemented, users
of libraries could expect more reliable research help from author and
subject catalogues. Eventually, massive library card catalogues were
created, and sometimes published in print in monstrous sets of folio
volumes . Libraries willingly allocated space to these enormous sets when
they were the only way to access the information; most of these monsters
have since found their ways to landfills. 3.6 A few systems of index cards,
such as the Institut International de Bibliographie , founded by Paul Otlet
and Henri la Fontaine in 1895, extended their cataloguing goals far beyond
the range of library science, becoming almost unbelievably ambitious in
their efforts to index knowledge, and essentially represented analog search
engines.

F. Analogue Machines for Searching Information

With the expanding volume of physical information librarians were
concerned about their ability to find space to house their growing
collections of monographs and periodicals. Before digitization, microfilming
bulky collections seemed like the most efficient way to conserve space and
to share copies of such information with other scholars and institutions.
Searching through reels of microfilm was tedious, but compression of the
information in this form opened the possibility of searchability, and inventors
sought ways both to index and speed up access to information on rolls of
microfilm. In 1931 Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon receivesd U.S.
Patent No. 1,838,389 for a " Statistical Machine ." This patent described
an electronic machine for searching through data encoded on reels of film,
using "radiating energy to actuate a recorder when the explored indications
upon the search plate and record element are identical, the indications on
one of said elements being penetrable by the rays and the indication on the
other element being impenetrable by the rays." Later, Vannevar Bush
incorporated technology similar to this in the Rapid Selector machine on
which he began development in 1938. The existence of Goldberg's patent
prevented Bush from patenting his Rapid Selector. Bush's machine became
famous after publication in July, 1945 of his Atlantic Monthly article, " As We
May Think, " describing the Memex . In September of the same year Bush
published a condensed, illustrated version of "As We May Think" in Life
magazine. Life's editors added the following subtitle: "A Top U.S. Scientist
Foresees a Possible Future World in Which Man-Made Machines Will Start
to Think." They also replaced the Atlantic Monthly's numbered sections with
headings, and added illustrations of the "cyclops camera,' the
"supersecretary" and the "Memex" in the form of a desk. This was the first
published illustration of what the Memex might have looked like. Because
the hypothetical Memex was capable of making permanent associative
links in information it foreshadowed aspects of the personal computer and
hyperlinks on the Internet.

In 1951 Louis N. Ridenour, Ralph R. Shaw , and Albert G. Hill published a

thin book entitled Bibliography in an Age of Science . This book published
three lectures delivered at the University of Illinois the previous year.
Though it was preceded by journal articles and technical reports, this may
be the first separately published book to address the problems of applying
new technologies to the searching and storage of printed information in
libraries. Shaw's article includes illustrations on pp. 60-61 of the Rapid
Selector prototype which was in operation at this time. This machine,
which applied the ideas of Emanuel Goldberg and the Memex idea of
Vannevar Bush, stored 72,000 frames of information on a 2,000 foot reel of
film. The prototype could search through the data at the rate of 78,000
"codes per minute." "Improvement of this searching speed to 120,000
codes per minute is now in sight." As far as I have been able to determine,
no further work was done on this project beyond the prototype. Instead,
research was directed toward using electric punched card tabulators for
information retrieval, or anticipating the use of the new high-speed digital
computers, of which the Univac 1 was the first actually delivered to a
customer, the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1953.

G. The Beginning of Electronic Databases

As the amount of printed information expanded exponentially, the labor
involved in creating library card catalogues inexorably increased along with
the cumbersome aspects of using them. With the rapid growth of medical
research after World War II, the Army Medical Library (now the National
Library of Medicine), which through Index Medicus was required to index all
journal articles in all languages concerning medicine, was challenged to
control an exploding number of publications. Automating the creation,
indexing and searching of Index Medicus became one of the first topics of
research on information retrieval , or online database development, in The
Army Medical Library Research Project at the Welch Medical Library at
Johns Hopkins University as early as 1949, even before electronic
computers were available for sale . Another very early
bibliographically-related information retrieval project, considered the
foundation of humanities computing, was Roberto Busa’s Index
Thomisticus , started by Father Busa with the support of IBM as early as
1949.

During the 1950s, with the rapid development of the mainframe industry,
Hans Peter Luhn of IBM developed automated systems for encoding library
information in 1957 and for the production of literature abstracts in 1958.
Auto-indexing and auto-abstracting became news stories. Eugene
Garfield’s citation analysis , which was first published in 1964 in five printed
volumes, indexing 613 journals and 1.4 million citations. NLM’s Medical
Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (Medlars) eventually became
operational in January 1964. This was the first large scale computer-based
retrospective library search service available to the general public.
However, Index Medicus continued to be published in book form, as it had
been since 1879, and in October 1971 the National Library of Medicine first
brought Index Medicus online through Medline ( Medical Literature Analysis
and Retrieval System Online).

Shortly before NLM brought Index Medicus online Edgar F. Codd of IBM
published "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" in
Communications of the ACM 1 3 (1970): 377–387. Codd’s model became
widely accepted as the definitive model for relational database
management systems . Codd postulated that data should be stored
independently from hardware and that a programmer should use a
nonprocedural language for accessing data. The crux of Codd’s solution
was that data, rather than being stored in a hierarchical structure, would be
stored in simple tables composed of rows and columns in which columns of
like data would relate tables to one another. A database user or application,
in Codd’s way of thinking, would not need to know the structure of the data
in order to query that data. Codd's work led to rapid growth in the
development of databases of all kinds yet traditional, non-automated
means of accessing large amounts of information remained. Even with
increasing adoption of Medline, Index Medicus continued to be published in
print until December 2004 --an excellent example of the persistence of
print, perhaps as a result of bureaucratic indecision, resulting in continuing
accumulation of dense and difficult to access printed volumes long after the
printed data had been supplanted in accessibility and ease of use by an
online database.

Through the 1960s and early 1970s, for most part, library card files, or
catalogues printed from the cards, as cumbersome as they were, remained
state of the art for indexing and searching library holdings. In 1967 the
colleges and universities in the state of Ohio founded the Ohio College
Library Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the
libraries of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce
costs. After the bibliographical database expanded far beyond the state of
Ohio it was renamed Online Computer Library Center, retaining the same
initials. By 2007 OCLC incorporated the online catalogues of more than
27,000 libraries and contained “1.1 billion catalogued items.”

H. ARPANET, Origins of the Internet

Some early library-related information retrieval projects were influential
upon the thinking of pioneers in other aspects of computing, such as J.C.R.
Licklider . A psychologist, Licklider was especially interested in the
relationship of people to computers . He was also interested in the
relationship of the physical information in libraries to the digital information
stored in the mainframes of the time, and in making the growing body of
information stored in libraries more accessible. In 1960 Licklider published
Man-Computer Symbiosis , postulating that the computer should become
an intimate symbiotic partner in human activity, including communication. In
1962 Licklider and and Welden E. Clark published “ Online Man-Computer
Communication ,” calling for time-sharing of computers, for graphic displays
of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. After he
was appointed Director of the Pentagon's Information Processing
Techniques Office (IPTO) in 1962 Licklider sent a memo to members and
affiliates of what he jokingly called the " Intergalactic Computer
Network ,"outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual
computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network
spanning the continent.” In November 1964 a meeting between Licklider
and Lawrence G. Roberts motivated Roberts to undertake the creation of
the ARPANET . Less than a year later, in October 1965 Roberts conducted
the first " actual network experiment ", tying MIT Linconln Labs' TX-2
computer to System Development Corporation's Q32. This was the first
time that two computers talked to each other, and the first time that packets
were used to communicate between computers. Also in 1965 Licklider
published a book, now for the most part forgotten, entitled Libraries of the
Future .

Two years later Lawrence Roberts published the first paper on the design
of the Arpanet: “ Multiple computer networks and intercomputer
communication .” The following year Licklider and Robert W. Taylor
published The Computer as a Communication Device in which they
described features of the future Arpanet. On October 29, 1969 the first
message was sent over the Arpanet from Leonard Kleinrock's UCLA
computer to the second node at Stanford Resarch Institute's computer. The
message was simply "Lo." In March 1970 Arpanet established a node at
Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, thereby spanning the U.S. By
1971 the Arpanet had 15 nodes. In 1973 the first international connections
were made to the Arpanet. After continued expansion In 1990 Arpanet
discontinued operations and folded into the Internet.

Related to education and culture, in 1987 in order to photograph, store, and

organize the art work of the painter, Andrew Wyeth , Fred Mintzer, Henry
Gladney and colleagues at IBM developed a high resolution digital
camera for photographing art works and a PC-based database system to
store and index the images. The system was used by Wyeth's staff to
photograph, store, and organize about 10,000 images. "Pictures were
scanned at a spatial resolution of 2500 by 3000 pixels and a color depth of
24 bits-per-pixe l, and were color calibrated." This was the first digital
image database of cultural materials .

I. Beginning of The World Wide Web

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee at CERN wrote Information
Management: A Proposal , proposing an Internet-based hypertext system.
ARCHIE , a program designed to index FTP archives, was developed
by three students at McGill University , Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Peter
J. Deutsch, in 1990. ARCHIE was the first “search engine ,” as distinct
from a “web search engine.” By November 12, 1990 Berners-Lee was
planning the World Wide Web, issuing from CERN World Wide Web:
Proposal for a Hypertext Project. The following day Berners-Lee wrote
the first web page . Over the Christmas holiday Berners-Lee wrote the
software tools necessary for a working World Wide Web :
A. The first web browser called WorldWideWeb .

B. A WYSIWYG HTML editor

C. The first Web server , CERN httpd . It was operational on Christmas

Day 1990.

In March 1991 Berners-Lee releated the first web browser, WorldWideWeb,

to a number of people at CERN. On August 6, 1991 Berners-Lee made
web server and web browser software available at no cost. On April 30,
1993 CERN released World Wide Web software into the public domain.
This was a critical step in the world wide adoption of the web.

On March 4, 1993 progammer Marc Andreesen announced on Usenet

the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag .
This was the first graphics-based web browser. The National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released the brower on April 22,
1993. On April 4, 1994 Andreesen and James H. Clark of Silicon
Graphics founded Mosaic Communications Corporation , the first
company to exploit the potential of the Mosaic web browser. This was the
first company to exploit the economic potential of the World Wide Web.
Their first product, Mosaic Netscape 0.9 beta, was released on October 13,
1994.

J. The First Search Engines

The first "full text" crawler-based web search engine , Web Crawler ,
created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, became
operational on April 20, 1994 . "Unlike its predecessors, it let users search
for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major
search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the
public." In January 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin , students of
computer science at Stanford, began collaboration at on a search engine
called BackRub , named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links"
pointing to a given website. This became the Google web search engine,
and Google’s PageRank a lgorithm was adapted and expanded for the
Internet conceptually from the ranking of printed scientific papers through
citation analysis. In January 1998 Page, Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry
Winograd of the Stanford Database Group published on paper The
PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web . "The worldwide
web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large
and heterogeneous. Current estimates are that there are over 150 million
web pages with a doubling life of less than one year." These and other
developments resulting from information retrieval research originating at
brick and mortar libraries, together with advances in computing and
networking, eventually led to the present virtually instantaneous speed of
searching digital books, databases, and web pages.

We may recall that electronic digital computing evolved out of research

done in World War II. The world's first general purpose digital computer, the
ENIAC, became operational in 1945. For the first ten years or more after
the invention of the ENIAC there were less than twenty electronic
computers in the world, and one of the earliest pioneers, Howard Aiken ,
famously predicted that the world would need only six.

The first mainframes were extremely expensive and only available to

governments, large corporations and research centers. Very gradually the
cost of computing declined, but it was not until the development of personal
computing in the 1980s that computing became affordable to most people,
and it was not until the connection of hundreds of millions of personal
computers to the Internet in the 1990s that the impact of computing was
fully felt upon the widest reaches of society. By comparison, in the
mid-fifteenth century it took roughly the same amount of time--fifty
years--for printing to spread throughout Europe. For the Middle Ages, in
which all change occurred much more slowly than today, such a
technological shift within 50 years was probably perceived by interested
observers as every bit as fast and disruptive as whatever shift we are
currently experiencing. For the first several hundred years of printing it was
a difficult trade to learn with very high capital and experiential costs of entry.
One could only learn the trade through apprenticeship. Until Moxon's
Mechanick Exercises (1683-84) no manual on printing was published, and
even if a person owned a copy of Moxon in the seventeenth century they
could not print without a large capital investment in type and equipment.
Today virtually anyone with an inexpensive personal computer, tablet or
even a smartphone and an Internet connection can become a
self-publisher or blogger. More than a billion people use computers in the
form of desktops, laptops, cell phones, tablets or what have you, and the
production of information is staggering. In July 2008, only eighteen years
after Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, Google announced
that it was indexing over one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs. We
may presume that the second trillion was reached exponentially faster than
the first. (This section was last revised on September 22, 2018).

Footnotes

● 1.A.1: Though paper and printing on paper originated in China , and the process spread
westward over many centuries, the earliest printing was stamped into soft clay, circa
2250 BCE, in Mesopotamia, long before the developments in China .
● 1.A.2: James Moran's Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth
Century to Modern Times (1973) provides useful analysis of the advances in printing
press technology and press output. The first edition of Moran's book is also a superbly
designed, printed and bound monograph.
● 1.A.3: Rosenthal, Franz, " 'Of Making Many Books There is No End:' The Classical
Muslim View," Atiyeh (ed) The Book in the Islamic World. The Written Word and
Communication in the Middle East (1995) 45. Ibn Khaldun's specific words on these
topics may be found in the one-volume condensation of Rosenthal's translation of The
Muqaddimah, abridged and edited by N. J. Dawood (2005) Chapter 6, section 34, the
title of which is "The great number of scholarly works available is an obstacle on the path
to attaining scholarship," and section 35, which has the title "The great number of brief
handbooks available on scholarly subjects is detrimental to the process of instruction"
(pp. 414-416).
● 1.A.4: Pool, I. de S."Tracking the Flow of Information," Science 221 (12 August 1983)
609-13. Reprinted in Etheridge (ed), Politics in Wired Nations. Selected Writings of Ithiel
de Sola Pool (1998).
● 1: In January 2011 the ISTC estimated that approximately 1500 of their entries were
items that were no longer thought to have been printed in the fifteenth century.
● 1.B.1: Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2000).
● 1.C.1: Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (1998) 3.
● 1.C.2: I am grateful to my son Max for critiquing my definition of the book and stimulating
me to improve my definition through spirited discussions.
● 1.C.3: I raise the question of the size of the Wikipedia relative to other websites since
one of the dramatic features of the Internet has been the amount of information that
some sites contain, and their remarkable accessibility. For example, collections of
government documents, such as all the U.S. patent records, accumulated since 1790 ,
may be enormous, and as I write this I am unaware of how one could make size
comparisons between websites, though one would assume that quantification of any
amount of digital information should be possible.
● 1.D.1: For a humorous music video on Gutenberg see Gutenberg ("Sunday Girl" by
Blondie) by historyteachers, downloadable from YouTube.
● 1.D.2: Hellinga, “The Gutenberg Revolutions” in Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the
History of the Book [2007], 209.
● 1.D.3: Buehler, The Fifteenth Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators
(1960) 17.
● 1.D.5: Hellinga, “The Codex in the Fifteenth century: Manuscript and Print,” Barker (ed),
A Potencie of Life. Books in Society [1993] 65-66.
● 1.D.o.: Here is an example of a footnote. Because I am unaware of a way of
programming footnotes to renumber automatically as I continue to edit and expand these
essays, I decided to identify them by their section, subsection, and footnote number, this
example being numbered zero. Doing this allows me to better keep track of their
numbers, a task I find difficult to manage in the HTML editor.
● 1.E.1: "The preponderance of textual evidence suggests that the ancients copied
manuscripts by dictation. Each copy of an ancient Latin book was before all else a
record of a public or private oral performance of a written text. In his letter to Atticus, for
example, Cicero spoke of dictating a text syllable by syllable to his secretary.
Nevertheless, some students have proposed that scriptura continua was highly suitable
for visual copying because its widely spaced letters could easily have been transcribed,
sign by sign, by scribes unable to understand the meaning of the text. If ancient scribes
had copied visually, rather than by transcribing texts read orally, one would anticpate
encountering errors of transposition such as those that occur in the copying of large,
unpunctuated numbers digit by digit. Such purely graphic errors are not in scriptura
continua codices, which instead are marked by divergences explicable only by errors
caused by copying from texts read aloud--errors of pronunciation, decoding, and
memory due to either a lector dicating to a scribe or to a scribe pronouncing to himself. It
is indeed possible that the scribe, and even the dictator reading to the scribe, might not
 have understood the sense of the copy being produced, but this is because scriptura
continua is a particularly ambiguous medium for the transcription of oral speech, a
problem augmented by the ambiguous script and syntax of a given exemplar. Several
factors probably contributed to the preference for oral rather than visual transcription of
texts, including the lack of specialized furniture in antiquity, which rendered the ocular
gestures necessary for visual contact between examplar and copy awkward and clumsy.
The ancient posture of writing on one's knee, which left little room for manipulating an
examplar, certainly would not have been conducive to such visual copying" (Saenger,
Space Between Words. The Origin of Silent Reading (1997) 48.
● 1.E.2: Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (1998) 7.
● 1.E.3: Statistics compiled from Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores covering the period 350
CE to 799 CE. See reference below.
● 1.E.5: M.B. Parkes, Introduction to Peter Ganz (ed) The Role of the Book in Medieval
Culture [1986] 15-16).
● 1: Davies, Aldus Manutius, Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (1999) 22.
● 1.E.6: Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1976) 34.
● 1.E.7: Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (1999) 25-35.
● 1.E.8: Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 [1967] 106.
● 1.E.9: Buehler, The Fifteenth Century Book: The Scribes, The Printers, The Decorators
(1960) 19.
● 1.E.10: Buehler, op. cit. 22-23.
● 1.E.11: Lefebre &Martin, The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 .
Trans. D. Gerard (1976) 262-63.
● 1.E.12: Jones, Printing the Classical Text (2004) 6.
● 1.E.13: Jones, Printing the Classical Text (2004) 4.
● 1.E.14: On this issue I admit that I may also be at fault for continuing to publish a
developing rough draft of this manuscript on the web as I write it. My excuse is that
having it exposed the way it is motivates me to continue to improve it. As mentioned
earlier, I also view writing and publishing this way as an experiment in web composition.
● 1.E.15: Davies, “Humanism in Script and Print,” Kraye (ed) The Cambridge Companion
to Renaissance Humanism [1996] 57). For further discussion of this issue see Jones,
Printing the Classical Text (2004) 4-9.
● 1.E.16: See the considerable discussion of this issue in Buehler, The Fifteenth Century
Book. The Scribes, The Printers, The Decorators (1960)24-39.
● 1.E.17: "For Christians, Greek was not only the language of the Bible, it was also the
language of the liturgy. The first Christians in the West held their religious services in
Greek, and even though Latin gradually replaced Greek in the liturgy, some remants of
Greek survived in the Western rites until modern times, as for example in the kyrie
eleison . Many Latin missals and prayer books of the Middle Ages preserve some Greek
prayers and hymns. Through the liturgy the medieval West mainted an uninterrupted
acquaintance with Greek. Many Greek terms were adopted by the Latin church (for
example, ecclesia, basilica, baptismus ). The need to understand such terminology and
the desire to comprehend the Greek quotations in ancient and patristic authors required
 that scholars in the West acquire at least some knowledge of Greek. There is some
surviving evidence for how they accomplished this. A number of manuscripts from
Western schoolrooms preserve Greek alphabets, from which scribes could learn to write
Greek, perhaps to enable them to copy the Greek passages they encoutered in patristic
texts. Greek-Latin glossaries and word lists provided a rudimentary understanding of
Greek voacbulary. Such basic resources kept Greek alive in the Western schools, at
least at the most elementary level. On a more sophistical level, translations from ancient
and patristic Greek authors continued to be made in the West. Aristotle mremained a
favorite, and he was translated from the Greek by scholars like Jacobus Veneticus in the
twelfth century, and Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth. . . . " (Babcock & Sosower,
Learning from the Greeks. An Exhibition Commemorating the Five-Hundredth
Anniversary of the Founding of the Aldine Press [at the Beinecke Library, Yale] (1994)
● 1.E.18: Jones, Printing the Classical Text (2004) 22.
● 1.F.1: Darnton, "First Steps Toward a History of Reading," Republished in Darnton, Kiss
of the Lamourette , 154–87.
● 1.F.2: For a detailed study of the workings and function of memory among medieval
scholars see Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
(1990). For a contrasting view, emphasizing note-taking as a means of information
management and retention, see Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly
Information before the Modern Age (2010), especially 75-76 ff, quoted in the database at
this link .
● 1.F.3: These statistics come from Jones, Printing the Classical Text (2004) 10-15.
● 1.F.4: Hirsch, Printing, Selling, Reading 1450-1550 (1967) 132.
● I.F.5: Flood, "The History of the Book in Germany," Suarez & Woudhuysen (eds) The
Oxford Companion to the Book I (2010) 227
● 1.G.1: Saenger, Space Between Words. The Origins of Silent Reading (1997) 49. The
Wikipedia article on the Book of Mulling stated in January 2011 that the Book of Mulling
is currently dated from the late 8th century, that three scribes were involved, and that "It
remains possible that the manuscript was copied from an autograph manuscript of St.
Moling."
● 1.G.2: The image is a portrait of the evangelist Mark. f.93v. For a color reproduction see
Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels. Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (2003) plate 14.
● 1.G.3: Coleman, "Reading the Evidence in Text and Image: How History Was Read in
Late Medieval France," Imagining the Past in France. History in Manuscript Painting
1250-1500 , Morrison & Coleman (eds) (2010) 54; see also 55-66 which reproduce
numerous images showing groups of people listening to reading.
● 1.G.4: For a very enjoyable and perhaps even somewhat historically "authentic"
cinematic account of Restif La Bretonne see the 1982 film La nuit de Varennes , in which
Restif is portrayed by Jean-Louis Barrault, and the aging Giacomo Casanova is
inimitably portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni.
● 2.A.1: The bas reliefs depicting the scribes are in room XVIII, panels 9-11, middle
register (BM ANE 123955-7), and court XIX, panel 12 (BM ANE 123825).
● 2.A.2: Wiseman, "Assyrian Writing-Boards," Iraq XVII (1955) 3-13.
● 2.A.3.: "For more information on papyrus see Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction
(1968) and Parkinson & Quirke, Papyrus (1995). See also Bertelli, " The Production and
Distribution of Books in Late Antiquity ," The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and
Demand , eds Hodges & Bowden (1998) 41-60.
● 2.B.1: ". . . there seems little doubt that the form of the written epic that has come down
to us is the result of aggregating (and so transforming) earlier products, possibly of an
oral tradition. But we need to appreciate a further point if we are to understand the
position of this epic in relation to literacy. For even before the version we know was
brought together in writing, the constituent parts existed not simply as 'oral poems' but as
part of a culture in which writing had played an increasingly important part since the
fourth millennium. For Mesopotamia had not experienced a truly oral culture, a purely
oral tradition, since that time. It is true that writing appears to have been relatively little
used for 'literary' activity in the usual sense. However its poetry was subject to influences
both in the form and in content, in composition and in reproduction (memorization), that
emanated from the other changes that writing had wrought, promoted or accompanied."
(Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral [1999] 92).
● 2.B.2.: Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship. From the Beginning to the End of the
Hellenistic Age (1968) 104-117. Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars , 3rd ed (1991)
4-7.
● 2.B.3. : See Skeat, " The Use of Dictation in Ancient Book-Production ," Proceedings of
the British Academy 42 (1956) 11.
● 2.B.4: Harris, Ancient Literacy (1989) 272.
● 2.B.5: Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (1989) 4.
● 2.B.7: For illustrations of a wide variety of Greek papyri and other writing forms see
Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World (1971), including as plate 4 a single leaf
of a wooden tablet filled with wax.
● 2.B.8: For the role of horses in ancient Greek life, and the place of the Athenian Cavalry
in Greek Culture see Camp, Horses and Horsemanship in the Athenian Agora (1998).
● 2.B.9: The pottery and lead tablets excavated from the Dipylon were described by Karin
Braun in "Der Dipylon-Brunnen B1 Die Funde," Mitteilungen des Deutschen
Archaeologischen Instituts Athenische Abteilung , Band 85 (1970 129-269, plates 53-94.
The lead tablets are illustrated on plates 83-93.
● 2.B.10.: Posner, "The Athenian Cavalry Archives of the Fourth and Third Centures B.C.",
The American Archivist (1974) 579-82.
● 2.B.12: Harris, op. cit. , 323.
● 2.B.13: Harris, op. cit .324.
● 2.C.1: Meyer, Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World. Tabulae in Roman Belief and
Practice [2004] 23.
● 2.C.2: Another tablet originally bound with the Schoyen example was published by A.
Henbeck, "The Würzburger Alphabettafel," Würzburger Jahrbücher für
Altertumswissenschaft , 12 (1986)7-20.
● 2.C.3: Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (1972) 116, footnote 83.
● 2.C.4.: See Skeat, " The Length of the Standard Papyrus Roll and the Cost-Advantage of
the Codex ," Collected Writings of T. C. Skeat , Elliot, ed. (2004) 65.
● 2.C.5: Gamble, The Early Christian Book (1995) 50.
● 2.C.6: Gamble, op.cit . 51-52.
● 2.C.7: "To sum up: existing Hebrew manuscripts in the form of a codex which contain an
explicit indication of their time of production date from circa 900 and later. Some codex
manuscripts, mostly fragmentary, can be dated up to about a century or, at most, two
centuries earlier. Indeed, literary evidence reflects the later adaptation of the codex,
which had been introduced as a book form for Greek and Latin texts as early as the
second century, and became the usual book form in the fifth century. However, the virtual
lack of surviving Hebrew books in any form from late antiquity to the High Middle Ages
cannot be attributed to their destruction by wear and tear or to conquerors and
persecutors. One should also consider the possibility that the talmudic and midrashic
literature, the so-called Oral Law , was indeed mainly transmitted orally until the Islamic
period, as is indicated explicitly in a few talmudic sources, and attested by literary
patterns and reciting devices contained in these texts" (Malachie Beit-Arié, "How Hebrew
Manuscripts Are Made," A Sign and a Witness. 2000 Years of Hebrew Books and
Illuminated Manuscripts [1988] 36-37). Further information on this topic is available from
the New York Public Library website's An Introduction to Hebrew Manuscripts .
● 2.C.8: Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church. A History of Early Christian
Texts (1995) 5.
● 2.C.9: "The relationship of early Christianity to the Jewish faith, and the foundation of the
cult deeply rooted in a people accustomed to religious intolerance actually helped it take
hold initially. The Jews were accustomed to resisting political authority in order to
practice their religion, and the transition to Christianity among these people helped foster
the sense of Imperial resistance. To the Romans, Christians were a strange and
subversive group, meeting in catacombs, sewers and dark alleys, done only for their own
safety, but perpetuating the idea that the religion was odd, shameful and secretive.
Rumors of sexual depravity, child sacrifice and other disturbing behavior, left a stigma on
the early Christians. Perhaps worst of all was the idea of cannibalism. The concept of
breaking bread originating with the last supper, partaking of the blood and body of Christ,
which later came to be known as Communion, was taken literally. To the Romans, where
religious custom dictated following ancient practices in a literal sense, the idea of
performing such a ritual as a representation was misunderstood, and the early cult had
to deal with many such misperceptions"
( http://www.unrv.com/culture/christian-persecution.php, accessed 12-04-2008).
● 2.C.10: See Roberts & Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (1983). An updated and expanded,
but preliminary, revised version of this book by Robert A. Kraft "and associates," with a
working title of "The Gestation of the Codex" or, "From Scroll and Tablets to Codex and
Beyond " was published on the Internet in 2008. Kraft's earlier draft of this revision, in
briefer outline form , is also very useful. Both could be accessed in July 2011.
● 2.C.11: "Greek and Roman religions appear to have been largely indifferent to the use of
texts. Although particular items--an occasional ritual manual, votive inscription, aretalogy,
 hymn, written oracle, or magical text--have been found, they do not occur in connection
with a particular culture or in a quantity that would justify speaking of a religious
literature. Exception might be sought in Orphism or Hermeticism, whose fragmentary
literary remains are relatively extensive, but if these are exceptions they prove the rule.
No Graeco-Roman religious group produced, used or valued texts on a scale
comparable to Judaism and Christianity, so that apart from Jewish literature, there is no
appreciable body of religious writings with which early Christian literature can be fruitfully
compared" (Harris, Books and Readers in the Early Church [1995] 18). In Early Christian
Books in Egypt (2009) Roger Bagnall showed that the number of surviving Christian
documents in codex form relative to the number of surviving non-Christian documents in
codex form during the transitional period from the first through fifth centuries CE is
roughly proportionate to the overall percentage of Christian versus non-Christian
documents surviving from the period. These statistics he correlated with the ratio of
estimated Christian population versus the non-Christian population in Egypt during the
same period. 2.C.12 Among his many books, Bagnall co-authored with Bruce W. Frier
The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994).
● 2.C.13: Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites. The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts
and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (10-300 CE) (2005).
● 2.C.14: Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt (2009) Tables 1.2., 1.3, 4.1, 4., and 4.5.
See Bagnall's chapter 4, "The Spread of the Codex.," and Chapter 3, "The Economics of
Book Production."
● 2.D.1: Parker, Codex Sinaiticus. The Story of the World's Oldest Bible (2010)
● 2.D.2: "Various factors worked together here with varying rhythm. Thus connected with
the colophon was a specifically Christian ornament, the cross as a staurogram , with
Rho-bow on the shoulder, plus alpha and omega. It has already shifted to before the text
in the miniature codex of John's Gospel . Following the example of the arch-framed
canon tables , lists of contents are set under coloured arcades in the sixth century, and
from the fifth /sixth century on they also acquire greater emphasis through such formulae
as 'In hoc corpore (codice) continentur. . .' " (Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and
Middle Ages [1990] 188-89).
● 2.E.1. : See Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes & Scholars. A Guide to the Transmission of
Greek & Latin Literature, 3rd ed (1991). For studies of the impact of these losses and the
challenges of reconstructing classical texts see Reynolds (ed) Texts and Transmission. A
Survey of the Latin Classics (1983).
● 2.E.2: Harris, Ancient Literacy (1989) 326.
● 2.E.5.: Graham Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals [1984] 1.
● 2.E.6. : Capparoni, "Magistri Salernitani Nondum Cogniti". A Contribution to the History
of the Medical School of Salerno (1923) 3.
● 2.E.7.: See. Berschin, "6. Greek Manuscripts in Western Libraries," Greek Letters and
the Latin Middle Ages. From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa . Translated by J. C. Frakes.
Revised and Expanded edition.
http://www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/Walter_Berschin_16.html accessed 01-01-2011).
● 2.D.8. : Reynolds (ed), Texts and Transmission. A Survey of the Latin Classics [1983]
xvi.
● 2.E.1.: "Charlemagne took a serious interest in scholarship, promoting the liberal arts at
the court, ordering that his children and grandchildren be well-educated, and even
studying himself (in a time when even leaders who promoted education did not take time
to learn themselves) under the tutelage of Paul the Deacon, from whom he learned
grammar; Alcuin, with whom he studied rhetoric, dialectic (logic), and astronomy (he was
particularly interested in the movements of the stars); and Einhard, who assisted him in
his studies of arithmetic. His great scholarly failure, as Einhard relates, was his inability
to write: when in his old age he began attempts to learn—practicing the formation of
letters in his bed during his free time on books and wax tablets he hid under his
pillow—'his effort came too late in life and achieved little success', and his ability to read
– which Einhard is silent about, and which no contemporary source supports—has also
been called into question" (Wikipedia article on Charlemagne, accessed 01-02-2011).
● 2.E.3: The codex was described by Henri Bordier in "Restitution d'un manuscrit du
sixième siècle mi-parti entre Paris et Genève contenant des lettres et des sermons de
Saint Augustin," Etudes paléographiques et historiques sur des papyrus du VIme siecle
en partie inedits refermant des homelies de Saint Avit et des ecrits de Saint Augustin
(1866) 107-53, with 1 color plate comparing the two separated portions.
● 2.E.4. : Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars 3rd ed (1991) 59-60.
● 2.E.5.: Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (1983) 120-135.
● 2.G.1.: For the history of of the medieval book trade in Paris the most comprehensive
study of the extensive archival material is Richard and Mary Rouse's Manuscripts and
their Makers. Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200-1500 (2 vols., 2000).
● 2.G.2. : "Venice was a major centre of glass production, and by the end of the thirteenth
century eyeglasses had certainly become an object of general use there, as we can tell
from an ordinance dated 2 April 1300 aimed at makers of glass and crystal. It prohibited
them from perpetrating a fraud that must have become widespread: 'acquiring or causing
to acquired, and selling or causing to be sold, ordinary lenses of colourless glass, under
the pretense that they are crystal, for example buttons, handles, discs for kegs and for
the eyes ('roidi de botacelis et da ogli'), tablets for altar pictures and crosses, and
magnifying glasses ('lapides ad legendum'). The penalty was a fine and the smashing of
the fraudulent object. The precise distinction made in the document between eyeglasses
and magnifying glasses establishes clearly just what each of the named objects is, and
since words preserve their own past like fossils preserved in amber, I note that the term
Brille, which means eyeglasses in German, is derived from berillium, the medieval latin
word for crystal (Frugoni, Inventions of the Middle Ages [2007] 7 and footnote 25).
● 2.G.3.: Morrison, "From Sacred to Secular: The Origins of History Illumination in France,"
Imagining the Past in France. History in Manuscript Painting, 1250-1500, Morrison &
Hedeman, eds. (2010) 22. This quote is taken from the author's summary of points made
with specific examples, and beautifully illustrated in this chapter.
● 2.G.4. : "Paper seems to have advanced less rapidly in Europe than it had advanced
either in China or in the Arabic world. The European parchment with which paper had to
 compete was a far better writing material than either bamboo slips or papyrus.
Furthermore, there were few in Europe who read, and the demand for a cheaper writing
material, until the advent of printing, was small. While it was the coming of paper that
made the invention of printing possible, it was the invention of printing that made the use
of paper general. After Europe began to print, first from blocks and then from type, paper
quickly took its place as the one material for writing as well as for printing, though,
strange to say, the first paper mill in England was not set up until seventeen years after
Caxton began to print at Westminster" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed
[1955] 137-38).
● 2.G.5: “In the twelfth century the principal apparatus for the academic reader was the
gloss, and the principal developments in the mise-en-page of the book in the twelfth
century centred on the presentation of the gloss. Inherited material--the auctoritates
[authorities]--was organized in such a way as to make it accessible alongside the text to
be studied. During the course of the twelfth century the content of the gloss to the Bible
became stabilized and producers of books introduced refinements of presentation
culminating in the layout of copies of what are probably the most highly developed of
glossed books, the commentaries of Peter Lombard on the Psalter and the Pauline
Epistles. The whole process of indicating text, commentary, and sources was
incorporated into the design of the page, presumably by a process of careful alignment
marked out beforehand in the exemplar. The full text of the Psalter or Epistles was
disposed in a larger, more formal version of twelfth-century script in conveniently sited
columns, and the size of the columns was determined by the length of the commentary
on that particular part of the text. In the commentary itself the lemmata were underlined
in red. Each of the auctores [authors] quoted in the commentary was identified by name
in the margin, again in red, and the extent of the quotation was also marked. As the final
refinement each of the auctores was given a symbol consisting of dots or lines and dots
which was placed both against the name in the margin, and against the beginning of the
auctoritats or quotation in the body of the commentary. The practice of indicating sources
in the margin derived from earlier manuscripts is here systematized, and becomes the
ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes (Parkes, “The Influence of the
Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” Alexander and
Gibson (eds) Medieval Learning and Literature. Essays presented to Richard William
Hunt [1976] 116-17).
● 3.1: Daly, Co ntributions to a History of of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle
Ages (1967) 25. See also Blum, Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of
Bibliography . Trans. H. H. Wellisch (1991).
● 3.4: “Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and
Manuscripts (1991) 229.
● 3.6: In January 2011 a university in Virginia offered to pack up and send a set of the 756
folio volumes of Mansell's National Union Catalogue of Pre-1956 Imprints to any
institution that would be willing to pay the freight. I doubt if there were any takers.