The Book
on the Bookshelf
By
Henry
Petroski
For those
who appreciate a historical perspective on books, you may appreciate reading The Book on the Bookshelf. Below are selected excerpts that are of
interest to me – and hopefully are to you as well.
1.
“The
stories of the evolution of the book and the bookshelf truly are inseparable,
and both are examples in the evolution of technology. More than literary factors, technological
factors – those relating to materials, function, economy, and use – have shaped
the book and the furniture upon which it rests. The evolution of the bookshelf
is thus paradigmatic in the history of technology. But because technology does not exist
independent of the social and cultural environments in which it is embedded and
which it in turn significantly influences, the history of technological
artifact like the book or the bookshelf cannot be understood fully without also
addressing its seemingly non-technological aspects.”
2.
“In
ancient times, books did not exist as we know them today. Roman writings were turned into rolls or
scrolls, mostly of papyrus, which were termed volumina. It is from the
Latin singular voluminum that our
English word “volume” comes. Both the
width and unrolled length of a scroll varied, as do the height and “length” of
a book today. On average, a scroll may
have been from 9 to 11 inches across, and the total length of a volume could be
in excess of 20 or 30 feet, with a given work occupying several rolls or
volumes.”
“Greek scrolls were similar; it has been
estimated that Homer’s Iliad, for example, would have filled about a dozen
rolls, and a reconstructed first – or second-century version of the complete
work occupies “nearly three hundred running feet of papyrus.” Had the words had spaces between them, as
they do in all modern books, another 30 feet of papyrus might have been
required. “It is extraordinary that so
simple a device as the separation of words should never have become general
until after the invention of printing,” but such an observation just reinforces
how accustomed we have become to practices that once were far from obvious or
necessary. Wordstruntogether are foreign
to our eyes, but “with a little practice, it is not so difficult to read an
undivided text as might be supposed.”
3.
“The
Latin or Greek volume was read from left to right, and when the scroll was held
in the hands, the already-read portion was often rolled up in the left hand
while the still-to-be-read text was unrolled from the right, not unlike the way
we handle the pages of a book being read today.
Sometimes the finished part of the volume was collected behind the
scroll, in the way some people fold the pages of a magazine behind it, but more
commonly both the read and unread text were rolled up and unrolled on the same
side of the scroll. The former
configuration is commonly seen today in schlock printing, the latter in the way
blueprints might be unrolled at a construction site. However oriented, scrolling on computer screens
takes its name from the way scrolls worked, and no matter the manner in which
it was read, when a scroll was finished it would have to be rewound to be read
again, very much as with a modern videotape after it is viewed.”
4.
“The
library at Alexandria, which was founded around 300 B.C. as a repository for
copies of all the books in the world, is believed to have held hundreds of
thousands of scrolls at one time. Whenever a ship came into port, its scrolls
were copied for the library. One story, perhaps apocryphal, has the works of
Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus borrowed from Athens in order to make
copies for Alexandria. According to the
account, when the copies were completed, it was they that were sent back to
Greece, with the original scrolls being kept in Egypt.”
5. “By
the early centuries of the Christian era, bookshelves had to accommodate, in
addition to scrolls, a growing number of bound manuscripts, or codices, which
in time would displace scrolls as the preferred format for books. The codex, named for the fact that it was
covered with wood (codex means “tree trunk” in Latin), and which led to the
term “code” in a legal context, was made by folding over flat sheets of papyrus
or parchment and seeing them together into a binding. This had several distinct advantages over the
scroll. Where an entire scroll might
have to be unrolled to find a passage near the end, the relevant page could be
turned to immediately in the codex. Also,
writing in a scroll was normally on the side only, whereas the codex lent
itself to the use of both sides of the leaf.
“The codex evolved from the tablets
made of wood or ivory that in classical times were hinged together to form what
might be described as a portable writing surface. Tax collectors and others who needed to make
notations while standing or while sitting on a horse would have found rolls
unmanageable. Not only did scrolls have
to be kept from returning to the natural, rolled-up position, but they also
needed a hard surface backing them. In
comparison, the handheld tablet was ideally suited for note-taking. It could be immediately opened to the desired
place, and it presented its own hard surface on which to write. The writing was
often done with a stylus on a prepared or impressionable surface. Rather than needing a third limb to hold an
inkpot, everything could be done easily with two hands. When the task was done, the tablet could be
tied or clasped shut to protect its contents, and carried securely. Some tablets had hollowed-out “pages” filled
with wax, so that after a day’s notes were transcribed to a more permanent
record, as to a scroll, the impressions in the wax could be smoothed out with
the flat end of the same stylus that had been used to make them, and the fresh
tablet book was ready for another day of note-taking.”
6. “For
a long time papyrus was the medium of choice.
The word is believed to be of Egyptian origin, as is the plant. The Greeks referred to papyrus as byblos, after Byblus, the Phoenician
city that was a center of papyrus exploration.
Hence we have the Greek word for book, biblion, which in turn gave us the English word “bible,” “The
Book.”
7. “Vellum
was another alternative to papyrus.
Although vellum and parchment are often confused in usage, they are,
strictly speaking, distinct materials.
Vellum, etymologically related to “veal,” is made from calfskin, though
the Latin term relates to the hide of sheep and other animals, and even of
fishes, have been used for the purpose of making a material for writing upon,”
with stillborn lambs and calves having provided “some of the finest and
thinnest” material. In the final
analysis, vellum and parchment proved to be more durable than papyrus. Unfortunately, the animal-derived material
did not come easily, for “one sheep yields no more than a single sheet (two
leaves) for a folio book.” Thus, “a very
large flock of sheep” might have to be slaughtered to obtain the parchment
needed for a single codex.”
8. “With
the exception of the continued use of the scroll in the practice of religion
and for legal purposes in a country like Britain, where there remains a Master
of the Rolls, the codex in time did drive out the scroll – general texts being
copies from rolls into codex form as early as the fourth century – and thus
shelves and armaria came typically to contain only volumes more recognizable
today as books. With the increased
number of books with which libraries of all kinds had to deal – and collections
always do seem to expand – furniture to hold the books multiplied and grew larger. Armaria generally retained their form of
being essentially what today we might call cupboards or wardrobes, and
increasingly in the Middle Ages they were kept locked or otherwise secured.
“Security was necessary, of course,
because every book was produced by hand.
Each letter, word, sentence, paragraph, page – each entire volume – was
laboriously executed by a scribe, either from another manuscript or from the
dictation of a lead scribe who presided over a stable of book producers, much
as a master may have supervised the galley slaves rowing an ancient trireme.”
9. “That
is what makes the history of technology interesting and relevant, it not only
teaches us about the way things used to be done; it also gives us perspective
on how things are done today – and how they most likely will be done n the
future.”
10.
“Setting
moveable type – letter by letter, word by word, line by line, page by page –
was certainly little different than copying out a manuscript, but once that
type was set, its reverse image could be inked and pressed time after time
after time onto blank sheets of paper and transform them in one fell swoop into
printed pages that could be gathered into books. The essential technology to do this was in
place by the middle of the fifteenth century, thanks to Johannes Gutenberg’s
innovative method of casting metal type and his development of an ink that
would adhere to it and to paper, which enabled Gutenberg to typeset, print, and
publish his 42-line Bible in Mainz, Germany, in the early-to-mid 1450s. All
books that were produced by this new technology up to the year 1501 are known
as incunabula, which is Latin for “things in the cradle,” and an incunabulum is
an individual book that came out of the infancy of printing. The Latin was Englished in the mid-nineteenth
century to “incunable,” with the straightforward plural “incunables,” a word
that replaced the older English term “fifteeners” for books printed in the
fifteenth century.
“Incunabula, being books of a transitional
period, often owed much of their appearance to manuscripts, including multiple
columns of text per page and initial letters added by hand or printed in a
contrasting color of ink. Estimates
vary, but the total number of incunabula that survived to the nineteenth
century has been thought to be between fifteen thousand and twenty
thousand. The number of each title
printed varied, as it does today, according to expected sales, but several
hundred copies often constituted an edition.
“Unlike in the Middle Ages, when “a great
book might be available in a hundred manuscript copies, and read at most by a
thousand people,” after the middle of the fifteenth century a book “could be
available in thousands of copies and read by hundreds of thousands of
people.” It has been estimated that in
the sixteenth century in Europe alone there were more than one hundred thousand
different books printed. If it is conservatively assumed that there were on
average as few as one hundred copies of each book (print runs of several
hundred were not uncommon in the fifteenth century), ten million individual
copies of books were available to Europeans.
(Some estimates are ten times this.)
Thus, by one very conservative estimate, “the power of the printed word
increased a hundredfold the power of the written word.” Furthermore, more books meant more readers,
which translated into more writers, which in turn led to the production of
still more books. And more and more
books meant an increasing need to find more and different ways to store and
display them, including in shops where they were sold.”
“There’s no book so bad that something good may not be found in it.”
--Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
“When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do – well, that’s Memoirs.”
--Will Rogers, Autobiography (1949)
“Most of today’s books have an air of having been written in one day from books read the night before.”
--Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort, Maximes et pensees (1805)
“Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.”
--William Hazlitt, ‘The Plain Speaker’, On the Conversation of Authors (1846)
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