The History of THE
BOOK in 100 Books
The Complete Story,
From Egypt to E-book
by Roderick Cave &
Sara Ayad
Below
are excerpts form a wonderful book that creatively shares the history of books:
From
The Foreword by Sidney E. Berger & Michele V. Cloonan
“His
knowledge of the book in all its manifestations, along with its place in
history, is practically unparalleled…
“There
are, of course, the standard entries in a volume of this sort: texts written on cave walls and animal bones,
clay tablets and palm leaves, bamboo-strip books, the Iliad, Beowulf, medieval
illuminated manuscripts (naturally including the Book of Kells), the Gutenberg Bible, the Nuremberg Chronicle and so forth.
But we also get an Andean khipu from Peru (predating the Incas), papyrus
scrolls, the Tripitaka Koreana and the Ethiopian Bible – better
known as the Garima Gospels – to name just four examples….
“Clearly
this is a special compilation, containing an extraordinary list of important –
though often overlooked – books in a huge range of areas of scholarly and
popular interests.”
Introduction
“Perhaps
the popularity of e-books is rising:
perhaps the printed-paper book will disappear (just as the clay tablets
of Babylon and the papyrus scrolls of ancient. Egypt have long since dropped
out of use).
“We
are by no means persuaded that the future form of the book will be entirely
electronic; what is certain is that, over the past 10,000 plus years of
history, humankind has developed ways of preserving and transmitting
information which are deeply embedded in our sub consciousness.”
One
Word, Many Surfaces
“For
writing surfaces, mankind used stone, clay tablets, bark, leaves, papyrus,
bones, animal skins and paper, and many other media.”
One
Need, Many Solutions
“Almost
unconsciously, we recognize the interplay between the medium and the message it
carries. The history of the book is not a single development from a single
source. Many societies developed their own writing systems. The availability of clay in Mesopotamia,
papyrus in Egypt and lontar palms in India and Indonesia – plus the variety of
writing surfaces that were available in China and Southeast Asia – enabled all
these areas to develop their own systems of writing and bookmaking.
“These
developments occurred in different places and at different times, partly
because of the continuing inventiveness and ingenuity of humankind.”
The
Biggest Books Ever Written
“Perhaps
because of its long tradition of both literacy and centralized government,
China has frequently produced massive collections of books of importance, more
like complete collections of the information content of libraries than the
summaries usual in Western encyclopedias.
Soon after Emperor Yongle came to the throne, in 1403, he commissioned a
large compilation on the whole range of knowledge, from religion, science,
technology, astronomy, medicine and agriculture, through to drama, art, history
and literature. Over 2,000 scholars were
put to work analyzing and editing over 8,000 texts, completing their task in
five years.
“To
write out the text, completed in 1408, the scribes used more than 370 million
characters, filling over 11,000 volumes….Over the next 400 years, fire, war and
looting reduced the holding of the three manuscripts to a mere 400 volumes,
scattered in libraries and museums around the world…
“Learning
from the past, the emperor Qianlong had seven manuscript copies made, and the
scribes’ work, completed in 1782, filled nearly 37,000 volumes, using 800
million characters. The devastation of
wars has reduced them to four surviving sets, held in China and Taiwan.”
Monumental
Korean Undertaking
Korea
was the first country outside China to adopt printing and was a leader in
developing printing from type. Its most
famous book is the Buddhist Eighty Thousand Tripitaka (the three main canons of
Buddhist scriptures) of the 13th century CE.”
The
Coming of Information Science
“The
overabundance of books and other publications was becoming clear in Europe, as
in America. One of the most significant
developments came from Belgium, where two lawyers established the International
Institute of Bibliography (IIB) in 1895, transformed in 1937 into the
International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID); it was
responsible for elaborating Dewey’s classification into the Universal Decimal
Classification. The IIB had grand plans
for a universal bibliography, and by 1914 it had collected over 11 million
entries for its Universal Bibliographic Repertory, kept on cards. As its name change suggests, the FID was much
more interested in individual items of information than in books; their ways of
trying to improve information service (including the use of microforms) were
vital for the later development of computer-based systems.
“The
influence of the FID was marked and was behind many of the changes in what was
coming to be called “Information Science.”
The
Bible
“Described
as “the single most important scholarly publication of the Spanish
Renaissance,” the Complutensian Polyglot Bible is famed for its editing, the
success of its Greek typeface, which has been influential on type designers
since the late 19th century.
“The
classic verse epics of the Iliad and Odyssey, Petronius’ Satyricon or Apuleius’
The Golden Ass – or even the medieval
Beowulf – are often described as the
ancestors of the novel. But the first prose
book, often regarded as the earliest psychological novel, is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
(in English, Lady Murasaki), born in 978 CE and died c. 1014 or 1025.”
The
Oldest Printed Book of All
“The
Diamond Sutra is one of the key
religious books of the sayings of the Buddha. It was first translated from
Sanskrit to Chinese in 401 CE. The sutra’s name came from an Indian term, a
symbolic ritual object that symbolizes the indestructibility of a diamond and
the force of a thunderbolt. Believers
though they gained merit by copying the text; and this copy was made by Wang
Jie on May 11, 868 CE. It is the oldest
surviving dated book, printed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg started
printing in Europe.”
Cuneiform
Tablets
“Cuneiform writing on clay tablets had a
very long life. Many of the earliest
books including medical, legal, mathematical and others were in cuneiform and
the oldest epic of all is the tale of Gilgamesh and the Flood.”
The
Book Trade Develops
Chinese
government was highly centralized, and its emperors (or their officials)
planned on a grand scale. As with many
Western rulers, there was often a wish to bring books under control, through
both censorship and patronage. Attempts
at all-comprehensive collections of religious, literary and scientific texts
were made, the most famous being the Yongle
Dadian (The Great Canon of the Yongle Emperor) of 1403-1408 CE, probably
the biggest work ever produced (see pp 36-37).”
Origins
of a Childrens’ Classic
Some
of Aesop’s fables were rewritten as Aisopeia by Demetrius Phalereus (c. 350-280
BCE), famous for his part in the founding of the Alexandrian Library under
Ptolemy I Soter. But Demetrius’ version
of the fables perished; today, we rely instead on a text by Valerious Babrius,
who lived some time before 200 CE. The
earliest fragments of Greek papyrus manuscripts of the fables were rapidly
followed by other manuscripts, in Latin and many other languages. Editions of Aesop’s fables have been printed
frequently, from the earliest days after Gutenberg’s printing press to today.”
A
Timeless Epic
“If
asked to name the most important literary work of all time, many people would
name Homer’s Iliad. Or possibly the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer: although the survival rate of
Egyptian papyrus fragments of them (454 bits of the Iliad preserved against about 140 of the Odyssey) suggests that the Iliad’s
Iron Age reminiscence of Bronze Age combat was always favored.
“Homer’s
epic was believed to have been composed between 750-650 BCE, though some
authorities date it much earlier to the 12th century BCE; but it is
accepted that the texts of the Iliad
and the Odyssey were standardized in
processes that have continued ever since.”
The
Foundation of Pharmacology
“With
the Hippocratic Oath, the history of medicine is conventionally held to start
with Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460-370 BCE).
Medical practice depended largely on preparations made from plants, and
knowing which plants could cure (or kill) was vital. In prehistory, such knowledge was passed
orally, but Pedanus Diascorides systematized this information in his book known
as De Materia Medica, written about
30-50 CE. An army surgeon attached to
Roman forces in Nero’s time; Dioscorides traveled widely in the Middle
East. He indentified the pharamacological
properties and remedial effects of over 100 plants previously unknown to Roman
and Greek physicians, and he also discussed over 500 other plants that were
probably used earlier during Alexander the Great’s conquests.
“De Materia Medica became a standard
text used by herb gatherers and pharmacists for over 1,500 years, spawning many
manuscripts (and later printed versions) created all over the Western world –
and in Arab lands even more than in Europe.”
The
Father of Mapping
“Born
in Alexandria, Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus c. 90-168 CE) was one of the most
important Greek scientists, whose work on astronomy was to control European
thought for over 1,500 years. Ptolemy’s
work in astronomy and geography deeply influenced Arabic scholarship in the
work of the geographer al-Masudi (d. 956 CE) and others. It was largely because of their work that
Ptolemy’s manuscripts survived.
“The
Geographia was in several parts, the
first dealing with the problems of mapping our spherical globe on a flat
surface. Ptolemy invented the concepts
of latitude and longitude, and his careful and detailed records of 8,000 places
allowed later cartographers to plot these no their own maps. His collection of place names and their
coordinates reveals the geographic knowledge of the Roman Empire in the second
century. Apparently, a large-scale
Ptolemean map was displayed in Autun (France) in the fourth century.”
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