1/12/2024 0 Comments Papyrus reed samll book![]() ![]() It was the first of several times that Christian interests would advance book technology. We do know that, by copying their scriptures in book form, Christians distinguished them from the "pagan" literature of Greeks and Romans, written on papyrus scrolls, and from the Jewish Bible, written on parchment scrolls. among early Christians, but we know little about how or why. The papyrus codex first gained acceptance sometime before 100 A.D. When the book did catch on, it was written on papyrus, not parchment. Nonetheless, Martial's publishing venture was a commercial failure. His own epigrams, Martial says, can be taken anywhere Livy's immense History of Rome fits comfortably in a small book. Martial particularly boasts of the books' compactness and portability. A year or two earlier, in a series of couplets entitled Gifts to Take Home, Martial had included a group of poems to accompany copies of standard authors such as Vergil and Livy in book form. In 86 A.D., the Roman poet Martial published the first two books of his epigrams with a poem telling readers that they could be purchased in books made from parchment. That development was immediately trumpeted in advertising. Soon, an enterprising book dealer was selling complete literary works copied in compact parchment books. Wooden tablets were cumbersome and not very portable, while notebooks made from parchment were small enough to fit in the hand. This use of parchment led to one of book technology's first miniaturization steps. During the 1st century A.D., the Romans replaced the leaves of wood with parchment, a writing surface made from treated animal skins. Often, these were pierced along the edge and strung together to create a booklike device called a codex, from the Latin for a tree trunk or stem. But for drafts, notes and other ephemera, they wrote on wooden tablets covered with erasable wax. Greeks and Roman wrote finished copies on papyrus scrolls. ![]() Papyrus scrolls also are large and cumbersome. Compare this to the speed of flipping through a book. ![]() You can spend a long time moving forward and backward, occasionally stopping to see where you are, before finding what you want. The main technological limitation of the scroll is well known to anyone who has tried to find a passage on a cassette or video tape. Papyrus sheets were not bound in books but pasted end to end into long strips and rolled to form scrolls. By the time Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C., papyrus was used throughout the Mediterranean world. Scribes wrote on papyrus with reed pens and ink made from soot mixed with gum. Laid in a crosshatch pattern, the stems are pressed and dried to form sheets. The Egyptians found something better - papyrus, the word, though not the material, from which we get "paper." Papyrus is made from the split stems of an aquatic reed of the same name. The Mesopotamians wrote on wet clay tablets with wedge-shaped styluses. By 3000 B.C., writing was being used to keep business records, promulgate laws and codify divine revelation in Mesopotamia and Egypt. As a medium of communication, the book arose almost 2,000 years ago in response to social and technological pressures, replacing an earlier technology - writing on scrolls, which had dominated the field for 3,000 years. Such change may excite or frighten us, but the book as a medium has survived many technological upheavals and likely will continue to do so. Many people feel that the book is an information technology being marginalized, if not replaced. On every side, the digital future bears down, demanding that we read not the printed page but the glowing screen. ![]()
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