Books, as we know them, inhabit our homes, and affect large parts of our cultural habitat. Text is reliant on readers, and the relationship between the text and the financial aspects of book production gives rise to extensive discussions and strife between authors and publishers, between critics and authors, between the publishers themselves and even between the authors and the readers.

Growing up without access to books is just a thought experiment for many, including myself. Many take them for granted. So many books are printed that each year thousands, if not millions of them are burned, in order to regulate the market.

In most instances the book is a vehicle for the text, a vessel or a servant, or in the words of Beatrice Warde, a transparent crystal glass where one may judge the wine simply because the vessel doesn’t intrude upon the content:

Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art.

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Certain types of books call for a treatment beyond the conventional, which applies particularly to special limited editions. Experimental books also have their place in the outskirts of the flora of books, but they are equally dependant on the skill and knowledge of the designer as regular editions. This applies to everything from typographic treatment to binding and print quality.

The Book, the codex form, has its roots in the scroll, like the Jewish Talmud or the Egyptian papyri sheets that were made into a long sheet and then rolled up. The book that we are familiar with today originated in Roman times. Two wooden plates (codex; lat. chunk of wood) were filled with wax and inscribed by a stylus (a pointed metal stick), and this would make a temporary container for the text. When the wax was rubbed by the round end of the stylus, it heated, and the text disappeared. This is called a diptych. The scribes wrote on papyrus or parchment (prepared animal skin), folded the sheets and put one on top of another. It is easy to imagine how these could be stitched together, and by putting these stitched sections between two wooden boards they were well protected. This type of binding, where the  sections are open in the back and sewn onto wooden boards with the spine exposed, is called a coptic binding. This was how the book, or codex, was born.

The transition from roll to codex happened between the 2nd and 4th centuries. The switch form papyri to parchment meant that books became more durable. Incidentally the word parchment has its name from the city Pergamon, which was a thriving center of parchment production during the Hellenistic period. Pliny the Elder’s story that parchment was ‘invented’ in Pergamon because Alexandria had monopolised papyrus it false, as parchment was in wide use in Anatolia and elsewhere long before this time.

The advantages of the codex over the roll were many: it was handier, more capacious, easier to consult, and it may have cost rather less to produce. Reference was made still easier by numbering the pages, and the addition of a list of contents guarded against forged interpolations and other interference with the text. These were important considerations in the days when much of life revolved around the authoritative texts of the Scriptures and the Code [between 2nd and 4th cent.]. The importance of the codex for religion and law is obvious. It had a relevance for literary texts too: a book which could hold the contents of several rolls meant that a corpus of related texts, or what was considered to be the best of an author’s work, could be put under one cover, and this was attractive to an age which was inclined to trim its intellectual heritage to a manageable form. 

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Another advantage of the book concerns its physical appearance. A book is easy to carry, and takes up little room even when it is read. It is much easier to leaf back and forth in a book than in a scroll. The book has so many advantages that in principle it has existed in its present form since mid 2nd century AD. And there is plenty of software that mimics the structure of the book, to make the screen display more book-like.

The libraries of Alexandria (from 300 BC), Pergamon (from 200 BC) and the first Roman library (39 BC) collected and kept the rare written records of old times, and the total destruction of the library of Alexandria exemplifies the vulnerability of scrolls and codices at this time. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400s, books continued their journey through Europe, helped by Christian monestaries, scribes and libraries.

The copying of texts by hand is no longer an everyday matter, and the calligraphy and scribal practice that was once an essential part of book production now has a narrow commercial use, although still alive as an art form, and as an underlying force in the design of type. But pre-Gutenberg this was the way that texts were spread. No calligraphy; no text. The often mesmerising illuminated initials often take the attention away from the text itself, even though the main text may have been written by a very skilled, anonymous scribe. We easily forget how vulnerable literature is to typos and mistakes in the copying process.