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The Early History of Book History

Prehistories of the Book

Historical appreciation of book production and reception began early. In the first century ce, Pliny the Elder, having seen documents written on papyrus 200 years earlier, observed that upon papyrus 'the immortality of human beings depends'.1 Papyrus had by then been a common writing material for 3,000 years.

Words matter to those writing the history of graphic communication. The word paper (papier in French and German) itself derives from the Latin, papyrus and the Greek p?p???? (papuros). From the Greek ß?ß??? (bublos), a word said to derive from the name of the Phoenician city of Byblos, biblos came to mean the roll made from papyrus, and then a codex book and the Bible, but other bibliographical terms also descend from the ancients. The charta, relates Pliny, comprised a papyrus roll of no more than twenty sheets or about 4.5 metres. By 537-8 Cassiodorus was reporting that 'antiquity gave the name of liber to the books of the ancients; for even today we call the bark of green wood liber'.2

Further language study is illuminating. 'Biblos', 'volumen' and 'liber' could all mean book in the sense of the division of a work, where a work was too long to fit into one papyrus roll. The Books of the Bible are its divisions. The standard way of reading was to unroll or, in the Latin, explicare, 'to unfold'. Because of its resemblance to a block of wood, the tablet came to be called a codex (from the Latin caudex 'a tree trunk'), a term certainly used by the poet Martial (40-104 ce). There is a similar association in the Latin liber, which originally meant 'bark'. Such comments tempt us to construct a bibliographical chronology. In 84-6 ce, for example, when rolls dominated, Martial noted that a parchment codex was convenient for travel and storage space. Some scrolls unfolded vertically (resembling the 'scrolling down' textual reading of the modern computer screen), but the more general horizontal scroll, with divided-up text, looked more like the codex. Many note that the earliest full description of a scroll is by Catullus (b. c.84 bce) when he rebuked a fellow poet for writing not upon an erased flat sheet but on rolled and polished carta regia with ivory handles wrapped in red parchment and tied with red thongs.3

Some 200 years later, the legal scholar Ulpian noted that codices were now acceptable and he anticipated much later reflective, even romantic observations such as those by Cassiodorus (537 ce) who, looking back, mused that papyrus remained unequalled for preserving great thought:

For previously, the sayings of the wise and the ideas of our ancestors were in danger. For how could you quickly record words which the resistant hardness of bark made it almost impossible to set down? .The tempting beauty of paper .opens a field for the elegant with its white surface; its help is always plentiful; and it is so pliant that it can be rolled together, although it is unfolded to a great length. Its joints are seamless, its parts united; it is the snowy pith of a green plant, a writing surface which takes black ink for its ornament; on it, with letters exalted .there discourse is stored in safety, to be heard for ever with consistency.4

The roll was stored upright in a capsa, or book box, horizontally on a shelf, or in a pigeonhole. Most works required more than one roll kept together, and owners and early librarians placed valuable rolls in a chest or wrapped them in a protective sleeve of parchment tied with thongs. Such physical limitations - the length of the roll and the number of rolls that could be stored together - often defined the divisions of literature, but also brought criticism of such filing systems. Title tags were often mislaid and citation from papyrus rolls proved difficult and often inaccurate.

Such discussion of material forms and of how codices were coming to be preferred to rolls accompanied an awareness of the risks threatening the preservation of books. In his rediscovered letter, Galen describes how a fire that ravaged the city of Rome in 192 ce affected books and their owners: 'when Philides the grammarian's books were destroyed in the fire, he wasted away and died as a result of discouragement and distress. What is more, for quite some time, people went around in black garments - thin and pale like mourners.'5 This European perspective, however, obscures even older descriptions and appreciation of the production and function of books. Until this point, in answering 'What is the History of the Book?', sustained discussion of printing has been deliberately withheld, not only to underscore the length and depth of book history before print, but in order to emphasize the rich and comparatively neglected history of books in Asia. As noted, greater study is required of the history of silk and bamboo books, but the invention of printing in East Asia also predated the invention of printing by movable type in Europe by 800 years. Printing supposedly began in China in 636 ce and definitely by 868. It is reasonable to expect therefore an earlier history of the book to have been developed, however different in its perspective or inspiration.

As many scholars in Europe and North America remind us - and most recently, Cynthia Brokaw, Peter Kornicki and Joseph McDermott - a great variety of global book culture technologies originated in China and East Asia. Like Assyrian cuneiform centuries before, Aramaic and Sanskrit, which developed from the much older Brahmi in South Asia, classical Chinese operated as the lingua franca of East Asia for two or more millennia. Just as Sanskrit carried practical learning and the edicts of authority, in both Korea and Japan classical Chinese was promoted as the language of government and the male elite, with particular reverence for Chinese classical books as virtuous sources in ethics and politics.6 Gender remained critical. In Korea before about 1800 literate men wrote in Chinese, whereas women depended on Korean.

Extracts from Chinese literature were also widely adopted as an exemplar of approved writing, so that from early medieval years the various cities and settlements of East Asia supported a relatively unified language and similar forms of textual production. Scribal and manuscript production and distribution did not simply predate printing but continued alongside its deployment and expansion. From the seventh century, however, Chinese and then Korean and Japanese artisans devised a number of different techniques based on different printing technologies: the carving of artisanal characters, xylography or woodblock printing and movable type made from earthenware, wood and metal. This style of printing proved appropriate for the multiple characters of Asian written languages in the same way that movable type supported simpler alphabets.

Xylography, more than metal moveable type, remained the predominant technology of print until the early twentieth century. Even in Korea, where metal movable type was developed by government officials, xylography was the more commonly used technology. In medieval China this form of woodblock printing sustained a great expansion in publishing. By the early modern period the major form of book manufacture was printing and one that was to hugely influence the book histories of Korea and Japan. The first printing in Japan comprised a style of woodblock impression (???, moku-hanga) intimately connected to belief, emotion and prayer.

Although under-researched, it appears that the complexity of early and medieval Asian book production and reception did not inspire attempts to write histories of book production and effects. Even more than in Europe, it seems that from what is known at present we should not over-estimate the development of book studies in ancient Asia. In the era of the first Chinese print revolution, few wrote about their own bibliographical history. This is also true of Korea, where by the early thirteenth century, artisans at the Korean court were experimenting with metal movable type. Nonetheless, we do have hints, in ways reminiscent of Renaissance and post-Reformation Europe, that the new technology was prized and very much associated with progressive ideals. The early rulers of the Korean Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), for example, were quick to recognize the value of printing in administration and governance. As a 1403 edict of King Taejong of Joseon ??? explained, 'if the country is to be governed well, it is essential that books be read widely .It is my desire to cast copper type so that we can print as many books as possible and have them made available widely.' Reflections on literacy also increased. Chinese scholars were, from an early period, interested in cataloguing books, and, in the first century ce, Liu Xin ?? developed the first cataloguing system. Later, many Chinese scholars worked on collating editions and developing principles of textual criticism, particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when printed books became more common. Even so, Chinese and...