Origins of the book Writers in the
Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as
scrolls; these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern wine rack. Court records and notes were written on
wax tablets, while important documents were written on
papyrus or
parchment. The modern English word "book" comes from the
Proto-Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded. The book was not needed in ancient times, as many early Greek texts—scrolls—were 30 pages long, which were customarily folded accordion-fashion to fit into the hand. Roman works were often longer, running to hundreds of pages. The
Ancient Greek word for book was , meaning "to cut". The Egyptian
Book of the Dead was a massive 200 pages long and was used in funerary services for the deceased.
Torah scrolls, editions of first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Israelite (or Hebrew) Bible, were—and still are—also held in special holders when read. Scrolls can be rolled in one of two ways. The first method is to wrap the scroll around a single core, similar to a modern roll of paper towels. While simple to construct, a single core scroll has a major disadvantage: in order to read text at the end of the scroll, the entire scroll must be unwound. This is partially overcome in the second method, which is to wrap the scroll around two cores, as in a Torah. With a double scroll, the text can be accessed from both beginning and end, and the portions of the scroll not being read can remain wound. This still leaves the scroll a sequential-access medium: to reach a given page, one generally has to unroll and re-roll many other pages.
Early book formats containing about ten codices depicted in the () In addition to the scroll,
wax tablets were commonly used in Antiquity as a writing surface.
Diptychs and later
polyptych formats were often hinged together along one edge, analogous to the spine of modern books, as well as a folding concertina format. Such a set of simple wooden boards sewn together was called by the Romans a
codex (pl. codices)—from the Latin word , meaning "the trunk" of a tree, around the first century AD. Two ancient polyptychs, a pentaptych and octoptych, excavated at
Herculaneum employed a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on thongs or cords. At the turn of the first century, a kind of folded parchment notebook called in Latin became commonly used for writing throughout the
Roman Empire. This term was used by the
Roman poet Martial. Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of
Saturnalia. According to T. C. Skeat, "in at least three cases and probably in all, in the form of codices" and he theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then "must have spread rapidly to the Near East". In his discussion of one of the earliest pagan parchment codices to survive from
Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Eric Turner seems to challenge Skeat's notion when stating "its mere existence is evidence that this book form had a prehistory" and that "early experiments with this book form may well have taken place outside of Egypt". Early intact codices were discovered at
Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Consisting of primarily Gnostic texts in Coptic, the books were mostly written on
papyrus, and while many are single-
quire, a few are multi-quire. Codices were a significant improvement over papyrus or vellum scrolls in that they were easier to handle. However, despite allowing writing on both sides of the leaves, they were still foliated—numbered on the leaves, like the Indian books. The idea spread quickly through the early churches, and the word "Bible" comes from the town where the Byzantine monks established their first
scriptorium,
Byblos, in modern Lebanon. The idea of numbering each side of the page—Latin , "to fasten"—appeared when the text of the individual testaments of the Bible were combined and text had to be searched through more quickly. This book format became the preferred way of preserving manuscript or printed material.
Development The
codex-style book, using sheets of either
papyrus or
vellum (before the spread of Chinese
papermaking outside of
Imperial China), was invented in the
Roman Empire during the 1st century AD. First described by the poet
Martial from
Roman Spain, it largely replaced earlier writing mediums such as
wax tablets and
scrolls by the year 300 AD. By the 6th century AD, the scroll and wax tablet had been completely replaced by the codex in the
Western world. Western books from the fifth century onwards were bound between hard covers, with pages made from parchment folded and sewn onto strong cords or ligaments that were attached to wooden boards and covered with leather. Since early books were exclusively handwritten on handmade materials, sizes and styles varied considerably, and there was no standard of uniformity. Early and medieval codices were bound with flat spines, and it was not until the fifteenth century that books began to have the rounded spines associated with hardcovers today. Because the vellum of early books would react to humidity by swelling, causing the book to take on a characteristic wedge shape, the wooden covers of medieval books were often secured with straps or clasps. These straps, along with metal bosses on the book's covers to keep it raised off the surface that it rests on, are collectively known as furniture. The earliest surviving European bookbinding is the
St Cuthbert Gospel of about 700, in red goatskin, now in the
British Library, whose decoration includes raised patterns and coloured tooled designs. Very grand manuscripts for liturgical rather than library use had covers in
metalwork called
treasure bindings, often studded with gems and incorporating
ivory relief panels or enamel elements. Very few of these have survived intact, as they have been broken up for their precious materials, but a fair number of the ivory panels have survived, as they were hard to recycle; the divided panels from the
Codex Aureus of Lorsch are among the most notable. The 8th century
Vienna Coronation Gospels were given a new gold relief cover in about 1500, and the
Lindau Gospels (now
Morgan Library, New York) have their original cover from around 800. Luxury medieval books for the library had leather covers decorated, often all over, with
tooling (impressed decoration), and often small metal embellishments such as bosses and corners called furniture. Medieval tooling showed animals and figures as well as the vegetal and geometric designs that would later dominate book cover decoration. Until the end of the period books were not usually stood up on shelves in the modern way. The most functional books were bound in plain white
vellum over boards, and had a brief title hand-written on the spine. Techniques for
gold tooling were imported from the Islamic world in the 15th century, and thereafter the gold-tooled leather binding has remained the conventional choice for high quality bindings for collectors, though cheaper bindings that only used gold for the title on the spine, or not at all, were always more common. Although the arrival of the printed book vastly increased the number of books produced in Europe, it did not in itself change the various styles of binding used, except that vellum became much less used.
Introduction of paper Although early, coarse
hempen paper had existed in China during the
Western Han period (202 BC – 9 AD), the
Eastern-Han Chinese court eunuch
Cai Lun ( – 121 AD) introduced the first significant improvement and standardization of papermaking by adding essential new materials into its composition. book board from a book published in London in 1872
Bookbinding in medieval China replaced traditional Chinese writing supports such as
bamboo and wooden slips, as well as
silk and paper scrolls. The evolution of the codex in
China began with folded-leaf
pamphlets in the 9th century AD, during the late
Tang dynasty (618–907), improved by the 'butterfly' bindings of the
Song dynasty (960–1279), the wrapped back binding of the
Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the stitched binding of the
Ming (1368–1644) and
Qing dynasties (1644–1912), and finally the adoption of Western-style bookbinding in the 20th century (coupled with the European
printing press that replaced
traditional Chinese printing methods). The initial phase of this evolution, the accordion-folded palm-leaf-style book, most likely came from
India and was introduced to China via
Buddhist missionaries and scriptures. With the arrival (from the East) of
rag paper manufacturing in Europe in the late
Middle Ages and the use of the
printing press beginning in the mid-15th century, bookbinding began to standardize somewhat, but page sizes still varied considerably.. Paper leaves also meant that heavy wooden boards and metal furniture were no longer necessary to keep books closed, allowing for much lighter pasteboard covers. The practice of rounding and backing the spines of books to create a solid, smooth surface and "shoulders" supporting the "text block" against its covers facilitated the upright storage of books and titling on spine. This became common practice by the close of the 16th century but was consistently practised in Rome as early as the 1520s. In the early sixteenth century, the Italian printer
Aldus Manutius realized that personal books would need to fit in saddle bags and thus produced books in the smaller formats of
quartos (one-quarter-size pages) and
octavos (one-eighth-size pages).
Leipzig, a prominent center of the German book-trade, in 1739 had 20 bookshops, 15 printing establishments, 22 book-binders and three type-foundries in a population of 28,000 people. In the German book-distribution system of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the end-user buyers of books "generally made separate arrangements with either the publisher or a bookbinder to have printed sheets bound according to their wishes and their budget". The reduced cost of books facilitated cheap lightweight Bibles, made from tissue-thin oxford paper, with floppy covers, that resembled the early
Arabic Qurans, enabling missionaries to take portable books with them around the world, and modern wood glues enabled the addition of paperback covers to simple glue bindings.
Forms of book binding on the
Horne Book, Denmark, 13th century The history of book-binding methods features: •
Coptic binding: a method of sewing leaves/pages together •
Ethiopian binding •
Long-stitch bookbinding • Islamic bookcover features a flap on the back cover that encloses the front when the book is closed. • Wooden-board binding •
Limp vellum binding • Calf binding ("leather-bound") • Paper case binding • In-board cloth binding • Cased cloth binding •
Embroidered binding •
Bradel binding •
Traditional Chinese and Korean bookbinding and Japanese stab binding •
Girdle binding •
Anthropodermic bibliopegy (rare) bookbinding in
human skin. •
Secret Belgian binding (or "crisscross binding"), invented in 1986. ==Modern commercial binding==