From Scroll to Codex

The following are two excerpts from the Book_Arts-L listserv “Definition of the Artist's Book; What is a Book; BSO's (Book Shaped Objects); Art vs. Craft” A Discussion held March 1998.

I have copied them here (without alteration) because they are related directly to one of ART317’s topics (topic 1) from earlier this semester and they’re an interesting read.

"Thinking About Scrolls
So, next month there will be a solo show of my books at UCLA called "Toying With Books: Playing With Conventions". I'm working on the catalog for it and I'm very excited about how it is developing. When you open the cover so it lies flat, then start pushing it towards the center, the pages start advancing one at a time. It's really nifty. And, since is has covers and the dozen individual pages are attached to one side, I guess it fits most people's definition of a book. I got the idea from a 1954 manual by Victor Strauss called "Point of Purchase Cardboard Displays". I figured I was taking a 1950's idea and updating it to the 1990's. But I was surprised when I recently showed the model to a group of colleagues. One of them, Nancy Tomasko, immediately recognized a connection between my structure and an ancient Chinese scroll. Whoa! I thought to myself, a Chinese scroll? I don't think so. The next time the group got together, Nancy presented me with a file of documentation on a particular type of Chinese scroll called a "whirlwind binding". For this type of binding, anywhere from eight to 24 additional leaves are attached to the surface of the scroll. Each sheet is indented from the previous one for easy access. What a great idea: a scroll with pages! When it was used around the 9th century, it was a very acceptable type of book. I had never seen this structure before, yet there was a definite connection between it and the 20th century book I was producing. The point I'm trying to make is that all of us who love books are operating on an historical continuum. The structure that we call a book has changed drastically from what it was in the past, and it will change drastically in the future. Other subscribers have pointed out that our word "book" pre-dates the codex, our word "library" predates the introduction of papyrus, and Richard Miller cleverly alluded to "volume" being derived from "roll", as in a scroll. Rather than being locked in time, I've found it productive to be aware of historical models and to embrace them in my development as a book artist. It's not an either/or situation. There's room on my library shelves for all kinds of books. I feel that my life and my library have both been enriched by a broad definition of what constitutes a book. Thanks to Nancy Tomasko, I am posting a selection from "The Story of Chinese Books". It traces the development of the book in China from a scroll to a sutra binding (what today we call a concertina binding) to what we now call a codex. Notice that the author identifies a modified sutra binding as a "whirlwind binding". We're not the only ones who have had trouble agreeing on definitions! For those who are interested in a further discussion of scrolls, I invite you to visit my web page. Under the heading "What is a Book?" there is an essay I originally posted to the Book Arts List on October 5, 1996 called "Is the Scroll a Book?". It a further elaboration of my continuing fascination with this ancient book structure.
Ed (Hutchins)"

"From Scrolls to Leaves
The period of the Sui and Tang dynasties, when hand copying flourished, was also the period when the scroll and rod system reached its height and when beautiful bindings appeared. In the mid-9th century, however, books in scroll form were gradually replaced by books in leaf form. The scrolls were long--often several tens of feet--and rather troublesome to unroll. The process of looking up a single sentence in the text might require the unrolling of most of a scroll. During the Warring States Period and the Qin and Han dynasties scrolls caused few problems because there were few lengthy writings. But from the Sui and Tang dynasties onward, after a number of dictionaries had been published, the matter of looking up a word or a sentence was an oft-occurring necessity. The great inconvenience and inefficiency of rolling and unrolling became more and more of a problem. Some inventive person then decided that, instead of using the scroll form, a book might be made by folding the paper to form a pile in a rectangular shape. The front and back covers of such a book were made of strong, thick paper, sometimes dyed in colour or mounted on cloth for protection. This new form was called a "leaf binding", or "sutra binding". With this new kind of binding, a reader could easily turn to any leaf to look up a word or a sentence, without having to unroll the whole book. This was a great step forward in the development of books. Before long, however, this new form was also found to have some drawbacks. A long piece of folded paper could easily become unfolded and spread out. To avoid this, book makers added another sheet of paper to the folded pile. This was creased in the middle and one half of the sheet was pasted onto the first leaf and the other half was pasted onto the last leaf. The extra sheet held the pile together and prevented it from spreading out, while the leaves of the pile could still be turned forwards and backwards. (This came to be called a "whirlwind binding".) These two forms of binding appeared in the mid-9th century. They overcame the defects of the scroll and rod system, yet they had a disadvantage in the fact that the place where the paper was folded might break after a lapse of time. Disarrangement and loss of leaves then occurred unavoidably. The next step was to bind the separate sheets into a book. When this step was taken books bound as they are today were created.

The Story of Chinese Books, written by Liu Guojun and Zheng Rusi, translated by Zhou Yicheng. Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1985.
Ed (Hutchins)
QUEERBOOKS"

Illuminated Manuscripts

This topic has been very interesting. Illuminated manuscripts vary greatly, in terms of

· The period of time in which they were created and how that impacted upon them

· The styles in which they were created

· Who created them and why

· The method by which they were produced and reproduced

Three of the most interesting facets of illuminated manuscript production are

· How the colours and ink were made

· The production line format of reproducing some manuscripts

· The detail in the illustrations used in the manuscripts

I want to know more about

· The relevance of illuminated manuscripts to my course in graphic design in terms of the production and reproduction of (non-digital?) texts

· How page margin notes that were used and later trimmed off and how that’s similar to editors work done nowadays

· How the people involved in the (re)creation of illuminated manuscripts learnt their craft, comparing apprenticeships and other education today’s ‘tradespeople’ undergo.

· Whether or not the colour work in the illuminated manuscripts is different from the colour work used by artists of the time (for example canvas-based)

Consider... the Book Form

Scroll:

The scroll is considered to be the first book form. Scrolls are made from 2 layers of papyrus pith (the central cylinder of the stem) which are laid at right angles to each other then pounded together. The sugar in the sap of the plant then binds them. Individual sheets were overlapped and pasted together using a flour and water paste to form a long roll or Charta. Parchment, made from animal skin, was used as an alternative to papyrus.

Developed by the Egyptians, papyrus was used as the main writing material in the ancient Greco-Roman world. It was exported to other parts of the world, but the dry environments in Egypt and parts of Mesopotamia (part of Iraq) were most favourable for its preservation.

Papyri were used as widely as contemporary texts and were for public and private use. Texts have been found on diverse topics such as religion, taxation, administration, marriage contracts, literature and horoscopes.

The main reasons papyrus remained the main writing substrate was because it was reasonably cheap and easy to produce. Although parchment was used, it was difficult and more expensive to produce and so didn’t take over from papyrus until the wider adoption of the codex form.

“The roll was stored upright in a book-box or capsa, horizontally on a shelf or in a pigeonhole. If particularly valuable, it could be placed in a chest or wrapped in a protective sleeve of parchment and tied with thongs. An author's work very often would require several rolls, which would be kept in the same book-box. It was these physical limitations--the length of the papyrus roll and the number of rolls that could be stored together--that tended to define the divisions of literature.”http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/scroll/scrollcodex.html

“…constantly being unrolled and rolled back up again caused abrasion and, even though writing only on one side of the page reduced the problem of wear, it was inefficient and made the roll that much more cumbersome to store. Author and title were indicated at the end of the text (colophon) and so were less vulnerable to damage when the roll was rewound, but this made it more inconvenient to identify the contents (there was a tendency, too, for the titulus to fall off). Since the individual sheets of the roll were seamlessly joined, lines and columns were not uniform but varied in length and size. Nor were they marked, which made citation difficult and often inaccurate.” http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/scroll/scrollcodex.html

References:

http://www.csu.edu.au/faculty/arts/humss/art317/form/briefhist.htm

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/world.html

http://www.wordwebonline.com/search.pl?w=parchment

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/rule.html

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/scroll/scrollcodex.html

http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=248

http://members.tripod.com/~papyri/vellum/vellum.html

Codex (codices):

The codex is a book in modern format. It comprises separate sheets of writing material that are stitched together within a cover. The term is most commonly used for hand-written books (manuscripts).

There are several theories as to why the codex took over from the scroll. One is that the wooden tablet (a shallow recess was carved into its surface and filled with coloured wax) or tabula cevata, which was often fastened into leaves and used by the Greeks and Romans for everyday correspondence, students’ lessons and the like, led to the development of the codex form. In fact, it was its resemblance to a block of wood that the tablet came to be called a codex, which means block of wood in Latin. Another is that the development came from folding scrolls into an accordion format which was easier to store and handle.

It is thought that despite the physical benefits of the codex over the scroll it was when the Christian church adopted the codex form to differentiate its writings from Judaic writings, which could only be copied in the format of the scroll, and also from pagan literature, which was also associated with the roll form, that it became the predominant book form. Other draw cards for the Christian church were that longer religious texts could be contained within a single volume and be referred to more easily, and (possibly) that the codex served to indicate to Christian readers that a particular copy had a sound origin before publishers' imprints were used.

Other advantages of the codex include:

1. its ability to be opened flat at any page making reading easier;
2. pages could be written of recto and verso (right and left hand pages respectively);
3. it was more compact and portable (replacing the wooden table ‘notebook’) and could be protected by a leather or wooden cover;
4. text could be accessed at any point without first having to scroll through preceding text;
5. the restrictions of size brought about by the papyrus rolls’ manufacturing process were removed;
6. and the ability of the codex to accept a wide variety of mediums and techniques

By the fourth century AD the codex replaced the scroll as the predominant form of book.

References:

http://www.wordwebonline.com/search.pl?w=codex

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/scroll/scrollcodex.html

http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/chbn2002_4.htm

http://members.tripod.com/~papyri/vellum/vellum.html

http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=248

Readings Topic 1: The Book Form

The Whatness of Bookness

Philip Smith’s definition of Bookness: http://www.philobiblon.com/bookness.shtml accessed Tuesday, 10 March 2009 8:54:30 PM

“The qualities which have to do with a book. In its simplest meaning the term covers the packaging of multiple planes held together in fixed or variable sequence by some kind of hinging mechanism, support, or container, associated with a visual/verbal content called a text. The term should not strictly speaking include pre-codex carriers of text such as the scroll or the clay tablet, in fact nothing on a single leaf or planar surface such as a TV screen, poster or hand-bill.”

“A blank book is still a book, but a blank dodecahedron or unmarked spiral of paper is not a book, it is a dodecahedron etc”

“A text can be inscribed on anything but this does not make it a book, or have the quality of bookness, even as a scroll retains its scrollness without any text on it.”

I disagree with Smith’s definition regarding the bookness of scrolls. While scrolls could vary in length, they had to be unrolled with one hand and rolled with the other, forming blocks of content that were viewed before the next rolling revealed the next section of text and covered the previous; showing ‘pages’ of text with each rolling – the same function as a spine-bound book, but without ‘bookness’. They were made with the intention of transmitting information. Even before the scroll has any content on it, its intention is the same as that of a codex. If a hinged document (one plane that has been folded) can be regarded as having bookness, then so can a rolled one. Same with clay tablets; their intention is the same whether or not there is text on it, just as a blank codex is still a book, because of its bookness and intended purpose.

Supported by Edward Hutchins http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/bookarts/1996/10/msg00039.html

Smith’s article, written in 1996, can only have been created with an educated glimpse into what is available electronically or digitally 13 years on. It is the increase in the availability and acceptability of books accessed by the “planar surfaces” of computers that has occurred since then that make Smith’s definition at best incomplete and at worst outdated and incorrect.

What is a Book?

http://www.artistbooks.com/editions/wiab.htmlaccessed 15/03/2009 6:27 PM

“When I defined books for myself, I chose not to look at what a book is, what it is made out of, or what it looks like. Instead, I chose to consider how a book is used and what purpose it serves. For me, a book is "a structure for storing and sharing information." ”

“Defining Books in an Electronic Age”. Adapted from postings by Edward Hutchins to the Book Arts List, April 8, 1995 and October 5, 1996

This definition of ‘book’ supports my own definition. Hutchins goes on to say that although many people have tried to arrive at a definition on which everyone can agree it’s not possible. What is possible is for people to find a common ground when discussing books, by using Philip Smith’s “bookness” framework. Hutchins interpretation of bookness; “In other words, instead of saying, "a "book" IS this AND this AND this AND this," maybe we should be saying, "bookness" CONSISTS of this OR this OR this OR this."” allows non-codex or digital ‘books’ to be included when they cannot be using Smith’s definition.

Is it a book?

http://www.philobiblon.com/isitabook/history/index.html accessed 15/03/2009 4:41 PM

“Once the printing press became widely used in the West, and books in the western codex format were produced in large numbers, it became difficult to think of the book in any other fashion. Nearly everyone now expects that a book must have a beginning, middle and end between the two covers. Texts are written in this format, and books continue to be physically constructed to support it.”

This quote from http://www.philobiblon.com/isitabook/history/index.html highlights the difficulty with defining ‘book’. We are so conditioned by what we have been taught is a book, as per Smith’s “packaging of multiple planes held together in fixed or variable sequence by some kind of hinging mechanism, support, or container, associated with a visual/verbal content called a text”, that the things that still serve the same purpose as a conventional codex ie to store and/or communicate information are see and “queer”. Originally posted by Edward Hutchins to the Book Arts List, April 11, 1995 http://www.artistbooks.com/editions/wiab.html

Ironic: Medieval European “manuscripts were sometimes constructed using a tree structure to show the contents of a book in a less strictly hierarchical way than in a table of contents. A similar tree structure is now a common way to show files on a web-site map.”

http://www.philobiblon.com/isitabook/history/index.html