By the British Academy / 29 Aug 2019
When e-readers first appeared, the end of traditional books was widely prophesied. Parallels were drawn with the invention of printing, which rapidly made handwritten manuscripts obsolete.
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Are E-Books Finally Over? The Publishing Industry Unexpectedly Tilts Back to Print observer.com (2018)
With paper book sales rebounding,
it seems we’ve entered a period of stable co-existing technologies, in which the same books are often available in both formats. This situation resembles the one that prevailed almost two thousand years ago, when the ‘book’ in our sense was first invented.
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Back when the young Julius Caesar was learning to read, books came in long rolls, with the text written in a series of columns on the inside of the roll; the outside was blank. You started reading at the left-hand end, unrolling the book with your right hand and rolling it up again with your left.
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By the time you reached the end you had rolled the book up backwards; to access the beginning again you would need to re-roll the entire thing, which was quite a task given that most bookrolls were about four metres long and some reached over ten metres. Finding something in the middle was not at all easy.
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Without the built-in covers of a modern book, bookrolls were delicate and easily damaged; they were normally kept in hard cases or boxes for protection. To read a roll, you had to take it out of its case, and you could not put it back in until you had rolled it back into a single cylinder: to leave it open at a particular point, you had to leave
it unprotected.
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While you could try to put a bookmark in, it would probably not stay put during the rerolling process. The combined force of these problems meant that readers did not often try to dip into books at particular points: bookrolls usually contained just one work each and were intended to be read through from beginning to end, and indeed their producers did not bother to include tables of contents or conspicuous section headings.
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The modern book format was invented by the Romans, who
called it a ‘codex’. There was great excitement in literary circles about the possibilities offered by the codex. Initially, the most obvious improvement was that this format allowed both sides of the writing material to be used, with the result that the same amount of parchment or papyrus (an ancient equivalent
of paper) could hold twice as
many words.
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Since parchment and papyrus were both expensive, this change made books cheaper. And while bookrolls had a natural maximum length – ones over four metres were rare because they were so difficult to use – codices could come in almost any size. So, works like Virgil’s Aeneid, which had previously been issued as sets of multiple bookrolls, could now be fitted into a single volume.
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Other advantages became more obvious as time went on, including one of great importance for us: with normal usage, codices last much longer than rolls. Many manuscripts in codex form have survived in libraries for a thousand years, and some even longer, preserving the great works of Greco-Roman antiquity for medieval and now for modern readers. By contrast, the usual lifespan of a bookroll containing the same works was rarely much longer than a century.
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Codices did not immediately replace rolls as the usual format for books. Many readers apparently liked their bookrolls (which weighed much less than codices) and had little interest in preserving literature for distant future generations. A bookroll was also easier to make: you could buy pre-made four-metre rolls and just copy into them whatever book you wanted.
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By contrast, to make a codex you had to copy onto unbound pages (in a peculiar order, owing to the structure of book quires) and then have them bound by a professional. For several centuries after the invention of the codex, therefore, both formats were in common use.
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The eventual obsolescence of the roll may not have had anything to
do with the advantages or disadvantages of the different
book formats.
Early Christians seem to have preferred the codex format for
their Bible and other religious texts, perhaps to distinguish these from Jewish sacred texts, which traditionally used the roll format.
The massive spread of Christianity may have been the primary cause
of the success of the codex; if Christianity had remained a minority religion, we might still have bookrolls as well as codices available today.
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Now that we are once again in a world that offers readers a choice
of book formats, we have the opportunity to enjoy a kind of flexibility that last existed close to fifteen hundred years ago, and to appreciate afresh the special features of the codex.
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