Book Thread [Sabrina Chase]

Welcome to the Book Thread, Guest Poster edition! I will be your host as we explore all sorts of book-related topics. All usual Book Thread rules are incorporated by reference (pets, beverage, clothing covering the lower limbs, etc.) with the special Sabrina Chase exemption for those stylish persons preferring kilts. Now let us proceed to today's topic, which is ...

Jade Book

Taking a break from the book industry, let's take a look at how a book is constructed. Not the contents, the form those contents take. When we say book what do we mean? The history of bookmaking begins with words that need recording in 1) a permanent form that is 2) portable. Oog's treatise on the best locations to spear a mammoth (and survive), being painted on the walls of a cave, fail the second test. Aishtupur-al's My search for a honest copper merchant in Akkad inscribed in cuneiform on a series of clay tablets was a little better, as long as you didn't get it wet (so not so permanent).

Then we get to papyrus. The oldest writing found is more than 4.5 millennia old and was a work invoice for the stone used in the Great Pyramid. (Really!) Ah, but there were also books! Only they were scrolls, long rolled-up lengths of papyrus, and if you wanted to go back to an earlier section to confirm your copy of the Book of the Dead was reincarnating the right person you had to unroll the whole thing. And papyrus is brittle, so scrolls were the only practical form it could be used in. Furthermore the papyrus plant is hard to grow in bulk so it was expensive to have lots of scrolls in your library, and we are all about Vast Amounts of Books here in the Book Thread!

China got clever. First they invented characters, which are easily read in vertical and horizontal alignments, and that, with the huge amount of bamboo available, led to the bamboo slip books known as jiandu. The picture at the top of the post is a fancy jade version of a jiandu. Bamboo books are tough, flexible, and cheap. They also need to be rolled up, and those rolls get heavy. The Chinese also invented bureaucracy ... which requires lots of record-keeping, and finally the bamboo scroll book was too much of a headache and they invented paper.

The books made with paper were much lighter. The paper was still in a long piece, but it could be folded unlike papyrus. The first books were basically accordion-pleated with a thicker piece of paper on either end. If you squint, looks pretty booklike. And paper is much cheaper, so finally we can have government paperwork AND our immense library! At one point they figured out how to sew one edge of the accordion-pleat so the book didn't collapse on you just when you got to the good part, but the covers were still just different paper and, horror of horrors, they did not cut the folds of the page! One whole side was unused!

Because they were all floppy, an ancient Chinese library was either a series of boxes containing the folded books, or books laid on their sides and piled up on [TRIGGER WARNING FOR ACE] shelves. Very hard to search for the book you wanted. The paper was so thin they could not stand on edge, and there were no spines to write helpful hints about the contents, like Yet Another Collection of Poems About Bamboo. This format persisted for thousands of years. I even have a Japanese Meiji-era junior-high history book, still in the floppy original form (and with the doubled, uncut pages).

The Romans decided this was an engineering problem and fixed it by inventing the codex around the first century AD, binding pages between boards. And that is pretty much how we got where we are now, with hardback books that can stand on their own vertically and with spines for title and author information. Much easier to scan the shelves!

The pages themselves gradually improved as well. European printing would take a large sheet of paper, printing both sides, and then carefully fold it to get the size book needed. Print layout for this was a headache, and at the end the purchaser often had to use a knife to cut open some of the folds that didn't get trimmed properly.

And this all ties into the great paperback vs. hardback discussion. Once books were plentiful, readers wanted ... more books. But the costs add up, especially the binding part. So books were often sold without covers. If the owner were wealthy enough they would just pay a binder to make a custom binding that matched the rest of the library (this is what Samuel Pepys did for his famous library). If you were a poor student, well, it's coverless books for you! Much later on publishers discovered they could do this out in the open with thick paper covers with lurid illustrations and ... we're back to the Chinese floppy book system. Only Western books had stiffer paper so we can still put them on shelves properly.

But never fear! If you have a paperback you love and want to make it fancy like Pepys did, it is not hard to do. I took a class on how to make a hardback from a paperback, so the Old Ways would not be forgotten. I encourage the Horde to try it out. (Might make a good Hobby thread!)

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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