G62 



BOOK. 



Book. 



Different 

 forms of 

 books. 



exceedingly long and narrow ; the leaves very thick, 

 and made of barks of trees, smeared over with a 

 double varnish ; the ink, or writing, was white on a 

 black ground. Copies of the Gospels in the Malay 

 tongue are occasionally brought to this country writ- 

 ten on oblong slips of bark, fastened together by a 

 cord. The Egyptian papyrus, too, which was first 

 manufactured into paper, was in very common use 

 among the ancients, about the time of Alexander the 

 Great ; but as these vegetable materials were of too 

 frail a nature to be long preserved, it was found ne- 

 cessary to have recourse to some substance which 

 might be less liable to be destroyed by accident, or 

 to decay with time. Leather, made of the skins of 

 goats or sheep, was accordingly employed for this 

 purpose ; and successive attempts to remedy the im- 

 perfections of that substance, gave rise to the inven- 

 tion of parchment. The manufacture of skins into 

 parchment is said to have been first invented at Per- 

 gamus, when the exportation of the papyrus from 

 Egypt was prohibited by one of the Ptolemies, in 

 order to throw an obstacle in the way of Eumenes, 

 King of Pergamus, who endeavoured to rival him in 

 the magnificence of his library. Most of the ancient 

 manuscripts now extant are written on parchment, 

 and scarcely any of them on the papyrus. There 

 are to be seen, in some libraries on the continentf-ma- 

 nuscripts written on a kind of parchment manufac- 

 tured from the human skin ; these manuscripts are 

 supposed to come from Peru. Books have some- 

 times likewise been engraved or stamped upon lead, 

 and written or printed on silk, linen, horn, vellum, 

 and paper. The manufacture of paper is an inven- 

 tion of so late a date as the thirteenth or fourteenth 

 century. The different materials which have been 

 employed in this manufacture will be more properly 

 described under the article Pater. At present, we 

 6hall only observe, that the attention of the curious 

 was long directed towards the discovery of a sub- 

 stance susceptible of writing, and proof against fire. 

 Professor Burkman, of Brunswick, published a trea- 

 tise on the manufacture of linen from asbestos, and 

 is said to have caused several copies of his work to 

 be printed on paper fabricated from linen of that de- 

 scription. Signior Castagnatta, too, in his account 

 of the asbestos, proposes a scheme for making a 

 book of so imperishable a nature, as to merit the ap- 

 pellation of the Book of Eternity. The leaves of 

 this book were to be of asbestos paper, the covering 

 of a thicker texture, but fabricated from the same 

 substance, and the whole to be sewed together with 

 asbestos thread. The contents of it were to be writ- 

 ten in letters of gold, so that the whole materials, 

 being not only incombustible, but proof against all 

 the elements, must remain for ever undestroyed. 



The form of books seems to have been originally 

 square, to which we find frequent allusions in Scrip- 

 ture, under the appellation sep/iir, translated by the 

 Septuagint a|i?, square tables. When they came 

 to be written on flexible materials, they were rolled 

 up in scrolls, called by the Greeks xty\xx.ix, and vo- 

 lumina by the Romans. Only one side of the paper, or 

 parchment, was written upon, and one sheet was always 

 joined to the end of another, till the volume, or book, 

 tvas finished, when it was rolled up on a cylinder, or 



7 



staff. To each end of this stick was affixed a ball, Book. 

 or nob, which was employed as a handle for evolving y " v [/ 

 the scroll. These balls were called umbilici, or cor- 

 turn, and were generally made of bone, wood, or 

 horn, and often carved and adorned with ivory, silver, 

 gold, or precious stones. Only one book was inclu- 

 ded in a volume, so that a work generally consisted 

 of as many volumes as books. On the outside wa 

 generally written the title, SuX^.aSo?. 



In the Oriental countries, it is customary not 

 only to roll up their books in the manner which we 

 have described, but to wrap them in an elegant and 

 costly covering, and to inscribe on the covering a 

 title indicating the general tenor of their contents. 

 This custom of writing on the outside of the cover- 

 ing of a book, or letter, has led Chrysostom to sup- 

 pose, that, in the passage of the 39th Psalm, which 

 our translators have rendered, " In the volume of the 

 book it is written of me," the word translated vo- 

 lume was the wrapper in which the sacred book wa* 

 contained ; and that on this wrapper was inscribed a 

 title, which signified " the coming of the Messiah:'* 

 This interpretation suggests a much more distinct 

 idea than the English word volume ; for, as every 

 Hebrew book was in reality a roll, or volume, the 

 passage, according to our version, merely signifies, 

 " In the book it is written of me." But, when we 

 refer it to the. case in which the book was inclosed, 

 the expression becomes clear and energetic, implying, 

 that the sum and substance of the sacred book is, 

 that " the Messiah cometh ;" which title might, 

 with great propriety, be inscribed on the wrapper or 

 covering of these sacred writings. 



In another translation this expression is rendered 

 ivlofiu, which seems to intimate, that the motto was 

 inscribed on the cylinder, round which books of the 

 form we have been describing were rolled. In gene- 

 ral, the cylinder extended far enough beyond the 

 parchment, paper, or writing material, to exhibit 

 conveniently, by a title, the general purport of the 

 volume. In illustration of this idea, Mr Harmer, in 

 the fourth volume of his Observations on Scripture, 

 mentions a circle of gold, with the name of one of 

 our Saxon princes inscribed upon it, and ornamented 

 after the rude manner of those times, which, he sup 



{loses, might be designed to case the end of the cy- 

 inder, on which some book belonging to that mo- 

 narch, or relating to him, was rolled. Of this an. 

 cient piece of gold there is an engraving in the seventh 

 volume of the Archccologia, or Transactions of the 

 Antiquarian Society. The square form, composed 

 of separate leaves, which is now universal in Europe, 

 is said to have been first invented by one of the kings 

 of Pergamus ; and soon came into general use. We 

 are assured by Montfaucon, that, of the numerous 

 Greek manuscripts which he had seen, only two 

 were in the form of rolls, the rest were made up 

 much in the same manner as modern books. 



The internal arrangement of books has varied con- Their in. 

 siderably in different countries, and at different pe- ternal ar- 

 riods. At first, the letters were only separated by ran g"ncnt. 

 lines, and it was long before their separation into in- 

 dividual words was even thought of. While this 

 mode of writing prevailed, the utmost care was ne- 

 cessary to guard against errors ; and accordingly we 



