PRIMITIVE BOOKS 



scribed on only one side and piled together to make a 

 book, was adopted everywhere in the Far East. The 

 palm leaf was the model, as just suggested, and it con- 

 tinued a favorite medium; but, in course of time, various 

 nations, perhaps finding it difficult to secure the native 

 material, imitated it with various artificial mediums. 

 Thus the sacred books of the Buddhists in India itself 

 and in Burma are sometimes written on strips of gold, 

 wood, or of ivory, and the books of Tibet, though re- 

 taining the essential character of the palm-leaf book, 

 are inscribed on what is virtually a form of paper. 

 Even cloth was sometimes made to serve the same 

 purpose. 



It will be obvious that this palm-leaf type of book has 

 many elements of convenience. It is light and portable, 

 unlike the Babylonian book which it resembled in ap- 

 pearance, and it is certainly more easy to manage in 

 reading than the papyrus roll of the Egyptians. To 

 handle the palm leaves is virtually equivalent to turning 

 the leaves of a modern book, and it seems odd that 

 some inventive Hindu did not hit upon the idea of 

 fastening the leaves together at one end, leaving the 

 other free. Had this been done, the type of the modern 

 European book would have been invented. 



FOLDED BOOKS 



A much nearer approach to the form of the modern 

 book was made by an obscure nation called the Battaks, 

 who inhabited the Island of Sumatra. This people 

 invented, or adopted from some unknown source, a 



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