One of the greatest contributions that modern investigation has made to
human knowledge is background. It was once thought a remarkable
achievement to uncover the historic background of modern institutions,
and this was all that, until lately, scholarship attempted. Dr. Samuel
Johnson confidently remarked that we know no more about ancient Britain
than the old writers have told us, nor can we ever know any more than
this. Edward Clodd reminds us that at the very time when the great
oracle voiced this assertion discoveries had already been made in
England that, when interpreted as they have been since, were to make the
landing of Caesar seem, by comparison, a contemporary occurrence. Now
this inconceivably remote prehistoric era furnishes not merely
arrowheads and stone chisels and burial mounds, but also other objects
that are the background of that "picture of time" of which the book of
to-day is the foreground.
Very properly these are objects of art, and they afford the earliest
illustrations in histories of art as they do in histories of the book.
Thus the printer who questions what art has to do with his business
stamps himself as two hundred thousand years behind the times. They are
pictures, and the book of to-day has descended as directly from them as
the printer of to-day has descended from the man who made them. They
are, moreover, in some instances, works of very high art. The picture of
the mammoth, scratched on a fragment of the mammoth's tusk, is a piece
of drawing so skillful that only the greatest living masters can equal
it. Not even Rembrandt's drawing of the elephant, which Dr. Holmes
celebrates in one of his poems, is more expressive or wrought with more
economy of effort. In the same district of southwestern France,
Dordogne, that yielded the drawings are found long cave galleries of
paintings representing the creatures of that period, all executed with
great spirit and ability. But what are the steps in the descent from
these ancient pictures to the printed book?
Primitive man had one more string to his conversational bow than most
civilized people have, namely, sign language. But gesture and speech
alike prevail but little against space and time. Each is possible only
at short range, and each dies on the eye or ear that receives it.
Pictures may be carried to any distance and may be preserved for any
length of time. They were probably made first in response to an instinct
rather for art than for the communication of ideas; but their great
advantage for communication must have been perceived very early, and, as
we find picture writing employed by primitive races to-day, we have the
right to infer that prehistoric peoples at the same stage of culture
also employed it. Pure picture writing, however, does not suffice for
all that men have to say. It is easy to represent a house, but how shall
we represent a home? It is easy to represent a woman, but how shall we
add the idea of wife? To do this we must pass from simple pictures to
symbols. Chinese writing has never advanced beyond this stage. Its
prodigious type-case of more than forty-two thousand characters
contains, therefore, only a series of pictures, direct and symbolic, all
highly conventionalized, but recognizable in their earlier forms. To
represent "wife" the Chinaman combines the two signs for "woman" and
"broom"; to represent "home" he makes a picture of a pig under a roof!
The Egyptian and Mexican systems of writing, though very different to
the eye, were both of this nature and represented ideas rather than
words. Yet all true alphabets, which are representations of sound, have
been derived from such primitive ideograms or pictures of ideas. What
was the process?
The rebus is the bridge from the writing of thoughts to the writing of
sounds, and it came into use through the necessity of writing proper
names. Every ancient name, like many modern ones, had a meaning. A
king's name might be Wolf, and it would be indicated by the picture of a
wolf. Ordinarily the picture would be named by everyone who saw it
according to his language; he might call it "wolf," or "lupus," or
"lykos"; but when it meant a man's name he must call it Wolf, whatever
his own language. So such names as Long Knife and Strong Arm would be
represented, and these pictures would thus be associated with the sound
rather than the thing. By and by it was found convenient, where the word
had several syllables, to use its picture to represent the sound of only
the first syllable, and, still later, of only the first sound or letter.
Thus the Egyptian symbol for F was originally a picture of the horned
asp, later it stood for the Egyptian name of this venomous creature, and
finally for the first sound in the name, being used as the letter F
itself; and the reason why we have the barred cross-piece in the F, the
two horns in U, V, and Y, and the four in W (VV) is because the Egyptian
asp had two horns, as may be seen from the illustration in the Century
Dictionary under the word cerastes; and every time that we write one of
these letters we are making a faded copy of the old picture. We find
systems of writing in all the stages from pure pictures to the phonetic
alphabet; in Egyptian hieroglyphics we find a mixture of all the stages.
So much for the background of the book as the bringer of a message to
the eye, but the outward form or wrapping of that message has also a
long and interesting history.
No objects could be much more unlike than a Babylonian tablet, an
Egyptian papyrus roll, and a Mexican book. They are as different as a
brick, a narrow window-shade, and a lady's fan; they have nothing common
in their development, yet they were used for the same purpose and might
bring identically the same message to the mind. Inwardly, as regards
writing or printing, all books have a parallel development; but
outwardly, in their material and its form, they are the results of local
conditions. In Babylonia, which was a fertile river-bottom, bricks were
the only building material, and clay was therefore a familiar substance.
Nothing was more natural than that the Babylonian should scratch his
record or message on a little pat of clay, which he could afterwards
bake and render permanent. Some day all other books in the world will
have crumbled into dust, their records being saved only when reproduced;
but at that remote time there will still exist Babylonian books, even
now five thousand years old, apparently no nearer destruction than when
they were first made.
The Babylonian book carried its message all on the outside; the Egyptian
book went to the opposite extreme, and we should find our chief
objection to it in the difficulty of getting readily at its contents.
There flourished on the banks of the Nile a stout reed, six feet high,
called by the Egyptians "p-apa" and by the Greeks "papyros" or "byblos."
It was the great source of raw material for Egyptian manufactures. Its
tufted head was used for garlands; its woody root for various purposes;
its tough rind for ropes, shoes, and similar articles--the basket of
Moses, for instance; and its cellular pith for a surface to write on. As
the stem was jointed, the pith came in lengths, the best from eight to
ten inches. These lengths were sliced through from top to bottom, and
the thin slices laid side by side. Another layer was pasted crosswise
above these, the whole pressed, dried in the sun, and rubbed smooth,
thus giving a single sheet of papyrus. As the grain ran differently on
the two surfaces of the papyrus sheet, only one side was written on.
Other sheets were added to this by pasting them edge to edge until
enough for a roll had been made, usually twenty, a roller being fastened
to the last edge and a protecting strip of wood to the front. The
manuscript was unrolled by the right hand and rolled up by the left. It
is obvious that a book of reference in this form would be subjected to
great wear. In our dictionaries it is as easy to find Z as A; but in a
papyrus book, to find the end meant to unroll the whole. The Latin word
for roll was "volumen," hence our "volume." A long work could obviously
not be produced conveniently in a single roll, therefore Homer's "Iliad"
and "Odyssey," for instance, were each divided into twenty-four books,
and that is why the divisions of an epic poem are still called books,
though they are really chapters. The rolls composing a single work were
kept together in a case something like a bandbox. The roll was the book
form of the Greek and Roman as well as the Egyptian world, but it left
no descendants. Our book form was derived from a different source, which
we will now consider.
Just as we speak of Russia leather, so the ancients spoke of Pergamum
skins, or parchment. The story is that Eumenes II, King of Pergamum, a
city of Asia Minor, tried to build up a library rivaling that of
Alexandria, and the Ptolemies, seeking to thwart him, forbade the export
of papyrus from Egypt. Eumenes, however, developed the manufacture of
Pergamum skin, or parchment, or vellum, which not only enabled him to
go on with his library, but also incidentally changed the whole
character of the book for future ages. This material is not only much
more serviceable than the fragile papyrus, but, being tough enough to
stand folding and sewing, permitted the book to be made in its present
or codex form, the original codex being two or three Roman waxed tablets
of wood, fastened together like hinged slates, and thus opening very
crudely in the manner of our books. This development of parchment
occurred in the first half of the second century before Christ. The new
material and book form gradually made their way into favor and came to
constitute the book of the early Christian and medieval world. Though
paper was introduced into Europe soon after the year seven hundred, it
did not displace parchment until the invention of printing called for a
material of its cheaper and more adaptable character.
But, though we have traced the origin of our present book form, we have
not yet filled in the background of its history. Several other notable
types of the book deserve our attention; first of all that of China, one
of the most attractive of all book forms, to which we devote our next
chapter. Though it superficially resembles our own books, it is really
the product of a different line of evolution. When we examine it
closely, we find that in many respects it is the exact reverse of our
practice. It is printed on only one side of the paper; it is trimmed at
the back and folded on the fore edge; its wide margin is at the top; its
running headline is on the folded fore edge; its sewing is on the
outside; its binding is limp; its lines run up and down the page; and
its pages, according to Western ideas, open from the back towards the
front. Yet it is a thing of beauty, and let us hope that nothing in the
modern reorganization of China will change its character to prevent it
from remaining a joy forever.
Just as Chinese paper is made from bamboo, which plays an even greater
part in China than papyrus did in Egypt, so the book of India utilizes
the leaves of that important tropical tree, the palm. The sheets of the
book before me are strips of palm-leaf two inches wide and two feet
long. They are written on both sides and, following the run of the
grain, lengthwise. This makes an inordinate length of line, but, owing
to the small number of lines on the page, the confusion of the eye is
less than might be expected. The leaves composing the book are clamped
between two boards of their own size, the block thus formed is pierced
with two holes, through which pins are thrust, and the whole is wound
with a cord. The dimensions vary, some books being larger and some much
smaller. I have also before me a Burmese booklet in which the leaves are
one inch wide and six inches long. Sometimes the sheets are of brass,
beautifully lacquered, and the writing heavy and highly decorative.
These books also vary greatly in size, some forming truly massive and
sumptuous volumes. Birch bark was also employed as a book material in
India, being used in what we should call quarto sheets, and in Farther
India a peculiar roll is in use, made of Chinese paper, folded at the
side, sewed at the top, and rolled up like a manifold banner in a cover
of orange-colored or brown cotton cloth.
We do not ordinarily associate books with pre-Columbian America; yet one
of the most interesting of all book forms was current in Mexico before
the Conquest. As in the case of the Chinese book, it looks superficially
like ours; we think it is a tiny quarto until we see that its measure is
rather that of an oblong twenty-fourmo; that is, its dimensions are just
scant of five inches high and six inches wide. It has thin wooden covers
and is, over all, an inch thick; but between these covers is a strip of
deerskin twenty-nine feet long and, of course, nearly five inches wide.
This is folded in screen or fan fashion, the first and last leaves being
pasted to the inside of the covers. This attachment is really the only
binding; the whole strip is capable of being opened up to its full
length. It is read--by those who can read its vividly colored
hieroglyphics--by holding it like a modern book, turning the leaves
until what seems the end is reached, and then turning the cover for the
next leaf, and continuing to turn until the first cover is reached
again, but from the other side. Incredible as it may seem, there is a
book of India which is almost identical in structure with the ancient
Mexican book. It has the shape of the palm-leaf book, but it is made of
heavy paper, blackened to be written on with a chalk pencil, and it
opens like a fan exactly in the Mexican fashion. Each cover is formed by
a double fold of paper, and the writing runs lengthwise of the page as
in the palm-leaf volume. As the writing can be erased, the book serves
the purpose of a slate.
The variety of objects that men have used to write upon almost surpasses
imagination, ranging from mountain walls to the ivory shoulders of Rider
Haggard's heroine in his "Mr. Meeson's Will." Such unusual, if actual,
writing materials belong, perhaps, rather to the penumbra than to the
background of the book; but, as a final survey of our subject, running
back to the time when there were no books and men must rely upon their
memories, we may quote what Lane says of the sources from which the
Kuran was derived after the death of Mohammed: "So Zeyd gathered the
Kurán from palm-leaves, skins, shoulder-blades (of beasts), stones, and
the hearts of men."