The largest monasteries had rooms called scriptoria where monks copied, decorated, and preserved both religious and secular volumes. Book culture in the Middle Ages was dominated by monasteries, which became centers of intellectual life. In medieval Europe, however, scribes were still laboriously copying texts by hand. Woodblock printing was a meticulous process that involved carving an entire page of text onto a wooden block, then inking and pressing the block to print a page. The earliest example of a dated, printed book is a Buddhist text called the Diamond Sutra (868 CE). The first known examples of text printed on paper are tiny, 2.5-inch-wide scrolls of Buddhist prayers commissioned by Japan’s Empress Shōtoku in 764 CE. The next major innovation in the history of books, the use of block printing on paper, began in Tang Dynasty China around 700 CE, though it wouldn’t arrive in Europe for nearly 800 years. Vlasta2 – Korean Wood Block – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. The earliest known printed books were created using woodblock printing. The codex was the preferred form for early Christian texts, and the spread of Christianity eventually brought about the dominance of the codex by the 6th century CE, it had almost entirely replaced the scroll. Traditions changed slowly in the ancient world, however, and the scroll remained the dominant form for secular works for several centuries. While reading a scroll was a two-handed activity, a codex could be propped open in front of a reader, allowing for note taking. It also allowed readers to quickly flip between sections. The codex was much more user-friendly than was the papyrus scroll: more portable, easier to store and handle, and less expensive to produce. This form, called the codex, has essentially the same structure as today’s books. Between the 2nd and 4th centuries, the Romans began sewing folded sheets of papyrus or parchment together, and binding them between wooden covers. Its spread coincided with another crucial development in the history of the book. Parchment had several advantages over papyrus: It was more durable, both sides could be written on, and its trade wasn’t monopolized by the Egyptians. Parchment was made from treated animal skins that were scraped thin to create a flexible, even surface. But other powerful entities in the ancient world were growing tired of the Egyptians’ monopoly over the papyrus trade. The Royal Library of Alexandria boasted around half a million scrolls in its collection some scholars claim that this was between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence at the time (Kelly, 2006). Many ancient civilizations housed their scrolls in large libraries, which acted as both repositories of knowledge and displays of political and economic power.
Because papyrus grew in Egypt, the Egyptians had a virtual monopoly over the papyrus trade. A standard scroll was around 30 feet long and 7 to 10 inches wide, while the longest Egyptian scroll ever found stretched over 133 feet, making it almost as long as the Statue of Liberty when it was rolled all the way out (Harry Ransom Center).īy the 6th century BCE, papyrus was the most common writing surface throughout the Mediterranean and was used by the Greeks and Romans. Individual sheets of papyrus were glued or sewn together to make scrolls. It was made using the tall reeds that grew plentifully in the Nile Valley. In many ways, papyrus was an ideal material for the Egyptians. Most prominent, though, was the practice of using reed pens to write on papyrus scrolls. From the time they first developed a written script, around 3000 BCE, Egyptians wrote on many different surfaces, including metal, leather, clay, stone, and bone. Most historians trace the origins of the book back to the ancient Egyptians, whose papyrus scrolls looked very different from the books we’re accustomed to today.
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