BOOK

book, the common name for any literary production of some bulk, now applied particularly to a printed composition forming a volume, or, if in more than one volume, a single organic literary work. the word is also used descriptively for the internal divisions or sections of a comprehensive work. the word "book" is found with variations of form and gender in all the teutonic languages, the original form postulated for it being a strong feminine _boks_, which must have been used in the sense of a writing-tablet. the most obvious connexion of this is with the old english _boc_, a beech tree, and though this is not free from philological difficulties, no probable alternative has been suggested. as early as 2400 b.c., in babylonia, legal decisions, revenue accounts, &c. were inscribed in cuneiform characters on clay tablets and placed in jars, arranged on shelves and labelled by clay tablets attached by straws. in the 7th century b.c. a library of literary works written on such tablets existed at nineveh, founded by sargan (721-705 b.c.). as in the case of the "creation" series at the british museum the narrative was sometimes continued from one tablet to another, and some of the tablets are inscribed with entries forming a catalogue of the library. these clay tablets are perhaps entitled to be called books, but they are out of the direct ancestry of the modern printed book with which we are here chiefly concerned. one of the earliest direct ancestors of this extant is a roll of eighteen columns in egyptian hieratic writing of about the 25th century b.c. in the musee de louvre at paris, preserving the maxims of ptah-hetep. papyrus, the material on which the manuscript (known as the papyrus prisse) is written, was made from the pith of a reed chiefly found in egypt, and is believed to have been in use as a writing material as early as about 4000 b.c. it continued to be the usual vehicle of writing until the early centuries of the christian era, was used for pontifical bulls until a.d. 1022, and occasionally even later; while in coptic manuscripts, for which its use had been revived in the 7th century, it was employed as late as about a.d. 1250. it was from the name by which they called the papyrus, [greek: bublos] or [greek: biblos], that the greeks formed [greek: biblion], their word for a book, the plural of which (mistaken for a feminine singular) has given us our own word bible. in the 2nd century b.c. eumenes ii., king of pergamus, finding papyrus hard to procure, introduced improvements into the preparations of the skins of sheep and calves for writing purposes, and was rewarded by the name of his kingdom being preserved in the word _pergamentum_, whence our "parchment," by which the dressed material is known. in the 10th century the supremacy which parchment had gradually established was attacked by the introduction from the east of a new writing material made from a pulp of linen rags, and the name of the vanquished papyrus was transferred to this new rival. paper-mills were set up in europe in the 12th century, and the use of paper gained ground, though not very rapidly, until on the invention of printing, the demand for a cheap material for books, and the ease with which paper could be worked on a press, gave it a practical monopoly. this it preserved until nearly the end of the 19th century, when substances mainly composed of wood-pulp, esparto grass and clay largely took its place, while continuing, as in the transition from papyrus to linen-pulp, to pass under the same name (see paper). so long as the use of papyrus was predominant the usual form of a book was that of the _volumen_ or roll, wound round a stick, or sticks. the modern form of book, called by the latins _codex_ (a word originally used for the stump of a tree, or block of wood, and thence for the three-leaved tablets into which the block was sawn) was coming into fashion in martial's time at rome, and gained ground in proportion as parchment superseded papyrus. the _volumen_ as it was unrolled revealed a series of narrow columns of writing, and the influence of this arrangement is seen in the number of columns in the earliest codices. thus in the codex sinaiticus and codex vaticanus of the bible, both of the 4th century, there are respectively four and three columns to a page; in the codex alexandrinus (5th century) only two; in the codex bezae (6th century) only one, and from this date to the invention of printing, while there were great changes in handwriting, the arrangement of books changed very little, single or double columns being used as was found convenient. in the external form of books there was much the same conservatism. in the codex amiatinus written in england in the 8th century one of the miniatures shows a book in a red leather cover, and the arrangement of the pattern on this curiously resembles that of the 15th-century red leather bindings predominant in the biblioteca laurenziana at florence, in which the codex itself is preserved. in the same way some of the small stamps used in oxford bindings in the 15th century are nearly indistinguishable from those used in england three centuries earlier. much fuller details as to the history of written books in these as well as other respects will be found in the article