BOOK, the general name applied to a printed volume. Printed matter occupies both sides of a certain number of leaves of paper, which are so arranged that, ginning at the upper end of the left side of the first page, one may proceed with out dislocation of thought always from left to right till he reach the lower end of the last page. The first page, or recto, of the first leaf or folio, is technically known as a bastard or half title page; the next page, or verso, of the first folio is left blank. Then follows the title page proper, usually with a blank page at the back. In many books there intervenes a preface or introduction, a dedication, and a table of contents before the main body of the book begins. If any portion of the book has got out of its place, there are two ways by which the true order can be discovered. At the outer corner, or in the center above the reading matter, of each page is a number-1, 2, 3, etc.; this is the pagination or numerical order of pages. At the bottom of certain pages are numbers, 8, 16 and 32 numbers apart, which show the first page of the printed sheet of paper after it has been folded into 8, 16 or 32 pages. A, B, etc., are often used for numerals; and if the book goes beyond the number of letters in the alphabet, the series is continued—AA, BB, etc., or 2A, 2B, etc.
To understand the historic origin of this normal modern book, one must go back to a remote antiquity. The word "book" itself (Saxon boc, German, bush, Dutch, bock) appears originally in Gothic as a plural noun meaning primarily, as is generally believed, the runes inscribed on the bark of separate branches of the beech tree (Saxon, boc, German, buche, Dutch, beuke) for the purposes of divina tion, etc. Liber, the Latin equivalent (which has been adopted by all the Ro mance and Celtic tongues—French, livre, Italian, libro, Gaelic leabhar, Welsh, leor —and is the source of our English word library), properly meant bark, and was applied to prepared papyrus tissue from its barklike appearance. The Greek biblia, in like manner, is associated with e., papyrus.
As is now well known, the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians had a wide and varied literature. This was pre
served in two ways; either painted on the leaves of the papyrus which grew in abundance on the banks of the Euphrates, or impressed on clay shaped into tablets or cylinders. The oldest Egyptian vol-, ume still extant (in a sense the oldest took in the world) is the "Papyrus Prisse," which must be assigned to a very early period of Egyptian history, probably prior to the 12th dynasty—i. e., at least 2000 B. C. Owing to its wonder ful adaptability to literary purposes, the prepared papyrus tissue (see PAPYRUS) spread to Greece (at least before the time of Herodotus) and to Rome; and though it was so far supplanted, es pecially in certain regions, by the finer kinds of prepared skins—the material used by the Jews, Persians, and other Oriental nations—it maintained its posi tion as a book material down to the 10th century A. D. Ali Ibn el Azhad, in 920, describes the different kinds of pen re quired for writing on paper, parchment, and papyrus (see Dr. Joseph Karabacek's "Das Arabische Papier," Vienna, 1887). The ancient papyrus book, whether Egyp tian, Greek or Roman, was got up very much like a modern mounted map. A length of the material, written on one side only, was fastened to a wooden roller, round which it was wound; this formed a tama (Egyptian), kulindros (Greek), or volt en (Latin); hence our volume. Specimens of Egyptian rolls still exist, extending to upward of 20 and even 40 yards; but the great inconvenience at taching to the consulting of such enor mous scrolls made it much more usual to break up any lengthy literary produc tion into sections, each on a separate roll. In Egypt the rolls were kept in jars (holding say 9 or 10 each); in Rome in wooden boxes or canisters (often of costly workmanship), or in parchment cases. The change from the rolled to the folded form of book appears to have taken place in the ancient world after the adoption of the parchment or vellum, though practically the same arrangement of successive surfaces had been in vogue in the books or tablets of waxed wood used for notes and letters.