BOOK may be defined, a work composed for the purpose of communicating the knowledge or ideas of its author, on any subject, and with any design. The immense variety of topics which hunian know ledge embraces, and which reason or fancy may sug -gest,-renders it necessary, for the sake of precision, to distinguish books by different names, according to the objects proposed by them, or the matters which they discuss. Some of these names are specific and appropriate substantives, as romance, poem, novel, history, journal, &c. ; while others are merely gene ral appellatives, applicable not to books alone, but to every thing connected with the subject or science from which these appellatives are derived,—as philo sophical, theological, metaphysical, mathematical, or chemical. It is necessary likewise to express, by particular names, the various sizes and forms in which books appear ; and hence arise the distinctions of folio, quarto, octavo, &c. Short and fugitive pieces are denominated pamphlets, in contradistinction to books, which are of greater length, and embrace more general or more permanent topics. • The origin of books may be traced to as remote antiquity as the manner of expressing thought by al phabetical or hieroglyphic characters. Their form, and the materials of which they were made, varied with the local circumstances of different nations, and their progress in the arts. The etymology of the word book, and its equivalent in many languages, in dicates that they were originally written on vegetable substances ' • such as time rind or bark of trees, the leaves of plants, or on tablets of wood. Thus, from the Latin words liber and codex, we learn, that were sometimes inscribed on the inner bark, and sometimes on boards cut out off the main body of the tree ; and the English word book, derived from the Saxon boc, the root of which is the northern beech, a beech or service tree, evidently chews that the books of our ancestors were of a similar fabric. The custom of making books of bark still continues in several nations which have made but little progress in refinement. A very curious library of this de scription was discovered, some time ago by the Rus.. sians among the Calmuc Tartars. The books were.
exceedingly long and narrow ; the leaves very thick, and made of barks of trees, smeared over with a double varnish ; the ink, or writing, was white on a black ground. Copies of the Gospels in the Malay tongue are occasionally brought to this country writ ten on oblong slips of bark, fastened together by a cord. The Egyptian papyrus, too, which was first
manufactured into paper, was in very common use among the ancients, about the time of Alexander the Great ; but as these vegetable materials were of too frail a nature to be long preserved, it was found ne cessary to have recourse to some substance which might be less` liable to be destroyed by accident, or to decay with time. Leather, made of the skins of goats or sheep, was accordingly employed for this purpose ; and successive attempts to remedy the im perfections of that substance, gave rise to the inven tion of parchment. The manufacture of skins into parchment is said to have been first invented at Pcr gamus, when the exportation of the papyrus from Egypt was prohibited by one of the Ptolemies, in .order to throw an obstacle in the way of Eumenes, King of Pergamus, who endeavoured to rival him in the magnificence of his library. Most of the ancient manuscripts now extant are written 'on parchment, and scarcely any of them on the papyrus. There are to be seen, in some libraries on the continentf-ma nuscripts written on a kind of parchment manufac tured from the human skin ; these manuscripts are supposed to come frdm Peru. • Books have 'some times likewise been engraved or stamped upon lead, and written or printed on silk, linen, horn, vellum, and paper. The manufacture of paper is an inven tion of so late a date as the thirteenth or fourteenth 'century. The different materials which have been 'employed in this manufacture will be more properly described under'the article. PATER. At present, we shall only observe, that the attention of the curious was long directed towards the discovery of a sub stance susceptible of writing, and proof against fire. Professor Burkman, of Brunswick, published a trea tise on the manufacture of linen from asbestos, and is said to have caused several copies of his work to be printed on paper fabricated from linen of that de scription. Signior Castagnatta, too, in his account of the asbestos, propose's a scheme for making a book of so unperishable a nature, as to merit the ap pellation of the Book of Eternity. The leaves of this book were to be of asbestos paper, the covering of a thicker texture, but fabricated from the same substance, and the whole to be sewed together with asbestos thread. The contents of it were to be writ ten in letters of gold, so that the whole materials, being not only incombustible, but proof against all the elements, must remain for ever undestroycd.