BOOK. Used without qualification, the term currently implies a printed literary com position in many sheets; but in law and cus tom it has received three extensions, one of form and two of matter. The form includes anything bound like a book—volumes of accounts, or of blank leaves for keeping than or for indexing, etc., and even *books* of gold-leaf, 25 thin strips in a cover. The mat ter includes—by English statute law, *every volume, part or division of a volume, pam phlet, sheet of letterpress, sheet of music, map, Chart, or plan Separately publisheds; in liter ary usage, the written compositions of ancient times on whatever material, if of some WI/time.
Historically, it is curious that primitive at tention has invariably seized first on, and named the writing after, neither form nor matter, nor even the method of writing, but the; material on which the writing was ex ecuted; every name in common use, present or past, refers to this. *Book,* A.-S. bac, is from an old Teutonic bolts, that is. *the beeches,* tablets of beech-bark on which runes were cut or painted; Latin Tiber, whence French livre and our *library,* was the same thing, the inner bark of a tree, and the name was later given to the papyrus tissue from its bark-like appearance; codex or caudex, our *code,* and still used in its Latin form for old texts, meant the trunk of a tree, then wooden tablets, then square volumes like wooden blocks instead of those in scrolls; the Greek byblos, our *Bible,* was another name for the papyrus; and modern usage clings to the same connection of ideas—we speak of reading *a paper* before an audience. On the other hand, the words *write? *inscribe,* and and the various *-graphs,* all from words meaning to cut, commemorate a time when all writing was by scoring lines on some hard substance. Of course special terms refer to various aspects of the book: *volume* (Latin voinmen, from volvo, to roll) was the wooden roller around which a convenient sec tion of a long composition was twisted; 'tome* means a cutting—of the book into parts, exactly the same as *section? It is difficult to say at just what point the ancient writings may properly be called *books.* It is evident that mere scorings or
paintings .of short compositions on a single surface—runes, hymns, poems, epistles, proc lamations, business documents or what not --cannot be called books, even if the surface is large; though Lord Macaulay facetiously speaks of a rising young .Assyrian architect who *published a bridge • and four walls in honor of the reigning emperor.* On the other hand, long compositions carried over many tablets, grouped in numbered or lettered pages and divided into avohimes* or shelves, and even sometimes with the owner's book-plate (q.v.) attached, cannot be denied the name; nor can extensive compositions on papyrus like the 'Book of the Dead,' dating back well toward 2,000 D.C. if not earlier, nor the famous 'Papyrus Plisse,' the oldest volume known to exist. The Babylonian and Assyrian books were drawn on clay' tablets or polygonal cylinders (afterward hardened) with an iron stylus, producing the wedge-shaped or *cuneiform* characters, some of than so small and skilfully executed that they suggest the use of a magnifying glass—quite likely a ball of crystal. These about the 7th century ac. had begun to be gathered into royal or temple libraries, to the inestimable service of modern historical research; the vast majority of our knowledge of old Babylonia and Assyria comes from two great libraries, that of Ashurbanipal (Sardanapalus: 668-626 a.c.) at Nineveh and that of the Temple of Bel at Nippur. et, oddly, while our civilization as a whole is a direct heir of the Babylonian, and its details owe to that, through the Greek and Latin, a score of items to one of the Egyptian, our books have no connection with the Baby lonian and are the immediate progeny of the Egyptian; an unbroken sequence can be main tamed from the volume in the reader's hand to the Prisse,' perhaps more than 2,000 years before Christ, and containing the still older composition, regarded as the oldest extant book in the world, the (Maxims of dating probably from 2500 Lc.