Owing to the cheap and easy preparation of the papyrus tissue, by pulping the pith and spreading it out to dry, essentially like our paper, and its wonderful adaptability to liter ary use beyond anything discovered for many ages,— its thinness and lightness, yet hard, smooth, glossy surface showing off inks and pigments so beautifully—its use spread to Greece before the time of Herodotus at least, and to Rome, and maintained its position as a book material down to the 10th century A.D. Ali ibn el Azhad in 920 describes the different kinds of pens required for writing on paper, parchment and papyrus (see Karabacek's arabische Papier,' 1887). Unhappily, how ever, it had one insuperable defect for lairs, records or whatever else needed perpetuity: it was very sensitive to dampness, and dis solved and crumbled away in a few genera tions. Hence it is not merely probable but certain that the great mass of classical literature is lost forever, disintegrated and gone with its material record. The only place where any considerable Ands are still pos sible is Egypt, whose dry climate can preserve such things for countless ages, and whose libraries had vast quantities of the best Greek and Roman works: some remarkable die coveries have already been made there, and more may be hoped for. But for this reason, papyrus was largely supplanted for public uses, and with the wealthier collectors or authors, or for very popular books, by parchment, fine dressed skin, the material used by the Jews, Persians and other Oriental nations. Whim the book had outlived its popularity or 4 more exigent use was found for the parch ment, which was costly, the former writing was rubbed off or in, and a new book copied on, and this process was repeated sometimes six or seven times. Thanks to the fact that the erasure always left the outline of the old characters possible to revive by certain chemi cals, and that for clearness the new book was written crosswise to the old, so that the imper fectly erased words should not show up through and cause confusion, these palimpsests have yielded us many treasures supposed to have been extinguished.
As the very name "book" shows, however, paper-pulp and skin and clay were not the only materials used for books by the ancients; in fact, it would be hard to ate any common smooth-surfaced article not so used. Animal, vegetable and mineral substances have all been drawn on; metals, wood, wax, ivory, leaves, bark, etc. Wooden books were common among both Greeks and Romans; part of one containing Solon's laws was preserved at Athens till the 1st century. For the more important purposes, laws and edicts, they em ployed (before the general accession of parch ment) ivory, bronze, etc.; Hannibal engraved an account of his campaigns on bronze plates, which if they could be supposed existent, would be worth excavating all South Italy for, especially as the writing must have been in Carthaginian. The antiquary Montfaucon in 1699 bought at Rome a book of six thin leaden leaves, about 3x4 inches, with covers and hinges of lead; it contained Egyptian hieroglyphics, etc. For the common needs of business and social life, however,— contracts and wills, etc.,— the Romans used diptycha and tabulce or pugillaria — sheets covered with wax, to be written on with a stylus, and pro tected from contact by a raised margin, or opposite projections in the centres. Two of these, of date 169 A.D., were discovered early in the 19th century in Transylvania, and one of 1301 is preserved in the Florentine Museum. In the University of Gottingen is a Bible of palm-leaves, containing 5,376 leaves. Among the Kalmuck Tartars was found a collection of books made of long narrow leaves of varnished bark, the ink black on a white ground.
The shape of wooden and metal books, waxen and ivory tablets, and those of other hard substances, was square; but the thin flexible papyrus was too liable to dog's-ear and tear from handling in such form, and a method was adopted which has left deep traces on our book terminology—of rolling the sheets on wooden cylinders, very much in the fashion of a modern mounted map. They
were written on one side only, fastened to gether at the edges, and glued or otherwise attached to the roller, which was called in Egyptian a lama, in Greek a kulindros (cylinder), in Latin a volume's (roller), our volume.* We still speak of a piece of writ ing poetically as a "scroll.* Some of these were of huge size: specimens of Egyptian 'book-rolls still exist extending to 20 and even 40 yards (see Birt's 'Das Antike Buchwesen,' p. 439); but the great inconvenience of con sulting such enormous sheets, and the injury to themselves in the process, caused the break ing up of lengthy literary productions into sections, each on a separate roll. Certain handy sizes became normal, like the ordinary novel or essay volume of to-day; and this con ventional length of roll exercised great in fluence on the length of what are still called the "books*— that is, chapters — of the clas sical authors, one of these being about enough to make a roll or volume of. At each end of the roller was the umbilicus (navel) or carosus (knob), a boss to turn it by, and the volume was read by unrolling the scroll to expose successively the sheets or paging' (things "fastened" together). The title was generally written in red, on fine vellum, and pasted on the outside, which was dyed with cedrus or saffron. Much labor and expense was often involved in the ornamentation of books, and pleasant conceits were sometimes conveyed by their color. The practice of perfuming the pages to which Martial alludes, "when the page smells of cedar and mantles with royal purple,' was not abandoned till very modern times. Lord Burghley, instructing the vice chancellor of Cambridge concerning the 'proper presentation of sonic volumes to Queen Elizabeth, cautions him to 'regard that the book had no savor of spike' (spikenard), "which commonly bookbinders did seek to add to make their books savor It seems an odd lure to book-buyers; but in this age we can hardly realize the important part played by perfumes in ages when pretty much everything and everybody smelt ill, when filth and the lack of washing or changing of clothes assailed all noses with evil stenches, and an agreeable scent was one of the greatest and rarest luxuries of life. In Egypt the rolls were kept in jars holding nine or ten each; in Rome they were kept in wooden boxes or canisters, often of costly workmanship, or in parchment cases. The change from scrolls to codices, or square books, seems to have taken place generally in the ancient world after the adoption of parchment or vellum; they appear to have been coming into general use in Mar tial's time (last half of the 1st century .a.m), as he alludes to their advantages. The name codex is still used for the more important ancient MSS., as the "Codex Alexandrinus." Not all the parchments were folded or ar ranged in small square sheets as now, how ever: M. Santander owned a beautiful Pentateuch written on 57 skins of Oriental leather, sewed together with threads or strips of the same material; it formed a roll of 113 French feet (120.45 English) long. And practically the same arrangement of successive surfaces had been enforced in the use of the clay or wooden tablets, from the nature of the articles. The form remained substantially unaltered throughout the Middle Ages, and being even more suitable for paper than for vellum, was ready on the invention of print ing to facilitate its full development; though important differences in bulk, arising as well from the condition of the art and its materials as the fashion of the times, distinguish books of the earlier periods of printing from those of to-day.