BOOK.. Any folded leaves which are or may be written upon ; also a general name for any literary composition, but more parti cularly any composition large enough to be formed into a volume. Before the use of books or volumes things were committed to writing on stone, wood, bark, de. The Decalogue was written on tables of stone ; so likewise, as we learn from Josephus, the children of Seth wrote their inventions and astronomical observations on two columns, one of brick and the other of stone, the latter of which was standing in his day. Hesiod's works were originally written upon tables of lead; Solon's laws upon wooden planks, &c. ; and the Pa rian Chronicle, or a chronicle of the affairs of Athens, on marbles, which are now known by the name of the Arundelian. The Scy thians, Celts, and their several descendants, the Goths, Teutons, &c. also used to write on trees whatever they thought worthy to preserve in writing. Tables of wood, box, and ivory, were also common among the ancients ; but we find that the Romans were accustomed to write upon tables of wax, by means of a style or bodkin, so contrived that they could also erase what they pleased. The finest and thinnest parts of the bark of trees, as of the lime, the ash, the maple, and the elm, were also employed, whence the Latin name liber signifies both book and bark. The
English word book is derived immediately from the Saxon boec, Low German bok, High German buck ; and is either from both, which signifies a beech, because the bark of this kind of tree was used ; or from biegen, to bend, because the leaves were folded or bent into the form of a book. When books were rolled up, they were on that account called yo.
lumen, a volume, a name afterwards given to paper and parchment folded together. Some times the roll consisted of several sheets of bark fastened together and rolled upon a stick, called an umbilicus. Before the introduction of printing, books were become so scarce in the middle ages, that, in Spain, one and the same copy of the Bible, St. Jerome's Epistles, and some few volumes of ecclesiastical offices, served several different monasteries. Since that period the increase of books has been prodigious ; and in consequence of the diffe rent editions, modes of printing, size, type, and other particulars connected either with the external form or internal contents, the knowledge of books has become a particular study and pursuit, under the name of bibli ography.