From the Vault: Invention of the Book, Part 2

Books are one of humanity’s greatest inventions, but where do they come from? In this classic Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore the history of book technology, from ancient clay tablets and papyrus scrolls to the codex and beyond. (Originally published 5/28/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
of the show. This one is part two of our
series on the invention of the book. It originally aired.
May I say let's get right into chapter well, I
would say chapter one, Volume two, Chapter one. Welcome to

(00:30):
Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
back with part two of our talk about the invention
of the book. Now, if you didn't listen to the
last episode, you should probably go back and listen to

(00:52):
that one first. That was the Invention of the Book
Part one, where we talked about what constitutes a book conceptually,
what are the earliest things that might be thought of
to count as a book in the archaeological record. We
talked about various materials on which ancient writings were printed,
you know, from hard surfaces and steals into things like

(01:12):
papyrus and and parchment and vellum. But today we wanted
to come back and talk a little bit more about
the overall form of books, and I thought a great
place to start with here would be one of the
most significant transitions in the history of books, and that
is the transition between the scroll and the codex. And
just to put you in the right frame of mind

(01:34):
for this, have you ever thought about how, once upon
a time you had to rewind books? Oh? Absolutely, when
you think about the way a scroll works, and indeed
how you know some electronic versions of documents work as well,
where you want is scrolling through the document. Uh. It
is like very much like say that the ribbon in
a VCR tape. It is a thing that has a

(01:56):
beginning in an end and uh, and if you were
to jump round in it, you were going to have
to scroll through it. You know. I know there must
be some writing attesting to this in the ancient world.
But I just wonder if you had, like an ancient library,
did you have the like the video store problem of
the person who checked out the scroll before you didn't
rewind it and you have to take it back from

(02:18):
the end to the beginning, Yeah, or those like poorly
wound or something. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's always
the case with with books and books are are precious objects,
and then we're even more precious in the past book scrolls,
whatever you know, you want to refer to this compiled
form of written knowledge. And yeah, it's something that's communal

(02:39):
in nature. You don't want the person before you mistreating it, right. So,
so this world where you had to rewind books, this
was of course the world of the scroll, which was
the most prominent physical form of the book throughout you know,
much of the Mediterranean World, North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, UM.
And unlike the codex model that we're familiar with today.
Remember again the codex basically like the books we know

(03:01):
today where there uh, there's a spine where the pages
are attached and you can leave through the pages to
read the text. Uh. The scroll was essentially one really
long page that was made by attaching successive sheets of material,
usually would be papyrus or parchment in to end with
either glue or with stitching. You could sew them together.

(03:24):
And then to read a scroll, of course, as you
would make your way through, you would unroll the the
long sheet from from a from a winding stick on
one end, and then you would roll it up on
the other one, and a scroll could unravel either vertically
or horizontally. In the direction of the rolling for a
particular document often depended on what language was being written,
like was the script naturally oriented vertically or horizontally. Last time,

(03:49):
in the previous episode, I mentioned the book the book
The Life Story of a Technology by Nicole Howard, which
we were using as one of our references, and Howard
draws attention to a number of basic practical limitations of
the scroll, some of which I had never considered before,
but I thought these were really interesting in helping us
think about what would cause the transition from the scroll

(04:10):
to the codex over time. So even with scrolls, you
might think that the idea of pages having pages in
a document, you know, these sort of like blocked out
sections of the text, that that would emerge with the
codex because it's natural to leaf through the pages. But
Howard points out that there was sometimes a need for
something like the concept of a page even in a scroll,

(04:33):
because just imagine trying to read a scroll. Imagine you
are writing in a script that flows horizontally like English,
it goes from left to right, and you're working with
a scroll that unravels horizontally. Do you write one line
that goes the entire fifty feet or whatever of the
entire scroll, and then back up, rewind the entire thing,

(04:53):
and then start on the second line. I mean, that's
obviously impractical. So instead, Howard writes that sometimes scribes would
mark off columns of text of some manageable length, maybe
a few inches wide, and then once the column was
filled down to the bottom, you would start at the
top of a new column. Basically, these would be pages
just like in a book, except you would roll and

(05:15):
unroll them instead of leafing through them. But she also
points out a really obvious disadvantage of the scroll. And
this is in addition to the need to rewind your
when you're done with the scroll, it is going to
be really tedious to jump to places in the middle
or end of a document to reference something. So imagine it's,
you know, the Bible, and you want to reference a

(05:36):
particular verse. Early books might might not even have had
page numbers like foldable you know, codex books might not
have had page numbers on the pages. But imagine it,
even without page numbers to refer to, it's just going
to be so much easier to leaf through and find
a later passage in a codex than it is going
to be to roll through and find a later passage

(05:59):
in the scroll, mostly due to the ease of page
flipping as a mechanical action as opposed to the rolling
and unrolling action. This is interesting. It makes me think
of the books once again because for for my own money, well,
first of all, I want to say that sometimes I'll
use e books when researching this podcast, and in those
cases I'll use a browser based um like Kindle Reader,

(06:22):
which allows me to jump around a lot and do
word searches and so forth. That is a little more flexible.
But for for my more personal reading, if I'm reading
a novel um in the book form, I'll use my Kindle.
And when I'm using the Kindle, I have the experience
that is more like a scroll, where I find that
I'm generally going just straight through it and if I

(06:45):
jump around, I risk losing my spot. And part of
that maybe I just don't know how to use the
Kindle properly. You know, it might be a little user
error on my part, But for the most part, I
feel like I've just got to keep going. I can't
jump around, I can't go back and if it is
a book that I know has like a glossary at
the end or some sort of encyclopedia related to the world,

(07:05):
something like saying, our Scott Baker book. Uh, then I'm
just not going to get that in an in an
electronic form, I'm going to get the hard copy so
I can flip around, so I could go to the
back and look up characters or places or wars and
see how they relate to the spot that I'm reading in. Yeah,
my experience is exactly like yours. I find that. If

(07:26):
it's so when I'm talking about an e book, if
it's a book I'm using for a reference, I really
only want to read it on a desktop so that
I can like use the mouse to navigate with the
slider and use the search function easily and all that.
If it's a book that I'm just reading for pleasure,
I'd rather read it like on my phone, uh, where
I can just leave through the pages one at a time.

(07:47):
But yeah, in in that format it is tedious to
try to flip back and forth too. In notes or whatever.
You know, I have to dragon dungeons and dragons a
little bit here. I don't know to what extent this
was intentional. But one thing that you see in Dungeons
and Dragons with spell books and spell scrolls is that
a spell book is something you reference, is something like
your your wizard character carries around or picks up and

(08:08):
learns new spells from. But a spell scroll is this
this more like magical text that is consumed as you
read it. To read the scroll is to is to
cast the spell that is contained in the magical writing
in the scroll itself, and then afterwards it is gone.
That's very interesting. I mean, that seems to reflect some

(08:28):
kind of knowledge about the differences of these two formats,
and it does make you wonder about the different psychological
effects of reading cultures based on a scroll versus reading
cultures based on a on a codex. Right, yeah, I
can't help but wonder how it alters the metaphor of
internal narrative, you know, to have to flip rather than
to scroll. Now. Now, granted, I imagine literacy was you know,

(08:51):
not widespread enough for the technological metaphor to be that meaningful,
you know, to the majority of the population in ancient times.
But interesting to think about. I also think it's interesting
to think about personal reading, like the reading that you know,
someone does on their own in a quiet room, as
inherently invoking an internal narrative or voice, as opposed to

(09:14):
the external narrative voice that you would get through say,
communal storytelling or communal singing, you know, these other modes
of sharing a story or a text with other people.
Uh It Also, you know, it makes me wonder about
how the the format the scroll versus the codex would
cause people to think differently about what books were for.

(09:37):
Like if a scroll based culture, I wonder, would be
more likely to suggest that you should read through an
entire book at once in order, rather than using it
as something to consult isolated sections from. On one hand,
you know, I wonder that, and that is kind of
a common sensical uh bit of induction from the idea
of a scroll. But honestly, then again, I would say,

(09:58):
I don't necessarily see a lot of direct evidence of this,
Like it does seem like ancient religious texts and scroll
cultures were pretty thoroughly consulted for isolated quotes in a
in a piecemeal fashion. I mean, I think about like
the rabbinical tradition and Judaism, which was very scroll based
at the time. But then again I don't know, Like, um,
I wonder here's another thing. Does a scroll culture maybe

(10:21):
place more emphasis on the memorization of books and narratives
that you read? Maybe so? And and I also can't
help but think maybe part of this is just we
are we are not scroll based individuals. Are Is this
not a scroll based culture? So of course we we
see like we imagine the regular use of scrolls as

(10:41):
being somewhat alien and clumsy. But I guess if one
is versed in the use of scrolls, if one is
accustomed to it, you know, obviously you're gonna have uh,
you know, more flexibility and using one totally. I I
do get the impression that that it is generally just easier,
you know, like you like, there are strict if shouldntcy
advantages to the code X over the scroll, but that

(11:03):
those are magnified by being unfamiliar with how to use
the scroll. Yeah. I think that's fair. But then so
I want to go back to another thing Nicole Howard
talks about, which I hadn't really thought about much, but
this is interesting as well. So to read a scroll,
you often needed to use either both hands at the
same time, or you needed to set it on a

(11:24):
desk with a with a pair of weights to hold
the open section down and keep it from rolling around.
So uh so, like think of the ease with which
you can hold a book, a codex book open in
one hand and write down notes or copy text with
the other hand. Or with some books, you know, if
it's a very nicely bound book and it's got the

(11:45):
right balance of weight and everything, you don't even need
one hand. You can just set it down on a
desk and leave it open, or put it on a
reading stand and it stays open to your place. Scrolls
were usually nowhere near this convenient. And uh and I
think we've often talked about the underappreciated evolutionary advantage of
technologies or methods that allow free hands while in use.

(12:07):
I think this is very clearly a case of that. Yeah,
I mean, certainly when you get into the use of
these various grommores, uh, these these sacred books, you know,
they're they're often intended to be taken with you. You
know a lot of times they are. They are handy
travel volumes of important texts then may be carried on
your person, as opposed to you know, left in the scriptorium.

(12:29):
And I mean, if we're going to use a biological analogy, obviously,
books are things much like genes that get reproduced through copying,
and so in a way, you could almost think of
books that are easier to copy as having a kind
of sexual selection advantage, right, Like it's easier for them
to reproduce. If a book is easier to make a
copy of because you can hold it in one hand

(12:51):
or set it down easily while you copy it onto
another sheet. I mean, I wonder if that literally results
in just more copies of those types of books getting made. Yeah,
I mean it's I know, it ultimately makes it more readable.
And like we said in the last episode, a book
that is not read or cannot be read in some
ways isn't a book like it is because so much
of it is about the transference of information and not

(13:14):
just the collection of information. Yeah, totally. So here's another
interesting issue Howard raises. When you're pulling a book like
we have today off the shelf, do you have a
hard time figuring out which book to grab? I mean
usually no, right, because the titles are right there on
the spine. It's totally easy to find what you're looking for, right,
And even if the spine does not have the title,

(13:35):
or the spine has been taped over, etcetera. You just
flip it open. You go right to the title page,
the copyright page. You can find all the information you
need right. The issue of identifying documents quickly from within
a large collection was nowhere near this easy and scroll
based cultures of the ancient world, Howard writes, quote readers
of scrolls dealt with the problem of identification by applying

(13:57):
small tags to the upper edges of scrolls. In Greek,
these were called silly boss, which is where we get
the term syllabus uh and she goes on, while the
Romans referred to them as titulus, which is where we
get the term title. Tags made it easier to organize
and identify scrolls, but there remained the problem of storage.

(14:19):
Being rounded, they did not lend themselves to meet stacking. Instead,
scrolls were placed in groups in a stone or wooden jar,
known in Greek as a biblioteca. And there's a great
piece of terminology like etymology there. Think of how this
jar library, this jar that had scrolls, and it influenced
the names for library buildings in the Romance languages today.

(14:42):
You know, the Spanish word for a library is biblioteca. Yeah,
though there's a funny, perhaps false etymology that always followed
from that in my head, which is also the Spanish
word disco taca for discotheq, which makes me think it's
like the disc library. That probably doesn't quite work out, right.
But Howard also acknowledges that bookmaking in the ancient world

(15:03):
was not a uniform industry, right. It wasn't like they had,
you know, factories that would uh that would print all
these books in this exactly similar way. For many centuries,
scrolls were the standard, but you would find weird exceptions
here and there. And she cites the examples of books
made out of papyrus and parchment that were stored not

(15:23):
in scrolls but by folding like a map, or folding
in an accordion style. And while this format was unusual
at the time, that accordion style fold may well have
set an important precedent because the accordion style fold, if
you think about it, would have actually allowed for finding
a place in a document more easily with a flipping

(15:45):
motion through the folded sections, rather than the tedious rolling
and unrolling of a scroll. And of course we still
see this form all the time, not only with maps
um but also with menus and more importantly brochures. Oh
tooele though, just trying to imagine, I like those big
maps that fold down, and you've got to find the

(16:06):
right way to fold it back or you'll be putting
the wrong direction. Creases in when you try to, Yeah,
and it'll be it won't be flat, it'll be like
a little a little puffy, and then it doesn't actually
go back where you're still in your maps. Imagine trying
to map fold your edition of Moby Dick. That sounds
like a nightmare. But so where does the actual codex
come in? Remember the codex format again is the book

(16:28):
that's still in use today and involves stacks of pages
folded inward fastened into spine, which you read by leafing
through one page to the next. We mentioned in the
last episode that it seems like the codex started to
be produced in the Roman world around the first century.
Nicole Howard points to a very important predecessor technology though,

(16:49):
which likely gave rise to the codex, and this is
a technology known as the diptic. So the easiest way
to imagine a diptic is to picture a hardback book
cover with out any pages inside it. So a diptic
would usually consist of two solid flaps made out of
something hard like would usually like she she says, often

(17:09):
ebony or box would, and they would be attached at
the edges with some kind of hinge, so you could
sew them together with with string or thread or with
leather straps, and this would allow them to open and
close like the cover of a book. And the diptic
was used generally as a temporary storage space for information.
So the inside surfaces of these flaps that open and

(17:33):
closed would be coated with wax, and then writing could
be scratched into the wax with a sharp implement or
with a stylus, and then the wax surface could be
reused simply by rubbing out the indentations or scratches bearing
the writing, essentially erasing the board and preparing it to
record new information again. And these could be used for
all kinds of things, for taking notes about something, for

(17:56):
sending a message to someone. It was a general purpose,
reuse able writing surface. But then there comes in a mystery,
so we know that there was this diptic device, But
we don't know who or when it first occurred to too,
simply so pages of parchment or papyrus in between the
flaps of the diptic. We don't know who came up

(18:19):
with this idea, where it first emerged. We know we
we think it probably happened first in the first century CE,
because we have some archaeological evidence of code codessees from
within the first century and the Latin poet Marshal who
lived from thirty eight to one oh four c mentions
this invention. He talks about it in some verses that

(18:41):
he wrote and published in the eighties, I believe, between
the years like eighty four and eighty six, talking about
how awesome these new parchment codices are, and he tells
you specifically in his poem where you can buy them,
which I like because poems of today that you know,
they don't usually just like include free advertisements for shops

(19:01):
for things, um, which is a shame. They should, they
should really monetize that right exactly So, I found a
translation that was cited in a in a BBC article
by a writer named Keith Houston or Houston that I'm
gonna refer back to in a minute. But this translation
of the section from Marshals Versus goes, you who long

(19:21):
for my little books to be with you everywhere, and
want to have companions for a long journey by these ones,
which parchment confines within small pages, give your scroll cases
to the great authors. One hand can hold me, which
is great. You know. He's like, oh, it's so sad
you can't travel with my books because they're on scrolls.

(19:41):
Well you can now take them with you on take
me with you on the road. And then yeah, all
the all those you know, the homers and whatever. You
can cram them into a scroll, stick them in a
jar somewhere. That's fine. Now, this is great. It's like saying,
you know, my my books, you know, and this in
the work. I'm one of the great authors. But my
work will be a part of your life, right, uh. Yeah.

(20:03):
And then he goes on to say, oh, by the way,
here's where you can get them, so that you are
not ignorant of where I am on sale, and don't
wonder aimlessly through the whole city. I will be your
guide and you will be certain. Look for secundus, the
freedomen of learned Locnsus behind the threshold of the Temple
of Peace and the Forum of Palace. So there you go.
I mean, look him right up. But it doesn't make

(20:25):
me wonder like how recent of an invention this was,
Like it was there only one shop in the Roman
Empire selling selling the code X at this time or
was it like, you know, did people generally sort of
know what they are but he was trying to spread
the word or I don't know, it's not quite clear.
I mean it could have been in a in a
sense kind of like the like the early days of

(20:47):
like the iPhone or the iPad. Right, maybe you couldn't
get him everywhere, had to go to that apple store, right,
this was the Secundus had the apple store of the day. Yeah,
look up Secundus and then you can take me everywhere.
I love it. So so, even though Marshall thought that
the parchment codex was great, it did not immediately take off. Instead,

(21:07):
for hundreds of years, books within the Roman Empire in
the Mediterranean region would remain this mix of codessease and scrolls,
with cod dissease slowly gathering greater popularity over the decades.
I've seems some sources assert that the codssease became mainstream,
and maybe like the third or fourth centuries, Howard says

(21:28):
that it wasn't really until the fifth century that the
Codex became extremely common commonplace. But whenever you date the
accomplishment of the Codex takeover, it's clear that it wasn't overnight.
It was a long, slow march. And there's another really
interesting thing that I learned. I was reading an article
for the BBC by by this author, Keith Houston or

(21:50):
Houston who the author of a book called the book
a cover to cover exploration of the most powerful object
of our time. And he points out an interesting cultural
train and that emerges that ties book technology to specific
religious groups. He writes, quote, Rome's pagan majority, along with
the Jewish population of the ancient world, preferred the familiar

(22:12):
form of the scroll. The Empire's fast growing Christian congregation,
on the other hand, enthusiastically churned out paged books containing Gospels,
commentaries and esoteric wisdom. And since I've read this in
several other sources that there seemed to be this this
preference for the Codex. Specifically, I mean among Christians generally,

(22:33):
but specifically I believe among the Christians of North Africa,
and it's interesting to wonder. I don't know if there's
an answer for why, in particular the Codex took off
with Christians within the region and and only more slowly
spread to the other religious groups. I mean, one one
can only assume that it just had to do with
the advantages of codices and how they particularly applied to

(22:57):
those groups. I mean, maybe it's the mobility for instance. Right, So, yeah,
we know several things about them. They're there, may be
easier to leave through quickly and reference things. They're easier,
they're smaller and more compact that you can take them,
you carry them around more easily. I mean, when I
think about some of the great early uh codessease in
in the archaeological record, a lot of them that come

(23:19):
to mind our Christian documents, you know, like the books
of the Nagamadi Library and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, and also you could get into the fact
that that perhaps they're easier to secret away. That could
be possible as well. Yeah. Alright, on that note, we're
going to take a break, but when we come back,
we will dive into the world of Mesoamerican codices. Thank alright,

(23:43):
we're back. So you're probably some of you are probably wondering, well,
what about the codices from other parts of the world.
In fact, some of the more famous codices from elsewhere
in the world are, for instance, the Mayan Codices. And
despite the name, you know that these were these were
not uh codices in the strictest sense of the word. Um.

(24:05):
These were typically long folded sheets um that were there
were more in keeping with that that accordion style system
we were talking about earlier and uh. And so yeah,
if you're being very strict about the definition of a
codex is as you know, having whole flipping pages front
and back. Uh, this is not going to fit that description.
But they are incredible works and they reveal a great

(24:28):
deal about say, Mayan culture. Now I've seen them referred
to as screenfold codices and uh and uh. And some
writers such as Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, author of UM
ninety three's Paper and Civilization, they are very firm on
the position that these were definitely books that you shouldn't
you shouldn't try and like skirt them out of the

(24:50):
you know, the way of the book uh categorization, like
these were books to be very clear. Oh yeah, I
mean I think we're in general going with the bigger
definition of the book and scroll or books as well
for us. Yeah. So I was reading more about these
um about Mayan codeseas, in particular in the construction of
the Codex in Classic and post Classic period Maya civilization

(25:12):
by Dr Thomas J. Tobin of Duquesne University, which incidentally
I learned today Werner Herzog attended school there in the
nineteen sixties. Everything comes back to Herzog though there there
again we have a we do have a South American
connection there with Herzog, of course, but at any rate.
Um Tobin points out that the Romans were making advancements

(25:32):
in what we think of as the Codex between one
hundred and seven hundred see as we were previously discussioning,
but that that's during that same time period the Mayan
civilization in meso America was making advances in their own
recording of information on paper. He writes that the Maya
developed paper pretty early in the millennium. Based on archaeological evidence,

(25:53):
they were making bark paper in the early fifth century. See. Basically,
the idea is that they were already using bark cloth tunics,
and from that developed huon a writing surface that could
be used to record information. Now, the cloth in question
was apparently a kind of tappa cloth, and it was
made from not the outer bark but the inner bark

(26:14):
of certain trees. And this evolved into papermaking over time,
and the result is apparently somewhat superior to papyrus by
many estimations. Yeah. Interesting, uh, this is especially interesting. Here's
a quote from from Tobin. In this right up quote,
the Maya developed paper screen fold codices as a direct
step beyond carving information into stone buildings and steely, unlike

(26:38):
Western papermaking, which took a more circuitous route to reach
its final form single sheets, papyrus rolls, and then leafed codices.
So I found that that interesting. Decided that again the
Maya make a a direct jump from seemingly from carving
into stone to using these codices. Huh. Yeah. Now. One
of the great tragedies here, of course, is that despite

(27:00):
records of thousands of Mayan codices and the inventories of
Spanish conquistors who made contact with the Mayans in the
sixteenth century, the vast majority of these codices were destroyed
later due to their either either they were seen as
being satanic in nature, being you know, just you know,
there's something dangerous about them, or they were just seen

(27:22):
as useless, just you know, garbage to be disposed of,
and so most of them were disposed of. Um, but
I think, what are the source I was reading here?
They were like they're like four complete codices of the
Maya's left in the world, and that's it, you know,
just this vast wealth of information, these libraries and information

(27:42):
are just lost to us. Just just one more horror
of the subjugation of the Maya people by European invaders. Um. Yeah,
that kind of destruction of knowledge is just like such
a blasphemy. Yeah. So like just you know, without getting
into the just sort of the larger horror of that
whole situation, just in terms of trying to understand how

(28:04):
the Mayan's made paper, you know, what was what what
was their original papermaking process, it becomes difficult because then
researchers have to, you know, they have to try and
reconstruct their methods based on you know, the few remaining codicies,
but also a lot of secondary evidence looking to modern
traditions in that part of the world, and sort of
you know, backtracking from that and then of course engaging

(28:25):
in a lot of experimentation. So Tobin himself tries this
out in this paper, uh, you know, trying to create
his own Mayan paper and ultimately his own Mayan UH codex.
As best we can tell, it was probably an intricate
process that by necessity lines up with some of the
steps used in other paking papermaking processes. Likewise, there is

(28:46):
some guesswork involved in the evolution of the craft, how
it developed from that. You know that the garment craft
that we already mentioned, we ultimately you know, know more
with certainty about say Egyptian and Chinese papermaking. But you know,
it's it's really a shame because the Mayan technology was
pretty advanced, uh, and it hasn't received as much attention,

(29:07):
in part due to the cultural destruction. I certainly recommend
anyone out there to to to when you get a chance,
look up the Mayan codices and look at some of
the examples of the surviving codices the photographs of them,
because they are really fascinating with all of the you know,
the Mayan writing and glyphs inside of it. Uh, They're
beautiful to behold, and you and some of the pictures

(29:28):
you get a real good sense of the folds that
are involved here. Yeah. Well, especially the symphasis on paper
brings me back to the materials on which writing is
preserved and how fundamental that is to the history of
book technology. Because you know, we talked about in the
previous episode about the various advantages of parchment and vellum

(29:50):
versus papyrus. But basically everything we're talking about in the
ancient world is going to be relatively difficult to produce
and you're to have a more limited supply of it
than we would have of, say, say paper today. So
maybe we should go back and look at another branch
on the paper tree here and and look at the

(30:10):
Chinese origins of paper. Yeah yeah, this is this is
an area that we know a lot more about. Um So, yeah,
previously we touched on the Chinese origins of paper, uh
in roughly, I think we said one oh five CE,
and this is nearly a thousand years ahead of the Europeans.
I think there's some dispute about the dating of the
originary paper in China. Yeah, yeah, and we'll we'll get

(30:32):
into some of that here. Traditionally, credit for the invention
of paper is given to one Psiloon who was an
imperial eunuch, and he is said to have created paper
or g h which Andrew Robinson in sevent d Inventions
of the Ancient World says was defined in contemporary dictionaries
as quote a matt of refuse fibers from tree bark, imperimnants,

(30:56):
cloth rags, and old fishing nets. Yeah. To compliment at this,
I was reading a section in Howard about the production
of paper here in China, and she says, the Chinese
originally used silk fiber to make paper. Uh. And obviously
this would have made a paper of a high quality,
but this was going to be very expensive, and over
time this was replaced with hemp fiber, which was cheaper,

(31:18):
and then after that replaced with the sort of melange
of things you're talking about it, she says, quote a
combination of bark, scraps of rags that had been discarded
and bast fiber. And remember we mentioned bast fiber in
the last episode. It's the vascular tissue of a plant
that the plant uses to transport vital organic compounds produced

(31:39):
by photosynthesis from one place to another within the plant's body.
So it's kind of like a plant's arteries. You can
imagine ropes and ancient paper made out of plant arteries. Yeah,
kind of the scaffolding for the paper. Right. But so,
the process for this was that you would put all
these various fibrous materials into a big vat of water,

(31:59):
and then you would soak them through until they became
a kind of pulp or paste, and then you would
do your best to mix up and thoroughly emulsify the paste,
and then you would press it flat to squeeze the
water out, and then when it dried, you would have
a crude form of paper. Um. And just thinking about
the roll of the water here, I I couldn't help
but be reminded of our recent episode on soap, and

(32:23):
it just makes me appreciate again how much usually just
passes by us unnoticed regarding the deep connections between chemistry
and the more human subjects like history and culture and literature,
Like how the molecular properties of water are so deeply
entwined in life and history and everything we know because
of these polar opposite charges across the length of the

(32:45):
water molecule, the potency of those charges to dissolve and
ingest the corn ucopia of the material world. Water is,
of course, the defining substance of all cells and life processes.
Remember that quota we talked about on the soap episode
The Hungarian by oh chemist Albert sent Gurgi, who said
that quote, life could leave the ocean when it learned

(33:06):
to grow a skin bag in which to take the
water with it. We're still living in water, having the
water now inside. Yeah, and then we'll continue to to
stress here just how important water is to this advance
of paper and ultimately bookmaking technology. It's enough to make
you wonder if you had, say a desert world like um,

(33:27):
I don't know, like like tattooing in Star Wars, right,
Like could a world like that? Um, Like, what with
the world like that, what would be the chances of
sentient life forms developing paper that is that that functions
in the same way our paper was. It seems like
they might even have to have like a different material
um solution to the same problem. Well, yeah, I mean

(33:49):
for the same reasons you would have a hard time
imagining paper, you would have a hard time imagining life
forms at all, just because like it's the same reason
that water is the substance of life on Earth and
the step utter of all life and technology. It's the
same reason that water is good for washing your hands
in your dishes, and now it's also the same reason
that it's used to make this pulp that we squeeze

(34:09):
into paper. It's just the ultimate dissolver and ingestor of
all things. Uh. Sorry, I guess that's kind of a digression.
But every now and then you just got to go
down the water hole. Oh yeah, yeah, And like I said,
we'll keep going down in the water hole in this episode. Well,
let's come back to um that idea of China, the
Chinese origin of paper, uh, coming in roughly one oh
five c E. Again, that's the traditional story. However, there

(34:32):
is archaeological evidence that indicates that a very early form
of paper might have been in use in western China
the much earlier than this, pushing the probable beginnings of
Chinese paper back to perhaps the second century b C.
In tropical south and southeastern China. Robinson even says that
it's possible it began in the sixth or fifth centuries

(34:55):
b C. E uh, as this is when we've dated
the washings of Himp and Linen rags too. The idea
here is that someone might have accidentally discovered paper making
while drying wet fibers on a mat, which indeed is
very central to some of the papermaking techniques that were
discussing here. And we'll continue to discussing this episode. So

(35:17):
if I'm understanding this right, the hypothesis is maybe somebody
was washing some old rags and hemp and stuff in
water and then left it there for a while, and
then it started to kind of mush up and turn
into this pulp in the water, and then they tried
to dry it out and it formed this this substance.
Right though, again, this would be like a big question.

(35:39):
It's basically saying the thing that we think people were
doing to accidentally discover paper, they were doing it far
before we're dating the discovery of paper. So there's a
certain amount of guesswork there. Did they or didn't they?
It's impossible to say. I do want to note that
there are other historians, such as A History of China

(36:01):
author John Key is a source I come back to
UH again and again for Chinese history related matters, and he,
for one, seems to stick to the first and second centuries.
See as the origins of paper, and I think this
is probably a matter of you know, what has proven
and recorded versus what seems possible based on additional evidence.

(36:22):
Uh So, I think either way, it's it's fair to
say that paper was a product of the Han dynasty,
which you know, gives us a nice a nice spread
between two O two b C and two twenty Okay,
but we do know once paper was established, uh in China,
did spread out from there? Right right, paper would have

(36:44):
spread from China to Korea, Vietnam and Japan, and eventually
it would follow the Silk Road out of the East
into Central Asia and then the Arab world. Um. I
was reading more about this in the books of James Burke,
specifically Connects and The Daily Universe Changed, both of which
were also television series that I know of a lot

(37:05):
of our listeners grew up watching as well. So more specifically,
Burke points out that, uh, the Arabs end up acquiring
paper technology when they overran um summerkand in seven, during
which they captured a Chinese workmen who had been sent

(37:25):
there to set up a paper manufacturing factory and samarcandas
that would be in what is Central Asia, like modern
days Pekistan. Yeah. Yeah, so like basically the Chinese had
papermaking interests there and when Arab forces overran the city, Uh,
they ended up capturing the workmen and learned about it
that way, and it took off from there. By ten

(37:48):
fifty for example, the Byzantine Empire was importing Arab paper now. Uh.
There are some wonderful sections in both books where Burke
talks about about paper in the Arab world in the
day the universe changed. He points out that the availability
of paper quote encourage the development of a highly literate community,

(38:09):
with regular postal services delivering correspondences as far away as India.
And he also points to the air abuse of paper
money which played into export and import duties. Yeah. This
already suggests a very interesting back and forth between material
economics and literary culture, like the idea of the presence
of a cheaper medium for transmitting the written word potentially

(38:32):
allowing a culture to become more literary just because like
it's easier to produce written materials. Yeah. I found this
to be a fascinating passage. Again, just Burke talking about
the the the the Arab world by virtue of their
paper technology. Just having this this highly literate community and
then better communication. Yeah, and of course papermaking would go

(38:53):
on to become an important industry in like the medieval
Islamic world, and you can you can chart the path
way that paper took through the medieval Islamic world to
medieval Europe. There was some initial resistance to to paper
in Europe. I was reading about this in Howard's book.
She says that, quote, Uh, in twelve twenty one, the
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the second issued a decree that

(39:17):
invalidated any government documents written on paper, such a Muslim
tool being unwelcome in Christendom, which what an amazingly ridiculous gesture.
But she she points out that the sanction was not effective.
She says, quote, paper mills spread quickly throughout Europe, and
as mills became more efficient, costs dropped, and in the

(39:37):
fifteenth century, uh, to the to the point where paper
was one six the price of vellum. So it's just
like the material advantages and the cheapness of paper overcame
whatever kind of attempted bands or cultural prejudice that we're
attempting to keep paper out of Europe. Oh, yeah, absolutely,
and we'll come back to this in a bit, uh,

(39:58):
because it's the prejudice against the new new paper. Is uh.
Is this such a wonderful topic. But first I'd like
to go back to China for just a minute with
a word on printed books, because this was also really cool.
I was again, I was reading in keys The History
of China, which is a nice, suitably thick tone, but
concise tone, mobile mobile tone about the you know, the

(40:20):
epic history of China. He discusses in one part a
Buddhist book titled the Diamond Sutra, which is an old
Mayana sutra that was translated into various languages first and
I think four hundred c E. And it was so
called the diamond Sutra because for those who mastered it,
mastered its teachings. It was said to cut away all

(40:41):
worldly illusions like a diamond. So there's a ten dynasty
translation that was found uncovered again in nineteen hundred C.
And it was subsequently dated to May eleven, eight sixty
eight C. And it consisted of seven printed pages pasted
together to form a scroll. Now Key points out that

(41:04):
this is sometimes wrongfully cited as the world's first printed book,
but then he adds quote replicating images and written characters
using inked blocks carved in relief, a process not much
removed from that used for making molds for ceramics and metals,
had been practiced in China since at least the eighth century.
But it is the oldest complete printed text with a

(41:27):
date with a date yeah. Uh and uh again, this
is one worth looking up a picture of because it's
really beautiful to look at the the art inside, um
is just absolutely beautiful. Uh. Yes, so I was reading
others considered this to be the oldest surviving printed book
in the world, and it's it's worth noting. He makes
a Key makes a point on this. Uh. This was

(41:49):
seven centuries before Gutenberg. This was eleven centuries before the
printing of India's scripts. Key contends that this was quote
undoubtedly the most momentous of all Chinese inventions. As a result,
Europe and India still have dozens of languages and literatures,
but China only one. Uh. Now, he's you know, making

(42:10):
he's not saying that China only has one language per
se here because obviously China has numerous languages. Um. But
but just talking about the consolidated um. Uh, you know,
focus on a single literature in a single language within
Chinese history. Yeah, well, I think this would go back
to what we talked about in the Chinese typewriter episode, right,

(42:32):
with the idea that the h am I correct in
thinking the different spoken languages of Chinese would still use
the same written script. Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah, uh and yeah.
I will remind people if you're interested in that. If
you want more about Chinese language, go back and listen
to that. Was it one episode or two? I can't recall.
I think it was just one, one really long episode

(42:54):
about the Chinese typewriter. Yeah. We talked with the author
Thomas S. Mulaney, who wrote ess typewriter history. In his book, Keys,
stresses that the real infotech revolution took place mostly during
the Five Dynasty's Ten Kingdoms period, which would have been
nine oh seven to nine seventy nine. The first use

(43:14):
of movable type may also date to this period, he adds,
but the earliest authoritative account of it being used would
come a few decades later, in the early eleventh century.
All right, I think we need to take another break,
but when we come back, we can discuss paper making
its way to European Alright, we're back Now, earlier we

(43:36):
already mentioned the idea of the influx of paper making
technology into Europe through the Muslim world in the Middle Ages,
and some attempts to to stem the tide of oncoming
paper technology, but ultimately any attempts of those sorts would fail.
Paper was destined to be the writing material of choice.
That's right, and so very discussed very where he mentioned

(43:58):
how paper from the Arab world is going to make
its way into Europe. Now specifically it ends up spreading
through the Arab world to Moorish Spain, specifically um I
believe it's pronounced Sha Tiva, which is south of Valencia,
and this is where the more is established paper mills,
and from here the technology spread to Christian Europe. Now

(44:21):
an interesting note from Burke about paper making technology in
both connections and the day of the universe change. Water
powered paper milling was in effect by at least twelve eighty.
Again the power of water coming into play here where
where it was used in the Italian marshes. Basically, water
powered trip hammers were used in these factories to pound

(44:43):
linen that was submerged in water to produce a white pulp,
which has then spread out to dry on wire mesh
and then pressed in a screw press to squeeze the
water out, and then you would hang it up to dry. Uh,
and then here's another fund. This is a classic connections here.
Burke rights that the timing was just right on the

(45:04):
mesh front because again it was like a metal mesh,
and it was the work of tailor's who had far
less work to do following the Black Death. These were
craftspeople who would have previously been stitching gold and silver
threads into garments, but now in the wake of the
Black Death there was garment making was was was less

(45:26):
of a business. There was there was less of it
to go around, so these very crafts people were now
making these fine meshes that were so important to the
paper making process. Anyway, back to the water powered paper
factories here. By the fourteenth century, these new advancements in
in the water power technology allowed linen rags, which were

(45:46):
collected by rag and bone men a lot of the times,
to be pounded into cheap, durable paper, and by the
end of the fourteenth century the price of paper in
Bologna had dropped by four percent, so this was cheaper
than parchment, but parchment purist. They some of them resisted
the change, insisting that, well, parchment can last a thousand years,

(46:07):
but this new paper, I don't know. I mean, i'd
grant I think parchment probably is more durable than paper, right, yeah, cheaper,
you know, it's hard to argue with that. It certainly is.
Now I want to throw in a note about rag
and bone men. Now some of you might hear that,
and you might think, well, this sounds like reanimate corpses

(46:29):
that are doing the will of the of the papermakers.
Uh No, they were not. They were, but they were
impoverished junk dealers that traveled around England. They were also
known as bone grubbers, and they did indeed scavenge bones
as well as junk for resale. In fact, Burke Rights
and connections that the bone scavenging, uh that you know

(46:50):
that was previously their main gig was all about collecting
the bones for use in fertilizer. But they then came
to collect and sell old rags to the paper makers,
and it was a tradition that lasted for centuries. Linen
rags especially were excellent raw materials for high quality, durable paper. Man.
That brings to mind a couple of things. First of all,

(47:10):
like this, uh, the class of people who collect things
counterintuitively that they can sell to well, it makes me
think of an ancient Rome, the people who collected urine
from from city latrines in order to sell to you know,
laundries and and the various businesses that used urine for
you know, its properties at the time. I remember, I
believe it was the Emperor Vespasian who first put a

(47:33):
tax on urine in order to support something he wanted
to do. And that's where the phrase money has no
smell comes from. You know. Somebody was like challenging him
on this and saying, the tax on urine to raise funds,
that's disgusting, and he's like, I don't smell anything on
the money. Urine also a friend of the the alchemist,
Oh absolutely, yeah. Who was it who had the big

(47:56):
old out of urine experiment? Oh goodness that when we
were talking about this is when in our history the
match we got into this. Yeah, when the Invention episode
about the match. Um, I forget that the exact timetable there,
but there were some key alchemists that were experimenting with
urine and hennig brand it was at the Big Urine. Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah,

(48:19):
I remember that now. So yeah, if you want more
urine based content, go look up that Invention episode on
the match Stick. You know. For a brief literary digression,
I could not help but think when you were talking
about the rag and Bone Man, the rag and Bone Collectors,
I couldn't help but think about the poem The Circus
Animals Desertion by the famous Irish poet William Butler Yates

(48:40):
and its image of the foul rag and bone shop
of the heart. This is it's it's really interesting. So
this poem was written in the final years of yates
his life, and in the early parts of the poem
he describes a kind of poetic jealousy of his younger self,
based in the agony of feeling that the imagination and

(49:01):
inspiration that came so easily to him in youth have
now abandoned him, and he finds himself in old age
struggling to find something meaningful or interesting to say. Uh So,
in instant you know, if you if you ever felt
yourself in one of those writer early moods, you will
know the agony of it. Uh. Instead, he finds himself

(49:22):
nostalgically obsessing about the characters and themes that he had
written about in earlier poems of his, one of those
subjects being one of our favorite mythical buddies, the Irish
hero Kukulan or kuhlan uh. So he so, just to
read a couple of these lines, he's, you know, he's
musing on these things he used to write about all
the time, he says, And when the fool and blind

(49:44):
man stole the bread, Kukulan fought the ungovernable sea heart
mysteries there and yet when all is said, it was
the dream itself enchanted me, character isolated by a deed
to engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted
stage took all my love, and not those things that

(50:04):
they were emblems of, which is an interesting admission, Like
he's saying, I think that, you know, he once believed
he was using mythical figures and stories as metaphors or
allegory to convey some underlying message about principles or politics
or whatever, but now admits that the underlying message was
always sort of a pretense, and what he really liked

(50:26):
were the mythical elements themselves that their face value, He
liked the heroes, he liked the settings, he liked the images. Yeah,
this is not a work of his. I was familiar
with that, but I really like that sentiment. And then
in the end of the poem, when he gets to
that image I mentioned, he asks himself like, well, where
did these images first come from? When you first you know,
when I wrote them? In the beginning and in its

(50:46):
concluding right lines, he writes, now that my ladder is gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start, in
the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Uh.
And I know this last line is interpreted by some
critics to refer to the paper on which the poem
is composed, the rag and bone shop being, of course
the place where you would buy paper, I guess, or

(51:07):
to you know, sell the stuff to make the paper.
And so for another weird connection between technology and literature,
I think this ending suggests to me that sometimes imagination
comes out of pure labor. He's suggesting that, you know,
the same way. Inventors are often not people dreaming up
ideal machines in the solitude of an ivory tower, but

(51:28):
people working with many hours of hands on experience with
a particular mechanical problem. And in the same way. Often
the poet who conjures great imagery and themes is not
the one who you know, shoots lightning bolts of genius
straight out of their brain. But it's somebody who does
a lot of work on the page, writing and writing
lots of junk until things begin to click and beauty emerges.

(51:51):
Just pounding the pulp, tell you have you can make
a fine piece of parchment out of out of old rags.
Now to go back to the paper industry itself. Uh,
there's another bit from Burke here that I wanted to share.
Writes that quote as the paper mill spreads, so too
to the spirit of religious reform unquote. And this would

(52:14):
have been alongside literacy itself and scriptoriums. And as the
price of paper fell, the development of eyeglasses advanced to
meet the demand for literacy, something we discussed in our
our our podcast episode of Invention on the sunglasses. But
there would still be too far, too few scribes in
Europe to meet the demands of the business world at

(52:35):
the time, even if you were now making cyborg scribes
via your your spectacle technology, you know, extending the the
the basically the uh, you know, the life of a
scribe by altering their eyes with these fabulous lenses. Um,
you still needed one invention yet that will really, you know,
boost literacy enough to you know, to give you the

(52:59):
scribes you need for the for the business world to thrive.
And that, of course is the printing press. But that,
as they say, is another story, and she'll be told
another time. Man, I'm not done thinking about how not
just the contents of the books we read, but the
physical form of the book has shaped our brain. I
think that there are there are insights yet left unearthed

(53:21):
on this subject. Absolutely all right, we're gonna have to
close it out for now, but we hope you enjoyed
our our two episode look at the invention of the book,
the invented invention of the codex. Uh. Perhaps this is
just the beginning of a journey for us as we know.
Come back to UH two additional literary inventions paper inventions

(53:43):
in the subsequent episodes. In the meantime, if you would
like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to boil
your mind for you who long for our little podcast
to be with you everywhere and want to have companions
for a long journey. You can find them wherever you
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Palace right and when you get our podcast from Secundus,

(54:06):
make sure that you rate, review and subscribe for more
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(54:33):
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