The Invention of the Book, Part 2

Books are one of humanity’s greatest inventions, but where do they come from? In this 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stot 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

(00:25):
to 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

(00:46):
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

(01:07):
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

(01:29):
beginning in an end and uh, and if you were
to jump around 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

(01:51):
the end to the beginning, Yeah, or those like poorly
wound or something. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's always
the case with books, and books are precious objects, and
we're even more precious in the past book scrolls. Whatever
you know, you want to refer to this compiled a
form of written knowledge, and yeah, if it's something that

(02:11):
is communal 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

(02:32):
codex is basically like the books we know 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

(02:54):
with stitching. You could sew them together. 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

(03:17):
script naturally oriented vertically or horizontally. Last time, 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

(03:38):
thought these were really interesting in helping us think about
what would cause the transition from the scroll 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 page is But Howard

(04:01):
points out that there was sometimes a need for something
like the concept of a page, even in a scroll,
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

(04:23):
entire scroll, and then back up, rewind the entire thing,
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

(04:46):
just like in a book, except you would roll and
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

(05:07):
it's you know, the Bible, and you want to reference
a 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

(05:29):
to be to roll through and find a later passage
in a 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 of e 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,

(05:50):
and in those cases I'll use a browser based um
like Kindle Reader, which allows me to jump around a
lot and do word searches and so forth, that 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,

(06:13):
where I find that I'm generally going just straight through
it and if I 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

(06:34):
glossary at the end or some sort of encyclopedia related
to the world, something like saying our Scott Baker book, Uh,
then I'm just not going to get that in a
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

(06:55):
I'm reading in. Yeah, my experience is exactly like yours.
I find that. If 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

(07:16):
my phone, uh, where I can just leave through the
pages one at a time. 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

(07:37):
something you reference, is something like your your wizard character
carries around or picks up and 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,

(07:57):
and then afterwards it is gone. That's very entry thing
that I mean. That seems to reflect some 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,

(08:20):
you know, to have to flip rather than to scroll. Now. Now, granted,
I imagine literacy was you know, not widespread enough for
the technological metaphor to be that meaningful you know, to
the majority of the population in ancient times. But it's
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

(08:43):
inherently invoking an internal narrative or voice, as opposed to
the external narrative voice that you would get through say,
communal storytelling or communal singing, you know, these other modes
of sharing a 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

(09:06):
people to think differently about what books were for. 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.

(09:30):
But honestly, then again, I would say 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,

(09:52):
here's another thing. Does a scroll culture maybe 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. Ours is not a scroll based culture,
So of course we we see like that we imagine

(10:13):
the regular use of scrolls as 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 efficiency advantages to the codex over the scroll,

(10:35):
but that 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

(10:58):
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

(11:18):
right balance of weight and everything. You don't even need
one hand. You can just set it down on the
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.

(11:40):
I think this is very clearly a case of that. Yeah,
I mean, certainly when you get into the use of
these various grimores, 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.

(12:02):
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

(12:23):
one hand 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, Like so much of it is about the

(12:44):
the transference of information and not just the collection of information. Yeah, totally.
Uh 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

(13:06):
spine does not have the title, 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

(13:28):
the problem of identification by applying 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

(13:50):
the problem of storage. Being rounded, they did not lend
themselves to neet 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

(14:13):
buildings in the Romance languages today. You know, the Spanish
word for a library is biblioteca yea. Though there's a funny,
perhaps false etymology that always followed from that in my head,
which is also the Spanish word disco teca for discotheq,
which makes me think it's like the disc library that
probably doesn't quite work out right, But Howard also acknowledges

(14:34):
that bookmaking in the ancient world 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 in scrolls but by folding

(14:59):
like a map, were 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 motion through the folded sections,

(15:20):
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 me news
and more importantly brochures. Oh totally. They're just trying to imagine,
like I like those big maps that fold out, and
you've got to find the right way to fold it
back or you'll be putting the wrong direction creases in

(15:42):
when you try to, yeah, and it'll be it won't
be flat, it'll be like a little little puffy, and
then it doesn't actually go back where you're stowing your maps.
Imagine trying to to map fold your edition of Moby Dick.
That sounds like a nightmare. But so where does the
actual codex come in? Remember the the codex format again,
is the book that's still in use today and involves

(16:03):
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, which likely gave rise to the Codex,

(16:24):
and this is a technology known as the diptic. So
the easiest way to imagine a diptic is to picture
a hardback book cover without 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 ebony or box would and they would be attached

(16:46):
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 restorage space for information.
So the inside surfaces of these flaps that open and

(17:06):
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

(17:29):
sending a message to someone. It was a general purpose,
reusable 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

(17:52):
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 codesas from
within the first century, and the Latin poet Marshal who
lived from thirty eight to one oh four, ce mentions
this invention. He talks about it in some verses that

(18:14):
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

(18:34):
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

(18:54):
for my little books to be with you everywhere, and
want to have companions for a long journey, buy 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. Well,

(19:15):
you can now take them with you on, take me
with you on the road. And then yeah, all all
those you know, the homers and whatever, you can cram
them into a scroll, stick him in a jar somewhere.
That's fine. No, this is great. It's like saying, you know,
my my books, you know, and this in the work.
I'm not one of the great authors, but my work
will be a part of your life, right uh. Yeah,

(19:36):
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
wander aimlessly through the whole city. I will be your
guide and you will be certain. Look for Secundous, the
freedomen of learned Loucnsus, 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

(19:58):
me wonder, like how recent of an invention this was,
Like it was there only one shop in the Roman
Empire selling selling the Codex 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 like the iPhone or

(20:21):
the iPad. Right, maybe you couldn't get him everywhere. He
had to go to that apple store, right, this was
the Secundus had the apple store of the day. Yeah,
look up Secundus. 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,
for hundreds of years, books within the Roman Empire in

(20:43):
the Mediterranean region would remain this mix of codsseas and scrolls,
with codssease slowly gathering greater popularity over the decades. It
seems some sources assert that the codsseas became mainstream and
maybe like the third or fourth centuries. Howard says that
it wasn't really until the fifth century that the codex

(21:05):
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
Houston who the author of a book called the book

(21:26):
a cover to cover exploration of the most powerful object
of our time, and he points out an interesting cultural
trend that emerges that ties book technology to specific religious groups. Uh.
He writes, quote, Rome's pagan majority, along with the Jewish
population of the ancient world, preferred the familiar form of
the scroll. The Empire's fast growing Christian congregation, on the

(21:50):
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, but
specifically I believe, among the Christians of North Africa. And

(22:11):
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 those groups.
I mean, maybe it's the mobility for instance, Right, So, yeah,

(22:35):
we know several things about them there 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 codesseas in
in the archaeological record, a lot of them that come
to mind are Christian documents, you know, like the books

(22:56):
of the Nagamadi Library and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, so you could get into the fact that
that perhaps they're easier to secret away. That could be
possible as well. Yeah, all right, on that note, we're
going to take a break, but when we come back
we will dive into the world of Mesoamerican codices. All right,

(23:16):
we're back. So uh 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 these were typically long folded sheets.

(23:41):
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.
They reveal a great deal about a Mayan culture. Now

(24:04):
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 nineteen forty 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 you know, the way of the

(24:24):
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 as scrolls or
books as well for us. Yeah. So I was reading
more about these um about Mayan codices, in particular in
the Construction of the Codex in Classic and Post Classic
period Maya Civilization by Dr Thomas J. Tobin of Duquesne University,

(24:48):
which incidentally, I learned today Werner Herzog attended school there
in the nineteen sixties. Everything comes back to her zag though.
There there again we have a we do have a
South American connection there with her Bizog, of course, but
at any rate, um Tobin points out that the Romans
were making advancements in what we think of as the
Codex between one hundred and seven hundred see as we

(25:10):
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, they were making bark paper in
the early fifth century see. Basically, the idea is that

(25:32):
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 and question was apparently a
kind of tappa cloth, and it was made from not
the outer bark but the inner bark of certain trees.
And this evolved into papermaking over time, and the result

(25:52):
is apparently somewhat superior to papyrus by many estimations. Yeah. Interesting. Uh,
this is especially in our 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 Western papermaking, which took him

(26:13):
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 records of thousands of Mayan

(26:36):
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, uh 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 as useless, just you know,

(26:56):
garbage to be disposed of, and so most of them
were disposed of. Um. But I think, uh, what 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 are just lost to us. Just

(27:17):
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 the Mayan's made paper,

(27:39):
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 in a lot of experimentation.

(28:00):
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. H. Likewise, there is some guesswork involved in

(28:20):
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, in part due

(28:41):
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're
really fascinating with all of the uh, you know, the
Mayan writing and glyphs inside of it. Uh. They're beautiful
to behold, and you in some of the pictures you

(29:01):
can 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

(29:23):
versus papyrus. But basically everything we're talking about in the
ancient world is going to be relatively difficult to produce
and and you're gonna 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

(29:43):
the 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

(30:05):
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 uh, 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,

(30:28):
hemper remnants, colloth rags, and old fishing nets. Yeah. To
complement 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

(30:50):
was cheaper, and then after that replaced with the sort
of melange of things you're talking about it, she says,
a quote a combination of bark, scraps of rag 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

(31:11):
organic compounds produced 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

(31:31):
a big vat of water, 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

(31:51):
I I couldn't help but be reminded of our recent
episode on soap, and 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

(32:14):
and everything we know because of these polar opposite charges
across the length of the 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 biochemist Albert

(32:34):
sent Gurgi, who said that quote, life could leave the
ocean when it learned 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 we'll
continue to to stress here just how important water is
to this advance of of paper and ultimately bookmaking technology.

(32:56):
It's enough to make you wonder if you had, say
a desert world like um, 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

(33:16):
different material um solution to the same problem. Well, yeah,
I mean 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 ladder of all life and technology.
It's the same reason that water is good for washing

(33:37):
your hands in your dishes, and now it's also the
same reason that it's used to make this pulp that
we squeeze 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, well, let's come back
to um. That idea of China, the Chinese area of paper, uh,

(34:01):
coming in roughly one oh five c E. Again, that's
the traditional story. However, there is archaeological evidence that indicates
that a very early form of paper might have been
in use and western China, the UM much earlier than this,
pushing the probable beginnings of Chinese paper back to perhaps
the second century b CE in tropical south and southeastern China.

(34:24):
Robinson even says that it's possible it began in the
sixth or fifth centuries b c E, 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 paper making

(34:47):
techniques that we're discussing here and will continue to discussing
this episode. So 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

(35:09):
this this substance. Right. Though again this would be like
a big question. 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

(35:29):
to note that there are other historians, such as um
A History of China 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 CE as the origins
of paper. And I think this is probably a matter
of you know, what has proven and recorded versus what

(35:52):
seems possible based on additional evidence. 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. Uh, A nice spread between two O,
two b C and two Okay, but we do know
once paper was established UH in China did spread out

(36:15):
from there, right right, paper would have 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 Connections
and The Daily Universe Changed, both of which were also

(36:36):
television series that I know of a lot of our
listeners UH 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 Chinese workmen who had been sent there

(36:59):
to set up a paper manufacturing factory and samarcandas that
would be in what is Central Asia like modern days Pakistan. 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 fifty, for example,

(37:22):
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, encouraged the development of a highly literate community,
with regular postal services delivering correspondences as far away as India.

(37:48):
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
allowing a culture to become more literary just because like

(38:10):
it's easier to produce written materials. Yeah. I found this
to be at a fascinating passage. Again, just Burt talking
about the the the the Arab world by virtue of
their paper technology, just having this this highly literate community
and the better communication. Yeah. And of course papermaking would
go on to become an important industry. And like the
medieval Islamic world, and you can you can chart the

(38:32):
pathway 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
invalidated any government documents written on paper, such a Muslim

(38:55):
tool being unwelcome in christened which would an amazingly ridiculou
this gesture. But she she points out that the sanction
was not effective. She says, quote, paper mills spread quickly
throughout Europe, and his mills became more efficient, costs dropped,
and in the fifteenth century, uh to the to the
point where paper was one six the price of vellum.

(39:16):
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 UH
in a bit, UH, because this is the prejudice against
the new new paper is UH is such a wonderful topic.

(39:37):
But first I'd like to go back to China for
just a minute, UH with a word on printed books,
because this was also really cool. I was again, I
was reading in Keys A History of China, which is
a nice suitably thick tone, but concise tone, mobile mobile
tone about the you know, the epic history of China.
He discusses in one part a Buddhist book titled the

(39:58):
Diamond Sutra, which is an old uh 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 worldly illusions like
a diamond. So there's a Tang dynasty translation that was

(40:20):
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 this is sometimes
wrongfully cited as the world's first printed book, but then

(40:42):
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 medals, had
been practiced in China since at least the eighth century.
But it is the oldest complete printed text with a
date a date. Yeah. Uh and uh again this is

(41:04):
one worth looking up a picture of because it's really
beautiful to look at the the art inside, um uh
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
seven centuries before Gutenberg. This was eleven centuries before the

(41:27):
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
he's not saying that China only has one language per

(41:47):
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 with the idea that the am I correct in

(42:08):
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 one, one really long episode about
the Chinese typewriter. Yeah. We talked with the author Thomas S. Mulaney,

(42:32):
who wrote Chinese Typewriter, a 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
of movable type may also date to this period, he adds,
but the earliest authoritative account of it being used would

(42:54):
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
already mentioned the idea of the influx of paper making
technology into Europe through the Muslim world in the Middle Ages,

(43:16):
and some attempts to 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 we already discussed wherey
where he mentioned how paper from the Arab world is
going to make its way into Europe. Now specifically it

(43:37):
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 Moore's established
paper mills, and from here the technology spread to Christian Europe. Now,
an interesting note from Burke about paper making technology in

(43:58):
both connections and the day the univer 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
linen that was submerged in water to produce a white

(44:19):
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 wrights that the timing was
just right on the mesh front, because again it was

(44:40):
like a metal mesh, and it was the work of
tailors 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 of a business. There was there

(45:01):
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 collected by rag and bone men

(45:22):
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
hundred 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, but this new paper,
I don't know. I mean, i'd grant I think parchment

(45:45):
probably is more durable than paper, right, yeah, four 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 well, this sounds like reanimate corpses that
are doing the will of the of the papermakers. Uh. No,

(46:06):
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 that was
previously their main gig was all about collecting the bones
for use in fertilizer. But they then came to collect

(46:30):
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,
like this, uh, the class of people who collect things
counterintuitively that they can sell to well, it makes me

(46:50):
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
tax on urine in order to support something he wanted
to do. And that's where the phrase money has no

(47:13):
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
old that of urine experiment? Oh goodness, that was when
we were talking about this is when in our history

(47:35):
the match we got into this. Yeah, when the Invention
episode about the match. Um, I forget that the exact
timetable there, but yeah, there were some key alchemists that
were experimenting with urine and nnick bround it was the
big yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, I remember that now. So yeah,
if you want more urine based content, go look up

(47:56):
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, and its image of the
foul rag and bone shop of the heart. This is

(48:19):
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 inspiration that came so
easily to him in youth have now abandoned him, and

(48:39):
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 right early moods, you will know the agony
of it. Uh Instead, he finds himself nostalgically obsessing about
the characters and themes that he had written about in
early your poems of his, one of those subjects being

(49:03):
one of our favorite mythical buddies, the Irish hero Kukulan
or Kuhlan. Uh So, he 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 man stole the bread,
Kucullen fought the ungovernable see heart mysteries there. And yet

(49:23):
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 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

(49:46):
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 were the mythical elements themselves,
that their face value. He liked the heroes, he liked
the settings, He like the images. Yeah, this is not

(50:07):
a work of his. I was familiar with that, but
I really like that sentiment. Uh. 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 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.

(50:30):
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
to part 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

(50:51):
comes out of pure labor. He's suggesting that, you know,
the same way. Inventors are often not people dreaming up
ideal machines and the alitude of an ivory tower, but
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

(51:13):
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.
Just pounding the pulp until you have you can make
a fine piece of parchment out of out of old rags.

(51:33):
Now to go back to the paper industry itself, there's
another bit from Burke here that I wanted to share,
writes that quote as the paper mill spread, so too
did the spirit of religious reform unquote. And this would
have been alongside literacy itself and scriptoriums. And is the
price of paper fell. The development of eyeglasses advanced to

(51:54):
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 a far, too few scribes
in Europe to meet the demands of the business world
at the time. Even if you were now making cyborg
scribes via your your spectacle technology, you know, extending the

(52:16):
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
scribes you need for the for the business world to thrive,
and that, of course is the printing press. But that,

(52:38):
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
on this subject. Absolutely all right, we're gonna have to

(52:58):
close it out for now, but we hope you enjoyed
our our two episode look at the invention of the book,
the inventive 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
in subsequent episodes. In the meantime, if you would like

(53:20):
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 get your podcasts.
They look up Secundus behind the Temple of Palace right
and when you get our podcasts from Secundus, make sure
that you rate, review and subscribe for more. Huge thanks

(53:43):
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 production

(54:07):
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