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The wisdom of the ancients, man’s achievements and failures, his beliefs, are all contained in books. Reading a book continues to remain a great pleasure.
Egyptian papyrus drawing
The ancient Egyptians produced their books on scrolls of PAPYRUS, brittle sheets of paper-like material made from the pith of the papyrus plant (from which we get the word 'paper').
From the 2nd century BC, PARCHMENT replaced papyrus as the writing material of choice. Made from animal skins, it proved far stronger than papyrus.
In ancient China, SILK was used as a writing material. In AD 105, a court official Ts'ai Lun, suggested writing on a solid mixture of pounded rags and wood pulp thought to be the first use of paper.
PAPERMAKING is considered to be one of the 'Four Great Inventions of Ancient China', since the first papermaking process was developed in China during the early 2nd century.
One of the earliest newspapers was the Roman Acta Diurna said to have been started by Julius Caesar.
In WOODBLOCK PRINTING, a relief image of an entire page was carved into blocks of wood, inked, and used to print copies of that page. This method originated in China, in the Han dynasty (before 220AD), as a means of printing on textiles and later paper, and was widely used throughout East Asia. The oldest-dated book printed by this method is The Diamond Sutra (868 AD).
The Romans were the first to fasten together sheets of parchment on one edge, producing the SHAPE OF THE BOOK as we know it today.
Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all books were COPIED BY HAND, making books expensive and comparatively rare.
Celsus Library in Ephesos, Turkey was built in 135 AD and could house around 12,000 scrolls
The FIRST-KNOWN WRITTEN RECORDS consisted of clay tablets dating from the 4th century BC. Pieces of reed were used as pens to write on the clay while it was damp. Ashurbanipal, King of Syria around 650 BC, had a library of 20,000 clay tablet books on all sorts of subjects.
The Phoenicians brought writing and papyrus to Greece around the 10th or 9th century BC. The Greek word for papyrus as writing material (biblion) and book (biblos) come from the Phoenician port town Byblos, through which papyrus was exported to Greece. From Greeks we have also the word ‘TOME’ which came to denote 'a roll of papyrus'.
The world’s largest book made of stone is in the Kuthodaw Pagoda (Myanmar).
ALPHABETIC WRITING emerged in Egypt around 1800 BC. At first the words were not separated from each other (scripta continua) and there was no punctuation. Texts were written from right to left, left to right, and even so that alternate lines read in opposite directions.
Hereford Cathedral Library, England is one of the best-preserved chained libraries
During the later Middle Ages, when public libraries appeared, books were often chained to a bookshelf or a desk to prevent theft. The so-called libri catenati were used up to the 18th century. In spite of these precautions some books were stolen; in the chained library of Wells Cathedral, only the chains remain! The largest remaining CHAINED LIBRARY in the world is in Hereford Cathedral. It houses some 1500 books, some printed and some handwritten.
BOOKMARKS were used throughout the medieval period, consisting of a small parchment strip attached to the edge of folio (or a piece of cord attached to a headband). Bookmarks in the 18th and 19th centuries were narrow silk ribbons bound into the book and become widespread in the 1850s. They were usually made from silk, embroidered fabrics or leather. Not until the 1880s, did paper and other materials become more common.
A page from the Gutenberg Bible
JOHANNES GUTENBERG, a goldsmith and businessman from the mining town of Mainz in southern Germany, borrowed money to invent a technology that changed the world of printing. He invented the printing press with replaceable/moveable wooden or metal letters in 1436 (completed by 1440). Gutenberg's press was hand-operated. He is accredited with printing the world's first book using movable type, the 42-line (the number of lines per page) Gutenberg Bible, which took him 3 years to produce 190 copies.
A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, bibliophilist, philobiblist or more informally, a bookworm.
The term E-BOOK is a contraction of “electronic book”; it refers to a digital version of a conventional print book. An e-book is usually made available through the internet, but also on CD-ROM and other forms. E-books are read by means of a physical book display device known as an e-book reader, such as the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle. These devices attempt to mimic the experience of reading a print book.
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