Books are our friends

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry:
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears the human soul!


I love this poem by Emily Dickinson. In it she explains the power of books. Like most relationships, books are taken for granted in today's society. They have become so common place that we scarcely notice them even though they surround us. You see them in grocery stores, in yard sales, discarded at Deseret Industries, and of course at the library and waiting in popular book stores. Most everyone has books. We collect them, burn them, abuse them. But do we realize that for most of the world's history only a few select people could own one? Also for most of the world's history the masses were illiterate. The few who could read and write were scribes. It was my privilege to learn about the evolution of books as I attended a class lecture last week that was held at the special collections department in the Harold B. Lee library at BYU. Thank you Dr. Holzapfel.


Anciently people wrote on papyrus which is made from a plant strongly associated with ancient Egypt. It was very durable but could not be folded. They also wrote on animal bones, turtle shells, and clay tablets. Eventually people discovered how to write on metal. The special collections department has a set Roman metal plates that granted a soldier Roman citizenship after 20 years of service. What an intriguing link to the past. It was then discovered that animal skins could be useful to write on and make books out of. The skins would be carefully prepared by first scraping away the fur. The best animal skin to write on was that of an unborn calf, or veal. This was because the skin was thin. It was called "vellum." Before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in approximately 1436, it took 11 years to copy a bible. Obviously the work was very labor intensive.


During the Middle Ages, books were copied by hand in monasteries by monks and in convents by nuns. It was interesting to learn that many monks and nuns came from poor families who could not afford to feed their children. Very young children would be left there and then spend the rest of their lives in the monastery or convent.


Unlike today, most people in the past never owned a book. Books were rare. Often they would be chained to a shelf to prevent theft. Proof of this was a book that still had part of the chain dangling from it. Resources for writing books were scarce, so if the vellum had a hole in it, or was torn, it was used anyway. The scribe would simply write around the hole, or repair the tear by sewing it. There were some fine examples of this. Sometimes the initial writing would be scraped away so the vellum could be reused to produce a different book.

Boards would make the front and back covers of books. Often they would be covered with leather. The spine is the bound edge and pages made of vellum or later, paper, constitute a book. By the way, we have the Chinese to thank for inventing paper.

What intrigued me the most about some of the books was the artwork. Often gold leaf was used. The books themselves were literally works of art, not just on the pages, but also on the edge of the pages. One book had two different landscape scenes that you could enjoy depending on how you turned the book. They were exquisite.