Readings in Bookbinding

There is a tendency, somewhat dangerous but also undeniably commonsense, to speak about the codex as a sort of perfect tool. A feat of engineering that is so ideally fit to its purpose that it is nearly impossible to separate it from the thought of reading. If we step back from the comfort of the codex, from its apparently organic ease, it is not hard to see that in making claims about its perfection we’re standing squarely in a loose mess of circular cause and consequence. Still, how compellingly it seems to not only fit our needs but also mimic our own thought, allowing for associative jumps, recursion, and visual memory.

Recently, as new portable methods of digesting texts have been gaining hold, there has been a return to trying to understand the codex’s function as a tool. In a post to if:book, Dan Piepenbring introduced Heidegger’s concept of “readiness-to-hand” to the discussion. Readiness-to-hand is a quality that Heidegger argued all well-designed tools share. It is marked by a lack of “obtrusiveness.” To simplify what I’m sure Heidegger would already think a criminal simplification, a tool that has great readiness-to-hand is one that obtains a sort of invisibility during use. Piepenbring uses the keyboard as an example, but I think this is somewhat inappropriate given Heidegger’s dismay over writing machines. Better is Heidegger’s own example of the hammer, a tool that does not obtrude on our use of it, on the act that it is designed for (only when it is not as it should be, broken for example, does it become obvious).

The problem, of course, with any theory of innate ‘fitness’ when speaking about tools is the attempt to separate the lack of ‘obtrusiveness’ from an ingrained cultural comfort with the tool and a personal familiarity with its use. Simply: how could we ever get past our own familiarity and ease with the codex to truly assess its essential readiness-to-hand? Does the codex seem perfect because we are perfectly familiar with it?

It seems like now, when we are in need of a way of discussing digital alternatives to the codex, would be a good time to look back to the period when the codex was last competing with other reading tools. Some of the more fascinating sections of David Diringer’s The Book Before Printing are those that deal with the transition from papyrus to parchment and from scroll to codex (these transitions are hard to separate from one another, with papyrus codices and parchment membranae being, for some time, as prevalent as parchment codices and papyrus scrolls). Diringer goes a long way in dispelling the common understanding of this transition. It was long assumed that the birth of the codex was somewhat simple to trace: as parchment replaced papyrus in the fourth century, so too did the rise of Christianity lead to the codex replacing the scroll. Diringer, however, is careful in pointing out that papyrus codices were in use as early as the middle of the second century, and that the use of parchment was not necessarily linked to favor for the codex.  This is a point  that’s even more compellingly backed up by Colin Roberts and T. C. Skeat in their Birth of the Codex.

What interests me most, however, is not so much the ongoing debates over the timing and impetuses of the codex’s birth, but the reaction to the form at the time. If we study the period of the codex as a new and artificial device, we are forced, however slightly, out of our trance of familiarity, and can more clearly recognize it as a tool, one that was once in competition with very familiar and long-standing competitors.

That is a very formal way to describe the excitement over reading that Augustine, in a letter cited by Roberts and Skeat, apologized for sending a letter in codex form, or that in another letter, cited by Diringer, he makes a  similar apology for using parchment (my own copy of his work has neither letters, but I found that in letter XV, he writes “You will more readily excuse this scrap of parchment, because what I wrote to him could not be delayed, and I thought that not to write to you for want of better material would be most absurd”). And how fascinating, in the period of long, heated debates over the disadvantages of reading on a screen as opposed to the page, to read in Diringer of Galen claiming that the shiny nature of parchment strains the eyes much more than the superior papyrus.

This sort of contemporaneous reaction to the introduction of a tool that we now think so natural as to be invisible is gripping. I only wish that there were more examples extant. I will certainly try my best to find what has survived. As a final example, though, we should have an epigram by Martial, who is quoted by Roberts and Skeat, and who was a rare example of an early pagan fan of the codex. The more I read about Martial in the context of the history of reading, the more compelling he becomes. In researching inks earlier this year, I found that with one of his collections of poems, he provided a piece of sponge, so that any offense to the reader could be scrubbed out. Now we find him introducing his first collection to be published in codex form:

You who are keen to have my books with you everywhere and
want to have them as companions for a long journey, buy these
ones which parchment confines within small leaves, leave
cylinders for great authors: one hand can hold me . . .