Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Books

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Books are one of the foundational tools of civilization. They allow us to pass knowledge and information between people who don’t know each other, and their compact form allows knowledge to be transported across vast distances.  Their permanence allows information to be sent across time such that centuries might separate a writer from a reader.  But how did books develop, and in the modern world, is a book still a book if it's purely digital?  Learn more about books, where they came from, and how they’ve changed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Books are one of the foundational tools of civilization. They allow us to pass knowledge and information between people who don't know each other, and their compact form allows knowledge to be transported across vast distances. Their permanence allows information to be sent across time, such that centuries might separate a writer from a reader. But how did books develop? And in the modern world, is a book still a book if it's purely digital? Learn more about books, where they came from, and how they've changed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I've previously done episodes on the history of writing, the printing press, paper, and several other related topics. To be sure, writing, the printing press, and paper were all vital to the development of books. However, in this episode, I want to take a slightly different approach. I want to focus on the format of books, as well as the culture and business of books. When writing developed, it began with people making marks on clay tablets to keep permanent records.

That eventually evolved to using animal skins in the form of vellum and parchment and the development of papyrus in Egypt. Papyrus and parchment were lighter and easier to transport and store than clay tablets, but there then arose an issue of what to do when you had writing that consisted of multiple pages. The first solution of this problem was the scrolls. Scrolls were developed in Mesopotamia in Egypt and were a very simple solution to the problem. Pieces of papyrus or parchment were just connected end-to-end, usually with some adhesive, to create one long continuous sheet that would be stored by rolling it up. The oldest known scroll is the Diary of Mirror found in Egypt and dated to the year 2568 BC. Scrolls appear to have developed independently in many different cultures. They appeared in

China and India and probably in Mesoamerica as well. Scrolls were usually held horizontally, with only one page appearing at a time for reading. To move to the next page, you would roll up one end and unroll the other. This type of scroll in last, is known as a volumen. A scroll that is held vertically is known as a rotulus. Images discovered in the ruin of Pompeii show people holding both a retullus and a volumen. Scrolls were fine. They worked, but they were hardly optimal. They were awkward to store and transport, and finding something in the middle of a scroll was difficult. And this is something that most modern people on the internet can appreciate if you've ever had to find your place

in the middle of a very long single-page website. Before I leave the subject of scrolls, I should note that scrolls lasted a really long time. During the Islamic Golden Age, scrolls remained popular and the earliest forms of the Quran were all written on scrolls. In Europe, scrolls remained used for important documents such as laws up through the Renaissance, and they also remained in use in China, in Korea at least of the year 1000. The Jewish Torah is still traditionally kept on a scroll the same way it was thousands of years ago. The thing that eventually replaced the scroll was the codex. A codex, by all outward appearances, looks like a book, and depending on how you define it, can be considered a book.

The earliest codex that we know of is the Graz Mummy Book. It was discovered in Alexandria Egypt and has been dated back to the year 260 BC. The Gras Mummy book isn't a full codex. It only has fragments, but it shows folding and holes indicating that it might have been an early form of codex. The widespread use of the codex began under the Romans. According to legend, Julius Caesar invented the codex. When Caesar was writing as Gallic commentaries, he supposedly folded a scroll like an accordion to form pages. It's highly unlikely that Caesar actually invented the codex, but it's one of the earliest known references to the technique. This method

of folding a single sheet to create pages is known as a bifold. Like the scroll, the bifolio appears to have been independently discovered in many places around the world. Mayan and Aztec codexes have been discovered that are folded scrolls similar to the early Roman scrolls. The codex replaced the scroll rather quickly because it had many advantages over a scroll. Scrolls were expensive to make. Parchment wasn't cheap and scrolls could only be written on one side. Eventually, people realize that instead of folding the sheet, of a scroll, you could cut the pages and write on both sides, having the amount of parchment

needed for the same amount of writing cut in half. A codex also didn't require a wooden stick, known as an umbilicus, nor did it require a bag to contain it in. This made them more portable and easier to store. A codex, on the other hand, only needed a leather or wood cover for protection. And by the way, the word codex actually comes from the Latin word caudex, which means that a tree trunk or a block of wood. Codexes were easier to read and easier to copy because you could hold it open on one particular page. You can easily index a codex and reference different parts of the document by page,

which you can't easily do with a scroll. Finally, every time you rolled and unrolled a scroll, you were deforming the parchment, which would slowly ruin the parchment and the ink every time you used it. The pages of a codex were flat, and stayed flat, so they lasted longer. To give you an idea of how quickly the Codex was adopted, in the Villa of the Papyri, in the buried town of Herculane near Pompeii,

all of the texts found were scrolls when it was buried in the year 79. However, the Nag Hammadi Library, which is a collection of Christian texts discovered in the Egyptian desert, that was dated to the year 390, are all codexes. By the 5th century in Egypt, codexes outnumbered scrolls by 10. one, and by the sixth century, the scroll was all but gone, save for ceremonial purposes. By the Middle Ages in Europe, the creation of codexes, or books by this point, became an

industry, one which was mostly conducted by monasteries. Each book had to be handcrafted. Every page was usually made out of parchment, which was expensive, and then the writing on every page had to be written by hand from a source copy. On top of that, there were also hand-drawn. illustrations and sometimes, especially for Bibles, covers that were encrusted in jewels and precious metals. Both the time commitment and the resources that went into making books is part of what made them so expensive and treasured. This was the state of affairs up until the development of the printing press in the 15th century. The printing press changed everything. It was to publishing as the assembly line was to manufacturing. While it did take some time to put together a page

with movable type. Once it was ready, hundreds of pages could be printed in a short amount of time, and this led to an explosion in the number of books. It wasn't just the printing press that made this possible. It was also the shift from parchment to paper. Paper could be made much cheaper than parchment and in larger quantities. With more books, wealthy people amassed book collections, and libraries began to accumulate books. Libraries had always existed, but, they were usually singular institutions. The number of libraries that existed in the ancient world was actually really small. You could probably count the number of libraries around the ancient Mediterranean on your fingers.

The hand-operated Gutenberg-style printing press with a worm scroll was the basic design for printing presses up until the 19th century. And it was eventually replaced by the steam-powered printing press. The steam-powered printing press could print almost 10 times the number of pages per hour as a hand-operated press. And it wasn't just the ability to print more pages. Paper made from wood pulp made paper cheaper and much more abundant. Bookbinding machines also automated what was a labor-intensive process. All of these innovations led to an explosion in books.

Unlike the Gutenberg Revolution, which made books more common, the Industrial Revolution saw books become commonplace. Middle-class people could now afford books, and have books in their home beyond a Bible. Novels and reading for enjoyment became popular as book prices fell. Encyclopedias, which attempted to encapsulate all human knowledge, were actually now sort of possible. The 19th century also saw one of the biggest advances in bookmaking

and an innovation which radically reduced the cost of books. The paperback book. The idea behind a paperback book was simple. The cover was just paper like all the interior pages. The first paperback books did appear in the 16th century, but they were never produced in large quantities. These cheap paperback books were often sold in places like train stations, not traditional bookstores, making them much more accessible. By the late 19th century, ever smaller communities began to have lending libraries, where regular people could come and check out books. The early 20th century also saw the rise of sound recording, and one of the first things recorded were the narration of books.

These records would have been the first audiobooks. Improved printing and distribution in the 20th century led to the rise of mass market paperback books. Mass market paperback books were made by companies that published multiple books with a standard size, no illustrations, and color-coded covers. Albatross Books in Germany is considered to be the first such paperback publisher having been founded in 1931. Pocket Books was launched in 1939, which ushered in an era of cheap books, became known as Pulp Fiction. The business model for these mass market paperback publishers was to bypass bookstores and go directly where people were. For example, in 1939, there were

2,800 bookstores in the United States. However, there were more than 7,000 newsstands, 18,000 cigar stores, and 58,000 drug stores. For most of the 20th century, publishing was a mass market business, books with small audiences had a hard time finding a publisher because publishers didn't want to take a risk of printing a run of books that nobody wanted. However, technology again helps solve the problem. The development of copiers and printers in the later part of the 20th century led to the creation of print-on-demand books. With print-on-demand books, an entire book can be printed and bound automatically whenever it's ordered. There's no need to do a large print run or to keep an inventory. Print-on-demand books are usually more expensive, but a print-on-demand publisher can keep thousands of books in their inventory ready to be printed at a moment's notice.

The rise of digital technology resulted in the total separation of books from any physical medium. In 1992, the Adobe Corporation created a portable document format, or PDF. It allowed for text to be laid out and displayed just like it would be in print, but in the electronic format. and these became known as e-books. After the creation of e-books, the next natural step was the development of e-readers. In 1997, the E-Inc Corporation developed a new technology called Electronic Paper, which is now generically called E-Nc. While you can read an e-book on pretty much any computing device with a screen,

e-ink devices have a very different type of display than what you're probably used to. E-ink displays are not backlit, and the display consists of tiny balls that are black or white and are either positively or negatively charged. Depending on the charge applied, each pixel will have the white or black balls forced to the surface to provide an image. Unlike other displays like LCDs or O-LEDs, an E-ink image will remain after you turn off the power, and this makes them very battery efficient. The lack of a backlight also makes them very easy to. to read in direct sunlight. Digitizing books has also made them more available than ever before.

Sites like Project Gutenberg and Standard Books provide free digital book downloads of titles that are in the public domain. Project Gutenberg has over 72,000 titles that are free to download. Even in a world with instant digital access to almost every book ever written, there's still a thriving market for printed books made out of paper. I personally use both e-readers. and printed books, and I can see the value in both. The convenience of an e-reader can't be denied, but there's also something to be said about the permanence and tactile feel of an actual book.

No matter how you buy or consume books today, the one thing that almost everyone can agree on is that books are one of the things that made the modern world what it is today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout,

out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.