Book Review
"The Book"
Keith Houston
5/5 stars
"Narrative arc of history through from the perspective of The Book.This one is a keeper."

Of the book:

-15 chapters; 329 pps prose. (≈27pps/chapter)
-1124 citations (3.4/page; ≈75/chapter)
-Author appears to have read 26 other books to recommend for further reading about books and bookmaking history.

It's an extremely well thought out book: for example (p.288), "You can see this in action right now. If you look at the end of this book, you will see that all gatherings except the one at which you are reading are closed, and they remain closed except when you turn the page into a new gathering."

The cover and initial pages are printed in such a way that one learns the titles of the various parts of the book: head cap/spine/fore-edge/foot/verso / bio/quote/synopsis/endpapers/half title/adcard/dingbat/imprint/dedication/front matter head.

This text is in the vein of another Englishman writer, by the name of Tim Harford: instead of trying to come up with new ideas and fine phrases, these authors do the yeoman's work of explaining that which actually exists and giving us a taste of the history with their interesting thoughts.

*******

A book like this one was waiting to be written. 

And that's because paper is something that intersects SO universally with human life these days. (What else could you think of that would link the Taliban and Idiot Academics in some Gender Studies Department?)

On the one hand, construction of the narrative arc of a book like this seems like it would be easy, but on the other the author has *very* thoroughly researched the material that he did use to create it.  (Even by Page 41, he has studied many of the endless Chinese dynastic intrigues. Also, he has delved into the etymological origins of Chinese characters and presented them in this book.)

The book is in four parts.

Part 1: Invention of paper (76pps; 23%)
Part 2: Invention of writing (76pps; 23%)
Part 3: Improvements in art owing to paper (86pps; 26%)
Part 4: Development of the book (88pps; 27%)

Neat Factoids:

Part I (76 pps)

1. Historical steps in paper

Step 1: papyrus (Egypt); 
Step 2: parchment (Greece/ Rome);
Step 3: bamboo/silk/pulp paper (China, Late Han Dynasty);
Step 4: Linen paper (Arabs / other Middle East)
Step 5: Pulp paper is industrialized and transferred to Europe (Arabs; conquest of Spain).


2. There are two sides to parchment paper: the skin side, and the hair side. Halachically, Torah scrolls are only to be written on the hair side.

3. The average American consumes about 500 lb of paper per year (5.57 40 ft trees).

4. Places like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are places where Arabs and Chinese battled, but also exchanged the art of paper making. (Ziyad ibn Salih slaughtered 50,000 Chinese troops and took another 20,000 prisoner - some of which had the art of papermaking.)

5. Newspapers actually used to be made from linen/old rags. Hence the reason that some newspapers are now pejoratively called "rags." (Think: Washington Post, New York Times, Seattle Times.)

Part II (76 pps)

1. There are more obelisks in Rome than there are the entirety of Egypt.

2. Writing is several thousand years old, but for the vast majority of human existence it did not exist. Writing also goes through several phases. (Pictorial/mixed pictorial phonetic/partially phonetic [consonantal abjads do not specify vocalization vowel sounds]/fully phonetic).

3. Gutenberg was predated by the Egyptians (with respect to printing) and by a Chinese commoner, Bi Sheng (movable type).

4. "Uppercase" and "lowercase" actually refer to the case in which the respective letters were put for their use in making a movable print template. (p.120)

5. It is odd that the Gutenberg Bible was 42 lines per column (and stayed that way such that the name "42 Line Bible" became a common nickname), and a Sefer Torah is 42 lines per column.

6. More books were printed in the first half century after Gutenberg's Bible than in the proceeding thousand years combined.

Part III (86 pps)

1. Currency (and therefore the modern market economy) was something that could only come into being when mass printing (for banknotes) had come into use. 

2. A very complicated detour into copper plate, lithography, photography, and modern book printing. (A picture really would have been worth a thousand words in many of these cases.)

Part IV (88 pps)

1. Quote (p.241): "Once you have something to write about, something to write with, and something to write on, what comes next?"..... This is an attempt to seal up the development of the book.

2. The book has been with us now for 1,600 years (through its predecessor, the codex). Other points in the development: books have been bound by leather from the beginning, and eventually leather covers were decorated by blind tooling. In the 16th century, books began to be shelled vertically, and so the author and title had to appear on the spine.

3. "Burke's skin pocketbook." (Yeesh.) And other "anthropodermic bibliopegy" (this is binding a book with human skin, in case it was not clear enough.)

3. Discussion about the process for choosing standardized papers as well as development of fonts.

4. Paper sizes were standardized in 1921 at the behest of Woodrow Wilson's government. The 8.5x11 was finally adopted by the Reagan administration six decades later. (We know that the government does not solve problems quickly, but this is just ridiculous.)


Second order thoughts:

1. The story that is told here is one of shifting rate determining steps. First, the availability of paper. Then the price of paper. Then the price of scribes. It seems these days that the rate limiting step is the willingness of people to read books. (Not for no reason is it a running joke among black people that "If you want a ni**a to NOT read something, then put it in a book.")

I'm reading that the US books per person has declined from 18.5 (1999) per year down to 12.6 (2021). 

2. This book is unintentionally a tome on Empiricism: ALL of these things had to be invented by relentless trial and error and what survives is a small fraction of what was initially there.

3. When writing and language are the domain of scribes, it seems to be of a much higher quality than when it becomes demotic / colloquial. (It seems like people wrote only when they had something to say: the writings of Rashi and Maimonides survive nearly 1,000 years after they are dead; many books these days go out of print in just a few years.) 

There is, correspondingly, an inevitable deterioration in the signal to noise ratio as things become more popular: Handwritten books with Gothic script and Sifrei Torah scrolls are works of art.

4. (p.174) Something starts out as a plaything of very wealthy people, and eventually it becomes cheap enough so that everybody can afford one. Books. Cars. Cell phones.

5. Religious impulses are not necessarily bad. Had there been no monks, there would have been no scribes, and there would have been no popularization of the written word. (This was true in Europe as well as China and Japan.)

6. When people are in a trade (and the purpose is to make money), they will automatically create standardization. It seems that paper makers had come up with standard sizes almost a century before the government noticed and decided to affirm what everybody already knew.

Verdict: Recommended. Obviously, there is just WAY. TOO. MUCH information in this book to be able to retain it all, but if you even have a vague idea of the evolution of books you will know more than most people.

I recommend this at the hardcover / new price.

Great acquired vocabulary:

Vellum
Kelaf
Duxustus
gewil
"Line in the sand"  (Popillus from the 6th Syrian War.)
colophon
backmatter head 
pergamena charta-->parchment (historical/ technical definition)
grimoire
uterine/abortive vellum
coppice
deckle
litharge
ouroboros
sherd (NOT "shard")
palimpsest 
copperas
rubricators
chase, quoins, forme
tympan
typefounder
1 oxymoron, 2 oxymora
nous (chiefly British. "aptitude ')
Paige Compositor
justify
Linotype
steampunk
gesso
orihan (concertina folded book)
ostraca 
sittybos (Greek)-->sillybus (Latin)-->syllabus
aquatint
Copperplate (in the sense of engraving and not a syllabus)
intaglio
mattock
codicologist
caoutchouc 
quite
deckle edge
versal
manicule
anthropodermic bibliopegy
duodecimo
octavo
quarto 
head cap/
spine/
fore-edge/
foot/
verso / 
bio/quote/
synopsis/
endpapers/
half title/
adcard/
dingbat/
imprint/
dedication
foolscap


Quote (p.138) "Paige and I always meet on  effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died."