



Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Stephanie Eason,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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TYPOGRAPHIC TECHNICAL SERIES FOR APPRENTICES--PART VIII--NO. 49


  BOOKS BEFORE
  TYPOGRAPHY

  A PRIMER _of_ INFORMATION ABOUT THE
  INVENTION OF THE ALPHABET AND
  THE HISTORY OF BOOK-MAKING
  UP TO THE INVENTION OF
  MOVABLE TYPES

  BY
  FREDERICK W. HAMILTON, LL.D.

  EDUCATIONAL DIRECTOR
  UNITED TYPOTHETAE OF AMERICA

  PUBLISHED BY THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
  UNITED TYPOTHETAE OF AMERICA
  1918



  COPYRIGHT, 1918
  UNITED TYPOTHETAE OF AMERICA
  CHICAGO, ILL.




PREFACE


An attempt has been made in this book to trace briefly the story of the
book from the earliest attempts made by mankind to convey a message by
marks on some substance down to the invention of movable types. The
development of writing is rapidly traced from the earliest known
pictures and sign marks to the present day. The discussion covers the
subjects of writing materials and how they were made; the evolution of
the book; the conditions of manufacture, distribution, and preservation
of books before printing, and the conditions out of which sprang the
invention of typographic printing.

It is believed that a comprehensive knowledge of the main facts in this
long story will be of great value to the young printer, and it is hoped
that he may be interested to continue the study in some of the many very
excellent books which are available. A short list of a few of the best
and most accessible authorities in English will be found on page 44. It
has not been thought worth while to refer to books in other languages.

The story of the efforts of men to convey their thoughts to the absent
is one of absorbing interest and leads into many pleasant byways of
knowledge. While we are studying the processes and materials of a trade
by which we hope to gain a livelihood it is well to know something about
the men of the past whose accomplishments we inherit. To know something
about the men of another time who made this time possible, what they
did, what manner of men they were, how they lived, and what they created
for us, is the task of this and the following volumes in Part VIII of
this series.




CONTENTS

                                                 PAGE

  CHAPTER I     THE ORIGIN OF THE ALPHABET          1

  CHAPTER II    WRITING MATERIALS                   9

  CHAPTER III   THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK          15

  CHAPTER IV    MAKING THE MANUSCRIPTS             20

  CHAPTER V     ANCIENT AND MEDIAEVAL LIBRARIES     27

  CHAPTER VI    THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA              37




BOOKS BEFORE TYPOGRAPHY




CHAPTER I

_The Origin of the Alphabet_


The story of printing really begins with the earliest dawn of
civilization. As soon as men developed a language, even of the simplest
sort, they felt the necessity of a means of communication with those who
were not present. This would be needed for the identification of
property, the making of records, the sending of orders or information,
the making of appointments, and many other purposes which would be
developed by the needs of even the most rudimentary civilization. We
accordingly find evidences of devices to accomplish these ends
associated with the earliest human remains. While the cave man was
disputing food and shelter with the cave bear, the sabre-tooth tiger,
and the mammoth in those places which are now the seats of the most
advanced civilizations, he scratched or painted outline sketches of the
animals he fought, and perhaps worshipped, on the wall of a cave or on
the flat surface of a spreading antler or a piece of bone.


[Illustration: The oldest known attempt to carve a picture. It dates
from the cave period and was found at Dordogne, France.]


One of the greatest single steps in civilization was the advance from
the use of rough stone implements and weapons to the use of chipped and
finished stones for the same purpose, commonly referred to as the
transition from the paleolithic to the neolithic age. Just how long ago
that was no one knows and only geologists can guess. Among remains
dating from this period of transition found in the little village of Mas
d'Azil in France, there have been discovered a number of painted
pebbles. Whether these were game counters, ownership tags, records, or
what not, no one can guess. Whether the marks on them were purely
mnemonic signs, numerals, or verbal signs of some sort, no one knows.
That they were in some way, however, the ancestors of modern printed
matter is unquestionable.


[Illustration: Pebbles from Mas d'Azil.]


Among the earliest methods of communicating ideas to the absent,
pictures hold the largest place. Other methods were knots, ordinarily
known by the name _quipus_ which they bear among the ancient Peruvians.
The number and arrangements of the knots and the color of the cords made
possible a considerable range of expression. Closely associated with
these were tallies, or notched sticks, and wampum, or strings of colored
shells or beads arranged in various designs. Here perhaps may also be
classed the so-called Ogham inscriptions, made by arrangements of short
lines in groups about a long central line. The short lines may be either
perpendicular to the central line or at an angle to it. They may be
above it, below it, or across it, thus providing a wide range of
combinations with a corresponding variety of expression. These primitive
methods survive in the rosary, the sailor's log line with its knots or
the knotted handkerchief which serves as a simple memorandum. They may
run all the way from purely mnemonic signs to a fairly well developed
alphabet.

More important in its development, however, was the picture. Primitive
men all over the world very soon learned to make pictures, very crude
and simple to be sure, but indicating fairly well what they stand for.
These pictures may be so arranged and conventionalized as to convey a
good deal of information. The position of a human figure may indicate
hunger, sleep, hostility, friendship, or a considerable number of other
things. A representation of a boat with a number of circles representing
the sun or moon above it may indicate a certain number of days' travel
in a certain direction, and so on indefinitely. This method of writing
was highly developed among the North American Indians, who did not,
however, get beyond it.


[Illustration: Indian picture writing. The biography of a chief.]


The next step forward is the attempt to represent abstract ideas by
means of pictures. The picture then ceases to represent an object and
represents an idea. This is called an ideogram. While it has certain
very obvious limitations, it has one advantage over more developed
systems. The ideogram does not represent a word; it represents an idea.
Consequently it may be intelligible to people who, in spoken language,
represent the idea by very different words. For example, there are
several cases where a common set of ideograms appears to have been used
as a means of communication between people whose spoken language was
mutually unintelligible. The Chinese sign for "words" made
thus [Illustration: [Chinese character]] is a typical ideogram. It
represents a mouth with vapor rising from it.

The next step forward is the development of the ideogram into the
phonogram, or sound sign. When this step is taken, the ideogram, besides
representing an idea in a general way, represents a sound, usually the
name of the object represented by the ideogram or by one of its
components. A succession of these phonograms then represents a series of
sounds, or syllables, and we have a real, though somewhat primitive and
cumbrous, written language. Concurrently with this process the original
picture has become conventionalized and abbreviated. In this shape it is
hardly recognizable as a picture at all and appears to be a mere
arbitrary sign.


[Illustration: Comparative ideographs.]


After a time men discovered that all the sounds of the human voice were
really decomposable into a very few and that all human speech,
consisting as it does of combinations of these sounds, could be
represented by combinations of simple phonograms each of which should
represent neither an idea nor a syllable but one of the primary sounds.
The phonograms were then greatly reduced in number, simplified in form,
and became what we know to-day as letters.

This process appears to have gone on independently in many parts of the
world. In many places it never got to the point of an alphabet, and this
arrest of development is not inconsistent with a high degree of
civilization. The Chinese and Japanese script, for example, are to this
day combinations of ideograms and phonograms.

Three of the great peoples of antiquity carried this process nearly or
quite to a conclusion, although the method followed and the results
reached were quite different in the three cases. The three
civilizations, of the Egyptians in the Nile Valley, the
Assyrio-Babylonians in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
and the Cretans, centering in Crete but spreading extensively through
the Mediterranean Basin, developed three great varieties of script. All
started with pictures. The Egyptians continued to use the pictures in
their formal inscriptions down to the Persian conquest in the 6th
century B.C. This picture writing or hieroglyphic was well developed
and in the phonogram stage about 5000 B.C. The formal picture writing
of the hieroglyphic was admirably suited to formal inscriptions either
carved in stone or painted on a variety of substances. It was not
suited, however, to the more rapid work of the recorder, the
correspondent, or the literary man. The scribes, or writers, therefore
developed a highly abbreviated and conventionalized form of hieroglyphic
which could be easily written with a reed pen on papyrus, a writing
material to be described presently. The first specimens of papyrus,
containing the earliest known specimens of this kind of writing, called
hieratic, date from about 3550 B.C. Even the hieratic was too formal
and cumbersome for the common people and was further abbreviated and
conventionalized into an alphabet known as the demotic which was in
common use among the Egyptians from about 1900 B.C. to 400 A.D.


[Illustration: Names in hieroglyphic text of three of the most famous
Pharaohs, Cheops, Thothmes III and Rameses II.]


Among the Assyrio-Babylonians the use of an entirely different kind of
writing material caused the development of a very different type of
script. The lands inherited by these people were clay lands and they
made enormous use of clay and its products for building materials,
utensils, and also writing material. The early inhabitants of this
region very soon found that a permanent record could be made by marking
a lump of soft clay with a sharp stick and then drying it in the sun or
baking it in an oven. Naturally the picture very soon degenerated into a
series of marks made by holding the stick, or pointed implement, nearly
parallel to the clay and then thrusting it into the surface. The
resultant mark was like the following: [Illustration: cuneiform] This