The book with pages (the codex)

The story

Reading a book ten metres long

Try to imagine that your favourite book is a long ribbon wound on two sticks. To read it you would have to hold one stick in one hand and one in the other, unrolling a little at a time, and to go back and reread a passage you would have to wind everything back. This is how the Romans read, for many centuries. Their book was called a volumen: a scroll, made of sheets of papyrus or parchment glued one after another and wound round a rod. From volumen comes our word “volume”.

Some of the oldest Latin scrolls we know come from the excavations at Herculaneum, the city buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. But for very long texts, such as a great poem or a history, the scroll was not convenient: more than one scroll was needed, and finding a particular passage was tiring.

From tablets to the codex

The new idea came from an everyday object. The Romans wrote notes, accounts and letters on wooden tablets covered with wax, joined together with rings or thin leather strips. This block of tablets was called a codex, a word that comes from caudex, “tree trunk”. Then someone had the idea of replacing the wooden tablets with sheets of parchment or papyrus, folded and sewn together: this is how the codex was born, the book with pages that we know.

Around AD 84–86 the poet Martial, in Rome, gives us valuable evidence: he recommends to his readers a new edition of his poems in codex form, saying that it takes up little space and is easily held in one hand. Scholars also think that already in the 1st century notebooks of folded parchment were in use, called in Latin pugillares membranei, as ancestors of the book with pages.

Why the codex won

The codex had many practical advantages. You could write on both sides of the sheet, so less material was needed. It took up less space and was easier to carry. Above all, it let you find the place you wanted at once: you leafed through it, instead of unrolling. For people who had to consult texts of law, medicine or religion, it was a great help.

The first Christians adopted it early. It seems that already from the 2nd century many of their texts, such as the Gospels, were written in codices, and the codex became the usual form for sacred books. Scholars debate how much the Christians counted in its spread: perhaps it was not only a religious choice, but also a practical one, linked to the kind of community that produced those texts. Books in codex form were also easier to copy and carry.

Parchment, that is, animal skin prepared for writing, suited this kind of book very well, better than papyrus, which was damaged by folding. Its name recalls the city of Pergamum, where according to the tradition it was perfected. Around the year 300, according to several reconstructions, codices were by now equal in number to scrolls; in the following centuries they replaced them almost entirely. Some scholars place their final dominance in the 4th century, others even later.

How a codex was made

The sheets were folded and slotted one inside another to form quires. A sheet folded in two was called a bifolium; with two bifolia you made a duernion, with three a ternion, with four a quaternion, also called a quire: from this comes the word for “exercise book” in Italian, quaderno. The Romans numbered the leaves, that is, the sheets, and not the individual pages, distinguishing the front (recto) from the back (verso). In ancient Rome codices were often copied by educated slaves; in the Middle Ages they were copied mostly by monks, in scriptoria, the writing rooms of convents and abbeys. Some codices were illuminated, that is, decorated with pictures and gold letters. One of the most beautiful is the Codex Rossanensis.

A new way of reading

The codex also changed the way of reading. With the scroll you read from beginning to end, in order. With the codex you could jump from one chapter to another, compare two passages, put in a marker. Later people began to number the pages and to make indexes. The oldest codices that survive are Egyptian and date from a period between the end of the 1st and the 2nd century AD.