A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  Being read to for the purpose of purifying the body, being read to for pleasure, being read to for instruction or to grant the sounds supremacy over the sense, both enrich and diminish the act of reading. Allowing someone else to speak the words on a page for us is an experience far less personal than holding the book and following the text with our own eyes. Surrendering to the reader’s voice — except when the listener’s personality is overwhelming — removes our ability to establish a certain pace for the book, a tone, an intonation that is unique to each person. It condemns the ear to someone else’s tongue, and in that act a hierarchy is established (sometimes made apparent in the reader’s privileged position, in a separate chair or on a podium) which places the listener in the reader’s grip. Even physically, the listener will often follow the reader’s cue. Describing a reading among friends, Diderot wrote in 1759, “Without conscious thought on either’s part, the reader disposes himself in the manner he finds most appropriate, and the listener does the same.… Add a third character to the scene, and he will submit to the law of the two former: it is a combined system of three interests.”34

  At the same time, the act of reading out loud to an attentive listener often forces the reader to become more punctilious, to read without skipping or going back to a previous passage, fixing the text by means of a certain ritual formality. Whether in the Benedictine monasteries or the winter rooms of the late Middle Ages, in the inns and kitchens of the Renaissance or the drawing-rooms and cigar factories of the nineteenth century — even today, listening to an actor read a book on tape as we drive down the highway — the ceremony of being read to no doubt deprives the listener of some of the freedom inherent in the act of reading — choosing a tone, stressing a point, returning to a best-loved passage — but it also gives the versatile text a respectable identity, a sense of unity in time and an existence in space that it seldom has in the capricious hands of a solitary reader.

  Master-printer Aldus Manutius. (photo credit 8.5)

  THE SHAPE OF THE BOOK

  y hands, choosing a book to take to bed or to the reading-desk, for the train or for a gift, consider the form as much as the content. Depending on the occasion, depending on the place where I’ve chosen to read, I prefer something small and cosy or ample and substantial. Books declare themselves through their titles, their authors, their places in a catalogue or on a bookshelf, the illustrations on their jackets; books also declare themselves through their size. At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book’s definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape.

  From the very beginning, readers demanded books in formats adapted to their intended use. The early Mesopotamian tablets were usually square but sometimes oblong pads of clay, approximately 3 inches across, and could be held comfortably in the hand. A book consisted of several such tablets, kept perhaps in a leather pouch or box, so that a reader could pick up tablet after tablet in a predetermined order. It is possible that the Mesopotamians also had books bound in much the same way as our volumes; neo-Hittite funerary stone monuments depict some objects resembling codexes — perhaps a series of tablets bound together inside a cover — but no such book has come down to us.

  Not all Mesopotamian books were meant to be held in the hand. There exist texts written on much larger surfaces, such as the Middle Assyrian Code of Laws, found in Ashur and dating from the twelfth century BC, which measures 67 square feet and carries its text in columns on both sides.1 Obviously this “book” was not meant to be handled, but to be erected and consulted as a work of reference. In this case, size must also have carried a hierarchic significance; a small tablet might suggest a private transaction; a book of laws in such a large format surely added, in the eyes of the Mesopotamian reader, to the authority of the laws themselves.

  Of course, whatever a reader might have desired, the format of a book was limited. Clay was convenient for manufacturing tablets, and papyrus (the dried and split stems of a reed-like plant) could be made into manageable scrolls; both were relatively portable. But neither was suitable for the form of book that superseded tablet and scroll: the codex, or sheaf of bound pages. A codex of clay tablets would have been heavy and cumbersome, and although there were codexes made of papyrus pages, papyrus was too brittle to be folded into booklets. Parchment, on the other hand, or vellum (both made from the skins of animals, through different procedures), could be cut up or folded into all sorts of different sizes. According to Pliny the Elder, King Ptolemy of Egypt, wishing to keep the production of papyrus a national secret in order to favour his own Library of Alexandria, forbade its export, thereby forcing his rival, Eumenes, ruler of Pergamum, to find a new material for the books in his library.2 If Pliny is to be believed, King Ptolemy’s edict led to the invention of parchment in Pergamum in the second century BC, although the earliest parchment booklets known to us today date from a century earlier.3 These materials were not used exclusively for one kind of book: there were scrolls made out of parchment and, as we have said, codexes made out of papyrus; but these were rare and impractical. By the fourth century, and until the appearance of paper in Italy eight centuries later, parchment was the preferred material throughout Europe for the making of books. Not only was it sturdier and smoother than papyrus, it was also cheaper, since a reader who demanded books written on papyrus (notwithstanding King Ptolemy’s edict) would have had to import the material from Egypt at considerable cost.

  The parchment codex quickly became the common form of books for officials and priests, travellers and students — in fact for all those who needed to transport their reading material conveniently from one place to another, and to consult any section of the text with ease. Furthermore, both sides of the leaf could hold text, and the four margins of a codex page made it easier to include glosses and commentaries, allowing the reader a hand in the story — a participation that was far more difficult when reading from a scroll. The organization of the texts themselves, which had previously been divided according to the capacity of a scroll (in the case of Homer’s Iliad, for instance, the division of the poem into twenty-four books probably resulted from the fact that it normally occupied twenty-four scrolls), was changed. The text could now be organized according to its contents, in books or chapters, or could become itself a component when several shorter works were conveniently collected under a single handy cover. The unwieldy scroll possessed a limited surface — a disadvantage we are keenly aware of today, having returned to this ancient book-form on our computer screens, which reveal only a portion of text at a time as we “scroll” upwards or downwards. The codex, on the other hand, allowed the reader to flip almost instantly to other pages, and thereby retain a sense of the whole — a sense compounded by the fact that the entire text was usually held in the reader’s hands throughout the reading. The codex had other extraordinary merits: originally intended to be transported with ease, and therefore necessarily small, it grew in both size and number of pages, becoming, if not limitless, at least much vaster than any previous book. The first-century poet Martial wondered at the magical powers of an object small enough to fit in the hand and yet containing an infinity of marvels:

  Homer on parchment pages!

  The Iliad and all the adventures

  Of Ulysses, foe of Priam’s kingdom!

  All locked within a piece of skin

  Folded into several little sheets!4

  The codex’s advantages prevailed: by AD 400, the classical scroll had been all but abandoned and most books were being produced as gathered leaves in a rectangular format. Folded once, the parchment became a folio; folded twice, a quarto; folded once again, an octavo. By the sixteenth century, the formats of the folded sheets had become official: in France, in 1527, François I decreed standard paper sizes throughout his kingdom; anyone breaking this rule was thrown into prison.5

  Of all the shapes that book
s have acquired through the ages, the most popular have been those that allowed the book to be held comfortably in the reader’s hand. Even in Greece and Rome, where scrolls were normally used for all kinds of texts, private missives were usually written on small, hand-held reusable wax tablets, protected by raised edges and decorated covers. In time, the tablets gave way to a few gathered leaves of fine parchment, sometimes of different colours, for the purpose of jotting down quick notes or doing sums. In Rome, towards the third century AD, these booklets lost their practical value and became prized instead for the look of their covers. Bound in finely decorated flats of ivory, they were offered as gifts to high officials on their nomination to office; eventually they became private gifts as well, and wealthy citizens began giving each other booklets in which they would inscribe a poem or dedication. Soon, enterprising booksellers started manufacturing small collections of poems in this manner — little gift books whose merit lay less in the contents than in the elaborate embellishments.6

  Engraving copied from a bas-relief showing a method for storing scrolls in ancient Rome. Note the name-tags hanging from the ends of the scrolls. (photo credit 9.1)

  The size of a book, whether it was a scroll or a codex, determined the shape of the place in which it was kept. Scrolls were put away either in wooden scroll boxes (which resembled hat-boxes of a sort) with labels which were made of clay in Egypt and of parchment in Rome, or in bookcases with their tags (the index or titulus) showing, so that the book could be easily identified. Codexes were stored lying flat, on shelves made for that purpose. Describing a visit to a country house in Gaul around AD 470, Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius, Bishop of Auvergne, mentioned a number of bookcases which varied according to the sizes of the codexes they were meant to hold: “Here too were books in plenty; you might fancy you were looking at the breast-high bookshelves (plantei) of the grammarians, or the wedge-shaped cases (cunei) of the Atheneum, or the well-filled cupboards (armaria) of the booksellers.”7 According to Sidonius, the books he found there were of two kinds: Latin classics for the men and books of devotion for the women.

  Since much of the life of Europeans in the Middle Ages was spent in religious offices, it is hardly surprising that one of the most popular books of the time was the personal prayer-book, or Book of Hours, which was commonly represented in depictions of the Annunciation. Usually handwritten or printed in a small format, in many cases illuminated with exquisite richness by master artists, it contained a collection of short services known as “the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary”, recited at various times of the night and day.8 Modelled on the Divine Office — the fuller services said daily by the clergy — the Little Office comprised Psalms and other passages from the Scriptures, as well as hymns, the Office of the Dead, special prayers to the saints and a calendar. These small volumes were eminently portable tools of devotion which the faithful could use either in public church services or in private prayers. Their size made them suitable for children; around 1493, the Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza of Milan had a Book of Hours designed for his three-year-old son, Francesco Maria Sforza, “Il Duchetto”, depicted on one of the pages as being led by a guardian angel through a night-time wilderness. The Books of Hours were richly but variably decorated, depending on who the customers were and how much they could afford to pay. Many depicted the commissioning of the family’s coat-of-arms, or a portrait of the reader. Books of Hours became conventional wedding gifts for the nobility and, later, for the rich bourgeoisie. By the end of the fifteenth century, the book illuminators of Flanders dominated the European market, sending trade delegations throughout Europe to establish the equivalent of our wedding-gift lists.9 The beautiful Book of Hours commissioned for the wedding of Anne of Brittany in 1490 was made to the size of her hand.10 It is designed for a single reader absorbed in both the words of the prayers repeated month after month and year after year, and the ever-surprising illustrations, whose details would never be utterly deciphered and whose urbanity — the Old and New Testament scenes took place in modern landscapes — brought the sacred words into a setting contemporary with the reader herself.

  A personalized illumination showing the child Francesco Maria Sforza with his guardian angel in a Book of Hours made especially for him. (photo credit 9.2)

  In the same way that small volumes served specific purposes, large volumes met other readers’ demands. Around the fifth century, the Catholic Church began producing huge service-books — missals, chorales, antiphonaries — which, displayed on a lectern in the middle of the choir, allowed readers to follow the words or musical notes with as much ease as if they were reading a monumental inscription. There is a beautiful antiphonary in the Abbey Library of St. Gall, containing a selection of liturgical texts in lettering so large that it can be read at a fair distance, to the cadence of melodic chants, by choirs of up to twenty singers;11 standing several feet back from it, I can make out the notes with absolute clarity, and I wish my own reference books could be consulted with such ease from afar. Some of these service-books were so immense that they had to be laid on rollers so they could be moved. But they were moved very rarely. Decorated with brass or ivory, protected with corners of metal, closed by gigantic clasps, they were books to be read communally and at a distance, disallowing any intimate perusal or sense of personal possession.

  A fifteenth-century depiction of a group of choirboys reading the large-size notes of an antiphonary. (photo credit 9.3)

  Saint Gregory’s mechanical reading-desk as imagined by a fourteenth-century sculptor. (photo credit 9.4)

  In order to be able to read a book comfortably, readers invented ingenious improvements on the lectern and the desk. There is a statue of Saint Gregory the Great, made of pigmental stone in Verona sometime in the fourteenth century and preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, showing the saint at a sort of articulated reading-desk which would have enabled him to prop the lectern at different angles or raise it in order to leave his seat. A fourteenth-century engraving shows a scholar in a book-lined library writing at an elevated, octagonal desk-cum-lectern that allows him to work on one side, then swivel the desk and read the books laid ready for him on the seven other sides. In 1588 an Italian engineer, Agostino Ramelli, serving under the King of France, published a book describing a series of useful machines. One of these is a “rotary reading desk” which Ramelli describes as “a beautiful and ingenious machine, which is very useful and convenient to every person who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are suffering from indisposition or are subject to gout: for with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying little space in the place where it is set, as any person of understanding can appreciate from the drawing”.12 (A full-scale model of this marvellous reading-wheel appeared in Richard Lester’s 1974 film The Three Musketeers.) Seat and reading-desk could be combined in a single piece of furniture. The ingenious cockfighting chair (so called because it was depicted in illustrations of cockfighting) was made in England in the early eighteenth century, specifically for libraries. The reader sat astride it, facing the desk at the back of the chair while leaning on the broad armrests for support and comfort.

  Mahogany cockfighting chair with leather upholstery, c. 1720. (photo credit 9.5)

  A clever reading-machine from the 1588 edition of Diverse et Artificiose Machine. (photo credit 9.6)

  Sometimes a reading-device would be invented out of a different kind of necessity. Benjamin Franklin relates that, during Queen Mary’s reign, his Protestant ancestors would hide their English bible, “fastened open with tapes under and within the cover of a joint-stool”. Whenever Franklin’s great-great-grandfather read to the family, “he turned up the joint-stool upon his knees, turning over the leaves then under the tapes. One of the children stood at the door to give notice if he saw the apparitor coming, who was an officer of the spiritual court. In that case the stool was tu
rned down again upon its feet, when the Bible remained concealed under it as before.”13

  Crafting a book, whether the elephantine volumes chained to the lecterns or the dainty booklets made for a child’s hand, was a long, laborious process. A change that took place in mid-fifteenth-century Europe not only reduced the number of working-hours needed to produce a book, but dramatically increased the output of books, altering for ever the reader’s relationship to what was no longer an exclusive and unique object crafted by the hands of a scribe. The change, of course, was the invention of printing.

  Sometime in the 1440s, a young engraver and gem-cutter from the Archbishopric of Mainz, whose full name was Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (which the practicalities of the business world trimmed down to Johann Gutenberg), realized that much could be gained in speed and efficiency if the letters of the alphabet were cut in the form of reusable type rather than as the woodcut blocks which were then being used occasionally for printing illustrations. Gutenberg experimented over several years, borrowing large sums of money to finance his enterprise. He succeeded in devising all the essentials of printing as they were employed until the twentieth century: metal prisms for moulding the faces of the letters, a press that combined features of those used in wine-making and bookbinding, and an oil-based ink — none of which had previously existed.14 Finally, between 1450 and 1455, Gutenberg produced a bible with forty-two lines to each page — the first book ever printed from type15 — and took the printed pages with him to the Frankfurt Trade Fair. By an extraordinary stroke of luck, we have a letter from a certain Enea Silvio Piccolomini to the Cardinal of Carvajal, dated March 12, 1455, in Wiener Neustadt, telling His Eminence that he has seen Gutenberg’s bible at the fair: