The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental

Interesting but mostly beyond my level of scholarship. Author David Diringer produced books on the alphabet, on illumination and binding, and this one (originally titled The Hand-Produced Book but reprinted by Dover Press as The Book Before Printing). Diringer expected the reader to also have read, or at least have access to, his other two books; for example, he frequently refers to a book’s writing as “majuscule”, “minuscule”, or “uncial” without ever defining those terms, presumably because he’d already done so in his book on the alphabet. On the other hand, since his treatment of books is encyclopedic, this one would have been much longer if all the terms were defined and even if the modern reader doesn’t have the show more other books, they’ll have Wikipedia.

So, there’s discussion of Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, Egyptian papyri, Greek and Roman wax tablets, vellum, and eventually paper; and discussion of writing in languages like Khotanese, Uighur, and Mayan. Outside of Europe there were a variety of exotic “book” materials, including thin strips of wood or bamboo, palm leaves, and silk. East and West apparently moved independently from scrolls to codices (i.e., sheets bound to a backing) since codices had the salient advantage that it was quick to get to something in the middle of the work.

Extensively illustrated, although the Dover edition I have has all the plates on uncoated paper, which makes them washed out. Thoroughly referenced and with an extensive bibliography. Goes well with Empires of the Word and Scribes and Illuminators. show less

Like Leo Strauss (in Persecution and the Style of Writing), Diringer understands that pre-Gutenberg writing was esoteric and therefore often associated with "religious" -- magical, romantic, and mysterious -- invocations and events. This work is also a good reference for the fact that the Believers' beliefs in the origins of their respective "Bibles" are invariably wrong. For example, the Gospels are not much different from many of the volumes of the Apocrapha, and none were written within a century of Jesus Christ.

Of particular interest today, we note the comments about the Koran: "The earliest preserved Koranic manuscripts are written on broad parchment sheets and, with one or two exceptions, in the heavy lapidary Kufic style. These show more manuscripts are seldom complete and rarely dated, and are very difficult to date. The earliest dated copy is the complete Koran, now in Cairo, dated A.H. 168 (=A.D. 784-5)." [329]

[Recent Deutsche scholarship has dated the previously undated leaves and palimpsests -- clarifying the fact that the early versions are Syriac, written for Christian schools -- ie not written by Arabs in Arabic.] So, interestingly , the Koran was compiled by Arab scholars living long after the death of Mohammad PBUH from available Arabic texts translated from the Syriac texts used in Christian schools (Madrasas). show less

Diringer gives a thorough, scholarly, and heavily illustrated history of written communication from the very beginnings up to the spread of the printing press. The illustrations are interesting despite being completely in black and white.

The most common edition on LibraryThing is the Dover Edition, first issued in 1982 and reprinted regularly thereafter, but the work predates that considerably. The Dover Edition, according to its copyright page, is "an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published in 1953 under the title 'The Hand-Produced Book.'"