Historically Speaking: The Enduring Technology of the Book

Durable, stackable and skimmable, books have been the world’s favorite way to read for two millennia and counting.

The Wall Street Journal

August 3, 2023

A fragment of the world’s oldest book was discovered earlier this year. Dated to about 260 B.C., the 6-by-10-inch piece of papyrus survived thanks to ancient Egyptian embalmers who recycled it for cartonnage, a papier-mache-like material used in mummy caskets. The Graz Mummy Book, so-called because it resides in the library of Austria’s Graz University, is 400 years older than the previous record holder, a fragment of a Latin book from the 2nd century A.D.

Stitching on the papyrus shows that it was part of a book with pages rather than a scroll. Scrolls served well enough in the ancient world, when only priests and scribes used them, but as the literacy rate in the Roman Empire increased, so did the demand for a more convenient format. A durable, stackable, skimmable, stitched-leaf book made sense. Its resemblance to a block of wood inspired the Latin name caudex, “bark stem,” which evolved into codex, the word for an ancient manuscript. The 1st-century Roman poet and satirist Martial was an early adopter: A codex contained more pages than the average scroll, he told his readers, and could even be held in one hand!

Thomas Fuchs

The book developed in different forms around the world. In India and parts of southeast Asia, dried palm-leaves were sewn together like venetian blinds. The Chinese employed a similar technique using bamboo or silk until the third century A.D., when hemp paper became a reliable alternative. In South America, the Mayans made their books from fig-tree bark, which was pliable enough to be folded into leaves. Only four codices escaped the mass destruction of Mayan culture by Franciscan missionaries in the 16th century.

Gutenberg’s printing press, perfected in 1454, made that kind of annihilation impossible in Europe. By the 16th century, more than nine million books had been printed. Authorities still tried their best to exert control, however. In 1538, England’s King Henry VIII prohibited the selling of “naughty printed books” by unlicensed booksellers.

Licensed or not, the profit margins for publishers were irresistible, especially after Jean Grolier, a 16th-century Treasurer-General of France, started the fashion for expensively decorated book covers made of leather. Bookselling became a cutthroat business. Shakespeare was an early victim of book-piracy: Shorthand stenographers would hide among the audience and surreptitiously record his plays so they could be printed and sold.

Beautiful leather-bound books never went out of fashion, but by the end of the 18th century, there was a new emphasis on cutting costs and shortening production time. Germany experimented with paperbacks in the 1840s, but these were downmarket prototypes that failed to catch on.

The paperback revolution was started in 1935 by the English publisher Allen Lane, who one day found himself stuck at a train station with nothing to read. Books were too rarefied and expensive, he decided. Facing down skeptics, Lane created Penguin and proceeded to publish 10 literary novels as paperbacks, including Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” A Penguin book had a distinctive look that signaled quality, yet it cost the same as a packet of cigarettes. The company sold a million paperbacks in its first year.

Radio was predicted to mean the downfall of books; so were television, the Internet and ebooks. For the record, Americans bought over 788.7 million physical books last year. Not bad for an invention well into its third millennium.

Historically Speaking: The Fungus That Fed Gods And Felled a Pope

There’s no hiding the fact that mushrooms, though delicious, have a dark side

The Wall Street Journal

October 21, 2022

Fall means mushroom season. And, oh, what joy. The Romans called mushrooms the food of the gods; to the ancient Chinese, they contained the elixir of life; and for many people, anything with truffles is the next best thing to a taste of heaven.

Lovers of mushrooms are known as mycophiles, while haters are mycophobes. Both sets have good reasons for feeling so strongly. The medicinal properties of mushrooms have been recognized for thousands of years. The ancient Chinese herbal text “Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing,” written down sometime during the Eastern Han Dynasty, 25-220 AD, was among the earliest medical treatises to highlight the immune-boosting powers of the reishi mushroom, also known as lingzhi.

The hallucinogenic powers of certain mushrooms were also widely known. Many societies, from the ancient Mayans to the Vikings, used psilocybin-containing fungi, popularly known as magic mushrooms, to achieve altered states either during religious rituals or in preparation for battle. One of the very few pre-Hispanic texts to survive Spanish destruction, the Codex Yuta Tnoho or Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, reveals the central role played by the mushroom in the cosmology of the Mixtecs.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

There is no hiding the fact that mushrooms have a dark side, however. Fewer than 100 species are actually poisonous out of the thousands of varieties that have been identified. But some are so deadly—the death cap (Amanita phalloides), for example—that recovery is uncertain even with swift treatment. Murder by mushroom is a staple of crime writing, although modern forensic science has made it impossible to disguise.

There is a strong possibility that this is how the Roman Emperor Claudius died on Oct. 13, 54 A.D. The alleged perpetrator, his fourth wife Agrippina the Younger, wanted to clear the path for her son Nero to sit on the imperial throne. Nero dutifully deified the late emperor, as was Roman custom. But according to the historian Dio Cassius, he revealed his true feelings by joking that mushrooms were surely a dish for gods, since Claudius, by means of a mushroom, had become a god.

Another victim of the death cap mushroom, it has been speculated, was Pope Clement VII in 1534, who is best known for opposing King Henry VIII’s attempt to get rid of Catherine of Aragon, the first of his six wives. Two centuries later, in what was almost certainly an accident, Holy Roman Emperor King Charles VI died in Vienna on Oct. 20, 1740, after attempting to treat a cold and fever with his favorite dish of stewed mushrooms.

Of course, mushrooms don’t need to be lethal to be dangerous. Ergot fungus, which looks like innocuous black seeds, can contaminate cereal grains, notably rye. Its baleful effects include twitching, convulsions, the sensation of burning, and terrifying hallucinations. The Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch may well have been suffering from ergotism, known as St. Anthony’s Fire in his day, when he painted his depictions of hell. Less clear is whether ergotism was behind the strange symptoms recorded among some of the townspeople during the Salem witch panic of 1692-93.

Unfortunately, the mushroom’s mixed reputation deterred scientific research into its many uses. But earlier this year a small study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology found evidence to support what many college students already believe: Magic mushrooms can be therapeutic. Medication containing psilocybin had an antidepressant effect over the course of a year. More studies are needed, but I know one thing for sure: Sautéed mushrooms and garlic are a recipe for happiness.

WSJ Historically Speaking: For Feb. 29, Tales of the Calendar Wars

A carved Mayan calendar on textured background. Despite the provisional nature of calendars, two real phenomena govern almost all of them: the phases of the moon and the rotations of the sun. PHOTO: ISTOCK

A carved Mayan calendar on textured background. Despite the provisional nature of calendars, two real phenomena govern almost all of them: the phases of the moon and the rotations of the sun. PHOTO: ISTOCK

Every four years on Feb. 29, we are reminded of one of life’s most puzzling conundrums: Time is both arbitrary and immutable. The “leap” making its appearance this Monday shows that the Western calendar on which we place so much reliance is a conceit—a piece of fiction introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in October 1582.

Despite the provisional nature of calendars, two real phenomena govern almost all of them: the phases of the moon and the rotations of the sun. Our Mesolithic ancestors were the first people to harness the movements of the cosmos to provide a fixed notion of the past, the present and the future. The oldest known calendar in the world was discovered in a Scottish field in 2013, notched into the earth some 10,000 years ago. Our forebears had created it by shaping 12 specially dug pits around a 164-foot arc to mimic the phases of the moon and track the months. Continue reading…