The first traces of writing date back to ancient Mesopotamia, between four and five thousand years ago. It was a type of cuneiform script, created by the Sumerian people and carved into clay tablets. This medium made written texts very heavy, so the Egyptians came up with the idea of using vegetable ink and papyrus. Since then, the forms and the media of writing have evolved to become the modern book we know today.
But when did the first book as an object appear? And what are the most significant moments in its history? When did it take on its modern form? These are some of the questions this article sets out to explore, tracing how the book evolved over time. We leave aside its digital form, which we already analyzed in the article on the history of the e-book.
The Book During Ancient History
We mentioned it at the beginning: the oldest known writing system consists of cuneiform symbols that were engraved with a calamus or other sharp element on pieces of moist clay that were then left to dry. These incisions were shaped like wedges arranged in a pyramidal manner.
It’s believed that the first book in history was written in the Akkadian language with this type of writing. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian writer Sîn-lēqi-unninni compiled, between 1300 and 1000 BC, an epic that had been circulating orally for more than a thousand years and is believed to have influenced important later works, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and even the Hebrew Old Testament.
The clay pieces were followed by rolls of papyrus and vegetable ink. The oldest finds of this type of medium date back to around 2400 BC, in Egypt. The papyrus came from Cyperus papyrus, a reed native to the Nile. This aquatic plant was cut, pressed, and dried to produce a surface on which they wrote using a sharpened reed stem or bird feathers.
The papyrus scroll consisted of individual sheets pasted together, and could reach a total length of 16 meters. The text was written in columns on the inside of the roll, which was kept in wooden tubes, as the material wore easily and was very susceptible to humidity.
Later, around the 2nd century BC, a new material began to be produced, one that was more resistant and practical for writing: parchment, a membrane with a polished, elastic, and very resistant surface that was obtained from the skin of animals, after a skinning, soaking, dehairing, and stretching process. The most refined types of parchment are considered some of the best supports for writing due to their durability and the quality of their surface. Its name comes from the city of Pergamon, in present-day Turkey, where parchment was supposedly first adopted.
During this period, another medium appeared: wax tablets, small wooden rectangular frames that were covered with multiple layers of wax and that could be attached to one another with thread. These tablets were reusable; one simply had to scratch the wax and could write on them again, using a wooden, metal, bone, or ivory stylus. Wax tablets were difficult to preserve, but they were useful in daily life and were the first attempt to create a medium in which writing could be modified.
The Book in the Middle Ages (5th-15th Centuries)
Parchment was the most widely used material for written production during much of the Middle Ages. However, until the invention of the codex, around the 4th century AD, papyrus was still used. Only then did the book become, roughly speaking, what we know today: a rectangular object of several sheets stacked and sewn together. This codex format is consolidated when Christianity becomes Europe’s official religion.
During the following centuries, parchment would return to the scene to make the pages of codices. During this period, book production and Christianity were intimately linked: the written word belonged exclusively to the Church. From the monasteries, scribes were in charge of reproducing the divine word handwritten in the codices.
The monopoly of the Church would fall in the 12th and 13th centuries, when book production began to be taken over by lay professionals during the emergence of universities and urban workshops. The new demand produced not only changes in production, but also new ways of writing, which contributed to a clearer, more legible expression of the written word. The littera moderna or gothic script appears, a typeface with more compact characters that makes it easier to read. Likewise, the organization of the text begins to gain importance: separation of words, punctuation, abbreviations, and columns.
Parchment began to fall into disuse when the Arabs introduced paper—a Chinese invention—into Spain. The first paper mill in medieval Europe was founded in Xativa in the mid-11th century and, from there, this new medium spread throughout the rest of the continent. Being easier and cheaper to manufacture, paper drove publishing production forward and became the most used material to manufacture books from the 15th century, with the arrival of the printing press.
The Book in the Modern Era
The invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in 1450 in Germany was one of the earliest drivers of the technological revolution that would change the production of knowledge in the West. This applies specifically to the West because the mechanism of movable types had been developed by Bi Sheng in China about 400 years before Gutenberg.
However, it was Gutenberg’s printing press that had a significant impact on the production of books, similar to that of the steam engine in the early industrialization of Europe. This invention standardized the different procedures involved in making books and replaced handwritten manual reproduction with reproduction from movable types.
Not all the advances happened at the same time, although the fundamental ones did: the printing press introduced the manufacture of characters from a single metal matrix and the use of more concentrated ink. The precedent of this technique is woodblock printing, a procedure that consists of making an engraving on wood to reproduce images on fabric using the same matrix—a procedure also created in China. Gutenberg’s technique used this technique to create types that could be combined in the same typeface box to form identical lines of text and line up pages very quickly.
Gutenberg’s printing press made it possible to automate the task of the monastic copyist and, therefore, reduce the time and costs of book production. Thus, the professions involved in production as we know them today began to be defined: the printer, the bookseller, the editor, the galley proofreader, and even the author became professionals during this period. Production, however, was still artisanal.
But although this period (1450-1550) is considered the birth of the modern book, the truth is that, according to Roger Chartier, there are more continuities than transformations between the handwritten book and the printed book. In fact, the latter sought to reproduce the format and design of the medieval handwritten book, whose fundamental aspects were defined during the centuries before printing: division of pages, numbering, format of columns and lines, as well as the semantic relationships between the text and its glosses, notes, and indexes. The books of this period are known as paleotypes or incunables (from Latin incunabula, “in the cradle”).
During the second half of the 15th century, production was dominated by Italian printers, mainly in cities such as Venice or Florence, who made use of Gutenberg’s mechanism to create their own printing businesses and actively compete for a market driven by the humanist movement of the Italian Renaissance (and, in the following century, by the Protestant Reformation in Germany).
The Frenchman Nicholas Jensen (1420-1480) and the Italian Aldus Manutius (1452-1515) were two of the most representative printers of Venice during this period. They recovered science and humanities texts from classical Greek and Roman literature, with a growing editorial eye: Manutius, for example, specialized in smaller, portable editions, while Jensen played with different typefaces (such as the Roman typeface and the Greek font that imitated handwriting), illustrations, and high-quality decorations.
The Book in the Old French Regime and the Birth of the Modern Publisher (16th-20th Centuries)
After the expansion of the printing press in Europe, the book underwent gradual technical changes. The most notable one concerned its content, especially after social and political changes such as the Lutheran Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Before, most books were liturgical or ecclesiastical, such as the first Bibles in the vernacular and the medieval works of Saint Augustine, Saint Albert the Great, and Saint Bernard. The printed book and the medieval handwritten texts coexisted until the 16th century.
From then on, the book as an object undergoes minor and successive transformations: smaller and more portable formats (which promoted the revolution in silent and private reading), the binding and Renaissance decoration of the Venetian printers who gave greater prominence to the cover, popularized the Roman font (as opposed to the Gothic one) and the use of intaglio for illustrations (as opposed to woodcut).
In the 18th century, typographic art resurfaced, and the quality of the books became a central aspect of the production. The book market became a highly lucrative business, and editions reached their highest level of quality yet seen. With enlightenment came an appetite for knowledge and science, which prompted the creation of works such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, manuals, and grammar books.
In this period, France became the center of the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts, or simply the French Encyclopedia, by writer, philosopher, and editor Denis Diderot, is considered the Bible of the Enlightenment. The encyclopedia entries were made by some of the most important authors and thinkers of this period: Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon, Malesherbes, and Voltaire are just some of the participants in its creation.
The figure of the publisher becomes the central axis of the book industry by separating itself from the tasks of the printer and the bookseller. The Encyclopedia was published in 1751 and had 17 volumes of text and 11 supplementary volumes with illustrations and engravings (about 2,500). This work has all the characteristics of the encyclopedias of the 20th century and became the best-selling book in France and neighboring countries.
The appearance of the Encyclopedia raised many problems and violent reactions from the French Government of the time. Diderot had to contend with the censors of the Old Regime and actively fought to obtain permission to publish a work that opposed religious conceptions, the position of the monarchy, and inherited customs to give rise to scientific conceptions of the world and nature.
The different editorial tasks that we know today consolidated during this period: the authors, printers, booksellers, proofreaders, illustrators, and other actors, organized by the figure of the publisher, made this an important industry that contributed to the intellectual climate that would lead to the French Revolution and the call for freedom of the press.
The Book in the Contemporary Age (19th-20th Centuries)
Over the two following centuries, the book’s production was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution and the technical advances it brought. At the same time, the creation of nation-states, schooling and literacy processes, and the rise of journalism created a reading public that generated a greater demand for all kinds of print.
During the 19th century, books continued to undergo physical transformations: smaller formats, new typographies (linotype and monotype) and illustration (lithography and photogravure) techniques, pulp paper, and the sheet of continuous paper were all advances that made it possible to improve the quality of the books in all aspects.
In the 20th century, these mechanical techniques were perfected, and automation was deepened. But it was computer science, during the second half of the century, that represented a qualitative leap in the way books were manufactured. In fact, with the birth of the digital book, the book was freed from its physical medium. The breakthrough is commonly attributed to Project Gutenberg from the University of Illinois during the early 1970s, although this is disputed. It was not until the turn of the millennium that a new medium for digital books appeared: the e-book reader or e-reader. This story continues in our article on the history of the e-book, don’t miss it!
Throughout their history, books went through many material, technical, and cultural transformations. From clay tablets, papyrus, and parchment to printing presses and digital readers, each innovation modified the way people produced, shared, and accessed knowledge. However, through all these changes, books have retained their place as one of the fundamental tools for the development of humanity.
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