Too often we take for granted the advancements that have occurred during the years. Cell phones have come a long way as they were very heavy and large when they first came out. Cars are more advanced and streamlined than the first ones Henry Ford mass produced. Everything evolves and improves as technology improves. Books are no exception.
The first books were not paperback or with fancy covers. They were not easily transportable. They were not easily written. They were incredibly hard to make and, therefore, not able to be mass produced. Books have really changed over the years.
The first books were nothing you could imagine. As paper does not come directly from nature, it had not been invented yet. Mankind had to use what resources they had. Nature provided them with mud and clay.
Mud and clay can be baked and hardened which makes great lasting “books”. As the flat mud tablet is still wet, the author took a stick, a reed, or any other object that could be used to make marks on the tablets. Then the tablet hardened with the words legible. Because of this method of writing, archeologists have found a wealth of information from centuries ago that has revealed much about ancient civilizations.
Now, this method of writing was not used to write novels and could not easily be transported. These tablets weighed a lot. Most people in ancient cultures used these tablets in economic ways as they documented how much grain or other product was stored and used. This was vital for most governments. It was also used to document the exploits of kings and emperors. As battles were won and nations conquered, tablets were written up to describe the feats.
Stone tablets were also used, but this required the ability to legibly carve the writing into the stone. Ancient civilizations used each of these methods which have lasted the years to come to us.
From stone and clay, mankind discovered at various times that other products could be used to create early book versions. In China toward the end of the BC era, man discovered that from the bark of trees that had been broken down and mixed with water. Once it was mixed well, it was laid out to dry. The true beginnings of our current paper had been discovered.
In Egypt, paper was created out of papyrus reeds. From these two paper methods, early forms of books arose. Stories of heroes, religious laws, letters to others far away began to take shape. Many of these early forms of books were compiled as wall hangings, scrolls, or just in single sheets stacked together. Leather was used as well as copper to create scrolls pieced together to create entire books. Many of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious pieces were written and preserved on such books.
As paper developed, it was inevitable that so would books. With the ability to create such functioning paper which was easier to transport than clay or stone tablets and with the ability to let creativity loose, books began to grow. Though books became more numerous, they were still not as common or readily available as they are today. Typically only the rich could possess such wondrous art works that books had become. To produce these books took years and sometimes lifetimes as you can see from the pictures below.
One page could take a long time to create. But all this changed with one single invention – the printing press.
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