The oldest and most durable books are fire-baked bricks. Even the pocket editions are heavy reading.
Next in antiquity and durability are papyrus scrolls.
When protected from air, earth, fire, water, mice and insects, they remain readable over millennia.
The ancient codex was the immediate ancestor of the modern book. Developed under the Roman Empire to be more portable and concealable than scrolls, it was used for subversive literature like the Christian Bible.
A papyrus codex is less durable than papyrus scrolls: its weaknesses are its binding and leather covers.
Papyrus was lost to medieval Europe, and vellum which replaced it was not an improvement. One hundred sixty sheep made the supreme sacrifice to produce this 12th century Codex Gigas:
The Chinese invention of printing and rag paper made possible the book as we know it. Bibles printed by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455 are eminently readable today.
Note the hand-drawn versals and ornaments, added to lessen readers' shock and help them adjust to the new technology.
Fine leather-bound books of the renaissance through the 18th century are cultural treasures of the human race. The beautiful books below are from Beaumarchais's 70-volume edition of Voltaire, printed 17831790 in Germany and smuggled into France.
The industrial revolution of the 19th century brought with it cheap, mass-produced books. If you lived in a city and had a few coins, you had access to big libraries of books, and that was something new in history. But printing and binding suffered greatly, and wood pulp paper made the books ticking chemical time bombs.
Here is one I was privileged to repair.
Karl Marx,
Kapital. Kritika politicheskoi ekonomii. Translated by Lopatine and Danielson, St. Petersburg: N. P. Poliakov, 1872.
This is from the bookseller's description that goes with the photograph:
Octavo (236 × 153 mm). Contemporary Russian black half calf, blue pebble-grain cloth sides, spine with double gilt rules. . . . Joints rubbed, corners worn . . . an excellent copy.
The spine is split calf glued to cardboard, the way cheap wallets were made before the invention of pleather. The uncoated buckram book cloth is blue under the dirt. Pulp paper, and the signatures are cemented with a 1/4" layer of brown rabbit-hide glue. It is a typical cheap Victorian book, which was published like a tech manual or statistical abstract in a legal edition of 3000 copies. Alexander II's Tsarist ideology was that Russia wasn't capitalist, and that Marx had only exposed the evil of Russia's great enemy, the British Empire. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The bookseller is right, the photographed volume is an excellent copy (but not IMO worth £10,000). Mine was split in two, right down the middle of the spine, but I got it back together and recovered it. That was 30 years ago and someone is using it today. In another two generations, the pages will be too brittle to turn, and then it can go into the fire.
I'm not sentimental about old leather-bound books. Books are for reading, the content is what matters.
