Codex

On rare occasions I was lucky enough to find a book back in the 300′s. This said, reading a book in the year 300 was a pain in the ass. The reading of the words was incredible, but actually handling the actual physical book itself was a huge chore. They had book technology down to a science by 600, but back in the 3 and 400′s the engineer-design-work of books was terrible.

Have you ever accidentally unrolled four or five feet of your toilet paper while yanking away at it before the big wipe? Well, this type a unwinding happened to every single precious book that I was ever able to get my hands on back in the 3 and 400′s. My kids would get their hands on a Scroll Book of mine and unwind it as if they were Olympic Gymnasts performing Ribbon-exercises. Mad effort went into my scrolling them back up, not unlike untangling a Slinky which has gotten coiled out of whack.

The 500′s were an exciting time for me. Just like the 300′s when it was almost impossible for me to get my hands on a written scroll book (even blank scrolls were near impossible to find for when I wanted to write instead of just reading). In 500 a game changer called the Codex Book had been brewing for some time and started becoming more affordable (and by more affordable, I mean less un-affordable).

The Codex format is defined as a rectangle of stacked pages printed on two-sides, usually in portrait-mode, with a cover, and bound at the spine; the cover or spine sometimes showcasing the name of the title and author. The only real change since the introduction of the design of Codex style Books (besides e-books in the early 2000′s) was when things shifted from hand-written to automatically printed. Codex books continued to be published in the Hand-written format until starting in the mid-1400′s when things started getting printed, and mass produced.

A Codex format book was way easier to handle than a Scroll format book. Much smarter design. Codex was more portable and convenient to use, I could carry it around in one hand. Even though you could technically carry the Scroll around to say, read it outside – I chose not to do so. They’d always become unrolled, and it was a pain to roll them back up. During a small quick sand-storm once, my scroll completely unrolled and then coiled up like a Chinese yo-yo. From that day onward I never removed my scrolls from my desk which was dedicated for scroll book reading.

Another factor that sucked about the Scroll format book was locating sections in the book that I wanted to reference back to. Scrolls were basically like a roll of paper-towels, but imagine a roll of paper-towels with two card-board tube centers. As you unwind the paper from one of the tubes you wind it around the other tube, like a cassette tape which has one long thread of tape which unwinds from one reel and winds up onto another reel. As you hit forward and reverse on a cassette tape, the long narrow thread of tape winds back up onto the opposite reel. Likewise; as you reverse and forward on a Scroll book, the long wide thread of paper winds back up onto the opposite paper-towel tube. So if there was a section of the book which I later wanted to reference I would have to scroll forward and backwards, from my paper-towel-like roll in my left hand to my paper-towel-like roll in my right hand. Forward and reverse back and forth until I could locate the section of the book that I wanted to reference, just like in the 1980′s when I wanted to locate a song on one of my cassette tapes. Scroll books sucked.

Codex on the other hand was like the Compact Disc. Once the Book became a rectangle of stacked pages printed on two-sides and bound at the spine, referencing back to an earlier section became as easy as finding a track number on a compact disc. The Codex book format was way ahead of its time.

Throughout the 500′s the Codex book design was gaining a groundswell in popularity. Each new best seller (best seller meaning dozens of copies were written out long-hand, and read by only hundreds of people) would be released in both older Scroll format (double paper-towel roll-like) and newer Codex format (normal book-like), and throughout the 500′s the demand for Codex outperformed Scroll in an increasing fashion.

I was an early adopter of the Codex book format during the 500′s because of what a pain in the ass it was to roll them back up whenever they became unrolled. Throughout this century the production of Codex format books increased at an accelerating pace. Yes, books continued to be rare, but more and more less so. Book production, and my resulting number of choices of what to read, increased. The Codex book fully replaced the scroll by 600. The number of reading selections I had to choose from kicked into high gear starting in the 1400′s when Gutenberg's press revolutionized access to stories, words, and-

-shit, my Samsung Tablet's running out of juice and is about to shut down. I'm not even sure if this will get saved to my Google Drive on time. Gotta go.