Fig. 22.—Orihon.
Without realising it we still preserve this blank and letterpress sequence, found in the converted roll, in official and legal manuscripts as well as in those intended for the printer.
When the printing press took the place of the scribe, the blank leaves had no further raison d’être, so they dropped out for good.
Following the rule that the forms of binding have always followed tolerably closely the forms of the manuscript they have covered, we find that rolls were kept in cylindrical boxes, called “scrinia.” Each roll was usually provided with a little tag, so that if there were several of them in one box they could easily be distinguished. The same sort of tags are used to-day in the case of rolled maps kept on shelves.
Until a late period the term parchment must be understood to mean vellum. Now we call sheep skin “parchment” and calf skin “vellum,” and they are prepared in the same way with lime, so that not being tanned they are not strictly “leather.” The finest vellum is prepared from the very youngest and smallest calves, and it is the most beautiful and suitable material for writing or printing upon that has ever yet been found. The surface is singularly even and offers little or no resistance to a pen, so that every sort of handwriting, square or round, is put upon it with equal ease. Vellum has one fault alone, particularly when bound in book form as distinct from a roll, and this is that the edges are apt to cockle, and by so doing they not only make the pages look ugly, but they also admit the dust. Often and often magnificent vellum books, especially at the top, show large vandykes of dust-stained spaces due to this cockling, and all such books should be provided with a close fitting cardboard cap, to be kept upon them whenever they are not in use.
Parchment and vellum were both well-known to the ancients, but their value as materials for writing upon does not seem to have been fully acknowledged until the second century B.C., until which period papyrus had held undisputed pre-eminence for that purpose. At that time for some reason the supply of papyrus from Egypt ran short, and Eumenes II., King of Pergamum, successfully introduced parchment in its stead. Parchment is so called because it was first produced at Pergamum.
Until about the fifth century A.D., vellum MSS. were in the roll form, but then came a change to the book form as we now know it. This change was probably due to the fact that stabbed binding, the only sort then used, was not suited to vellum. The few papyri that exist in book form were stabbed, that is to say, the rectangular pages were kept in position by a binding cord laced through holes pierced sideways right through the entire thickness of the back of the book. The marks of these holes can often be seen along the inner margins of ancient papyri, and they also show in many instances of rebound copies of our early English printed books. To-day plenty of examples of this form of sewing can be seen in the Chinese and Japanese books, “Orihons,” which are really links between the roll and the book form. It is also largely used for thin books of little value, and a modification of it can be seen in numbers of magazines, books of advertisements, and the like, which are kept together by abominable little clamps of wire attached on the same principle. When such books have to be properly bound the little clamps have to be carefully removed, and it is generally found that they have made an indelible stain of rust on the paper, even if they have not also torn it considerably.
Fig. 23.—Stabbed binding.