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CHAPTER III.
PAPER.
Paper—Watermarks—Quiring.
Although we get our word “paper” from “papyrus,” this latter was not a paper at all. The essential characteristic of a true paper is the matting or felting together of small fibres, whether these be of wood, linen, or other substance. Papyrus was the inner bark of a beautiful reed, which grows along the banks of the Nile, and from a very remote period strips of this bark were laid over each other at right angles, fixed together with gum, or perhaps a little Nile mud, and used for writing upon with a soft pen. The right-angular lines of the two layers of papyrus bark can easily be seen on any papyrus MS.
Papyrus is not a good substance for writing upon; it is at first too soft, and then it gets brittle and is apt to crumble away. By sticking successive strips of papyrus to each other ancient scribes produced long rolls of manuscript, and from these rolls we derive many of the book terms which are still in use. The most obvious is “volume,” which is from “volvere,” “to roll up”; and “Bible” comes from the Greek “βυβλοἱ,” meaning the inner bark of papyrus.