History of the Book

Associate Professor of English Whitney Trettien is an expert on the history of the book and its digital future. As the faculty director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, she uses and teaches digital tools for exploring this history. Here, she describes the book’s progression from clay tablet to its present-day formats. The history of the book, she says, is a history of innovation.

How do you define a “book,” given its many historical iterations?

That’s a question I explore a lot in my classes. A book, to me, is a physical means of recording, storing, transmitting, and sharing human knowledge, especially text. Clay tablets, papyrus bookrolls, EPUB files, the familiar codex: they’re all books. Thinking very broadly about what a book is helps us put it into conversation with other media and communication technologies, like film or audio or oral storytelling traditions.

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How do you approach this history with your students?

We begin with clay tablets, which emerged about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia as a means of recording some of the earliest forms of human writing. We go to the Penn Museum to look at examples. Then I have students make their own cuneiform tablet with Sculpey. They take a chopstick—which is similar to an ancient stylus—and try to write their names in cuneiform on the clay. Cuneiform script is full of chunky wedges, and when you use a chopstick to write you can see why. You can’t form fluid cursive on clay with a stick because you’re not applying an ink to a flat surface. You’re displacing the clay itself. This exercise shows the interconnectedness of writing tool, medium, and script.

From there, we move roughly historically from papyrus and parchment to the invention of paper in China and its uptake in the Islamic world. Eventually we make it to the printed book so familiar to us today, which is a relatively recent technology. For it to become possible, the paper industry had to develop, metal movable type had to be invented (several times over), and different forms of binding had to evolve. By the end, we understand the history of the book as a history of technological innovation.

How did the codex evolve?

It has a few origin points. One is the wax tablet of Ancient Rome, a set of wooden boards covered in wax and bound on one edge. You could scratch into the wax then “erase” it. Romans also used little folded pieces of parchment known as pugillares membranei or “skin notebooks.” Both of these seemed to have seeded the idea of the codex in the Western world. It had some advantages over bookrolls, which are rolls of papyrus or parchment that scroll horizontally. For instance, a scroll or bookroll only has text on one side, divided into pagina—that’s where the word “pages” comes from—and it’s more difficult to navigate back and forth through a long text. In a codex, you can insert a bookmark or finger to hold your place and easily flip the pages.

Similar book formats developed differently in other parts of the world. For instance, some Mesoamerican codices unfold like accordions, with content on both sides, a system with some of the advantages of both the codex and the bookroll.

The amazing innovation of the codex is that it takes the page structure of scrolls or bookrolls, cuts it up, and reorganizes those pages onto sheets in a more complicated, nonlinear way. When those sheets are folded and bound, you have a codex, this wonderfully flexible architecture.

What is the future of the book? Is it going away?

I don’t think the printed book as we know it is going anywhere. Print sales are rising in many categories. And this makes sense. Even if you don’t read novels, you might have a cookbook in your home. Meanwhile, audiobooks have taken off in fields like self-help, while the sales of ebooks are strong in romance. New formats aren’t replacing more established ones. Instead, it seems like they’re specializing according to genre.

Is there a particular text that stands out to your students?

The mundane evidence of a human life always tends to strike us. For instance, clay tablets used by Sumerian students were shaped like little round disks. When I ask students why, they can’t come up with an answer until they hold a ball of clay and realize it fits perfectly in your hand. A teacher would write an example of a few words in cuneiform on one side and the student could flip over the tablet to practice.

There’s a clay tablet at the Penn Museum I always love to share with students. It’s a legal document for an adoption, paired with an infant’s footprint imprinted in clay. A baby’s footprint from 4,000 years ago! We still do this with babies today, but with ink and paper, right? These little personal touches in everyday documents can be extraordinary ways to tap into history.