The scroll and the codex

Very interesting, Bill. Thanks for sharing them. It is curious, however, that he did not mention the careful planning that would apparently be necessary if producing a "gathering". The gathered pages will produce codexes in which the actual pages that the reader will see in sequence will not be from any one sheet of papyrus. Pages one and two will be from one sheet, three and four from another, five and six from another, and so on. (I think the numbers may be correct, but the actual numbers do not matter except as examples of the problem.) Obviously one needs to know how the codex is going to be constructed before one can begin copying the text, and then one presumably has to write on different sheets as one copies, returning to a sheet already written on when it is time for a different part of that sheet to appear in the sequence of pages in the codex. One would think that this complication would be a strong pull toward not using gatherings at all, but trying instead to stitch the separate pages together, following the second option that he described.

My former colleague Harold Scanlin once pointed out that the use of the codex, a new technology, instead of the scroll was a significant factor in the spread of the Church. Letters and books could be transported more easily, and readers could more easily find passages they wanted to re-read. The next great technological leap that facilitated the spread of the written word was the printing press. Now we can hardly keep up with the continued developments in the electronic media. But surely it is our duty to use them all.