EARLY BOOKS AND LIBRARIES.

BY STEPHEN SALISBURY.

CIVILIZATION has received no greater impetus than that given to it by the discoveries of the fifteenth century. Not only was the Western Hemisphere added to the known world, but the art of printing was invented, and in the latter part of the century was born the great leader of the Reformation, an agency most powerful in its influence upon human progress, whose initial movement was to a great degree occasioned by the invention of the printing press and the consequent revival of learning. Without that aid to the diffusion of knowledge and the impulse given to individual thought, it is not at all probable that the system of religious government which actually prevailed, or any which might have been instituted, would have been seriously menaced, still less powerfully interfered with and reformed. Although nothing new may appear in treating, somewhat at length, the gradual steps in the evolution of the printed book, from the early hieroglyphic sign scratched upon stone, bark or papyrus, still it may not be useless to repeat facts known to all, but infrequently considered.

Man in different parts of the world has shown a remarkable coincidence in practical phases of development from savagery into civilization, when called to devise a means of intercommunication by written or spoken language or to organize for social purposes, for protection, or in most of the lines of intellectual growth. So that it is by no means surprising when the investigator of to-day shows us that a new luxurious appliance is a crude approach to something that was better understood in an Egyptian civilization of

two thousand years ago, or in some later community, the record of whose existence perhaps remains only in the crumbling ruins which cover the surface of the soil, and whose advancement in the arts is shown solely by the elaborate and curious articles found in the excavations made in its neighborhood.

Of the early history of India and China we as yet know comparatively little, but that little teaches us to believe that cotton weaving, sculpture and engraving were brought to much perfection in prehistoric times, and that in China the art of printing with movable types was practised long before it became known in Europe.

Until a short time before the historic era the art of writing was unknown in Europe, even in its rudest and most elementary forms. All moral and religious maxims, as well as traditional history, were preserved by a sacerdotal order, which transmitted them orally to their successors. By this means a great multitude of facts were handed down from generation to generation, by a body of men who became very capable in this direction. When writing was invented the labors of these memorizers did not suddenly cease, even when codes of religious and moral laws had been transcribed. The oldest of moral and religious codes known to us, the Sanskrit Vedas, was probably orally preserved and transmitted for generations, as we learn that twelve years of study was necessary for inferior Sanskrit priests and forty years for those of the higher grades. It is believed that the poems of Homer were thus handed down for two or three centuries by professional bards and reciters of Greece, and the genuine portions of Ossian are known to have been preserved until a very recent period in the north of Scotland by oral tradition. It is possible that the arrangement of the sentence or theme into measured phrases having a balance of completeness, had its origin in an effort to aid the memory, and it is probable that the subsequent poetic metres of Greece and Rome were the result of such

efforts. Writing did not come at once into existence in its perfected state. It was the growth of centuries, like the culture of the memory. Egyptian writing, the parent of our own system, bears traces of the pictorial as well as of the phonetic principle. In Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, and in the Turkish and Chinese characters of to-day, we find a complicated series of pictures which have been changed and modified to secure convenience and despatch. It is said to be possible to follow the changes of form from the more correct pictorial representations through successive periods, until the letters assumed the present conventional character. At first, records that were kept were inscribed on the walls of palaces, temples, pyramids and obelisks. The vast number of these inscriptions and the want of space for more rendered some other form of preservation imperative. Records of victories and royal expeditions were carved upon rocks near the localities where they took place. The art of committing writing and inscriptions to small slabs of clay was discovered and practised in the Assyrian Empire, and notifications and proclamations were thus circulated. Lately we have seen samples of Babylonian books, which were secured by the late Catharine L. Wolfe expedition. They are little clay tablets inscribed on both sides in cuneiform characters and are commonly known as contract tablets, which contain the records of important social transactions, such as law suits, marriage settlements, etc., and they are now found stored in record chambers. Rock inscriptions were known to the Assyrians as speaking stones, and to the Greeks as hieroglyphics. The Egyptians discovered the use of papyrus, as a material upon which writings might be preserved, and cultivated the rush-like plant of which it is the fibre, to enable them to furnish the great quantity required for home use, and to supply the demand from neighboring countries. The Assyrians came near to the invention of printing, in the use of engraved seals from which any number of impressions might be taken.

The

Layard found such impressions in baked clay from seals, which appeared to be royal orders, so that duplicates might be furnished to officers of the government, a near approach to the system from which block books were made. Greek learning received great assistance from the use of the finely prepared papyrus of Egypt, and of the inner bark of lime trees. Still manuscript writings remained very expensive, and the active circulation of ideas was impossible. In the year 453 of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus established yearly records, which were written on white tablets and were placed in a room in his house accessible to the public. Cæsar, in 694, caused the proceedings of the Senate to be made public daily. Books in the time of Augustus existed only in the form of scrolls, and from the scarcity of writing material palimpsests, or a second use of the same sheet after erasure of the first written matter, became common. scrolls had rollers of wood or ivory affixed at either end. So rare and expensive were these scrolls that popular authors were read aloud at the baths and porticos. The first booksellers at Rome were the dealers in second-hand wares of all sorts, the buyers of manuscripts when forced on the market by the necessity of their owners. Families of wealth had slaves whose business it was to read aloud and to transcribe, and they were the book-makers of that period. Libraries of the time, as we may learn from Herculaneum, were but small collections. At Rome, books first took the square form in imitation of the tablets, and they were arranged in this form in blank for private memoranda, the pages of which were at first plates of metal coated with wax, within a cover more or less richly decorated and protected by raised edges, so that inscriptions written on the wax would not touch when the covers were closed. Afterwards five or six leaves of vellum took the place of wax tablets. These tablets with richly carved ivory covers were presented to consuls and other official dignitaries on their election to office, and served as their official badge.

The square form of books was probably adopted because of its convenience, and as affording a better opportunity for ornamentation. It is traced to the IV. century B. C. The carly Christians caused the Bible to be copied and illuminated by the priests themselves, in the monasteries which rapidly arose, and the work of transcribing manuscripts was carried on with much regularity, and as the books were required for use in the churches much care was taken with the writing and embellishments. Some of the monasteries supplied other institutions and churches with religious books, and became at the same time the repositories of ancient manuscripts, often preserved only for the beauty of the caligraphy. From the V. to the XII. centuries luxurious churchmen were almost the only possessors of books, for they monopolized existing intellectual civilization, and the books they produced were chiefly intended for the services of the church.

Having thus far indicated very briefly some of the steps in the progress from pictorial rock inscriptions to the written books of the XIV. century, we now come to consider the discovery of printing, or the method by which written books may be reproduced at will and indefinitely multiplied. In the art as ultimately perfected, wood engraving plays a most important part. The Chinese are thought to have been the first who perfected the art of wood engraving to the degree of cutting designs upon blocks which might be transferred to woven fabrics in colored patterns. Wood carving in relief or in the round has been generally practised in all countries and by many savage tribes, but etching or engraving has been found only as the outgrowth of civilization and very considerable advancement in the arts. It is thought that printing written texts from engraved tablets was first practised by the Chinese. Isaiah Thomas in his "History of Printing" says:

Dr.

1The History of Printing in America. By Isaiah Thomas. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, Jun. 1810. 8vo., Vol. I., p. 73.