Technically, even modern paperbacks are codices, but publishers and scholars reserve the term for manuscript (hand-written) books produced from Late antiquity until the Middle Ages. In fact, any combination of codices and scrolls with papyrus and parchment is technically feasible and common in the historical record. The change from rolls to codices roughly coincides with the transition from papyrus to parchment as the preferred writing material, but the two developments are unconnected. By the sixth century, the scroll had almost vanished as a medium for literature. In Egypt, by the fifth century, the codex outnumbered the scroll by ten to one based on surviving examples. The codex began to replace the scroll almost as soon as it was invented. The word codex comes from the Latin word caudex, meaning "trunk of a tree", “block of wood” or “book”. Ĭodices largely replaced scrolls similar to this. ![]() First described by the 1st century AD Roman poet Martial, who praised its convenient use, the codex achieved numerical parity with the scroll around 300 AD, and had completely replaced it throughout what was by then a Christianized Greco-Roman world by the 6th century. The spread of the codex is often associated with the rise of Christianity, which early on adopted the format for the Bible. The codex transformed the shape of the book itself, and offered a form that has lasted ever since. The gradual replacement of the scroll by the codex has been called the most important advance in book making before the invention of the printing press. The Ancient Romans developed the form from wax tablets. Some codices are continuously folded like a concertina, in particular the Maya codices and Aztec codices, which are actually long sheets of paper or animal skin folded into pages. Īt least in the Western world, the main alternative to the paged codex format for a long document was the continuous scroll, which was the dominant form of document in the ancient world. Elaborate historical bindings are called treasure bindings. Modern books are divided into paperback or softback and those bound with stiff boards, called hardbacks. A codex, much like the modern book, is bound by stacking the pages and securing one set of edges in a form analogous to modern bookbinding by a variety of methods over the centuries. ![]() The term codex is often used for ancient manuscript books, with handwritten contents. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. ![]() The codex (plural codices / ˈ k oʊ d ə s iː z/) was the historical ancestor of the modern book.
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