The What-Now of Kells?
The Book of Kells sits in the Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland. This 1200 year old artifact attracts visitors from around the world. The manuscript is displayed in the library's Old Library building, specifically in the "Long Room," a stunningly beautiful and historic library hall.
At Trinity College, the Book of Kells is typically displayed under glass, with one of its pages turned daily, allowing visitors to appreciate different aspects of its intricate artwork and text over time. This helps to preserve the incredible intricate art:
The Book of Kells is one of the most famous books in the world, but is it actually a book at all?
That depends.
If you look at the way Trinity College has it displayed, it sure looks like a book:
But what makes something a book? On one hand, the Book of Kells is written by hand, long predating Gutenberg’s printing press, which came about 600 years later. That doesn’t bother me any, though—just because it’s hand written, doesn’t mean it’s not a book.
What else?
Well, most books have a spine. This one certainly seems to, but the current form reflects centuries of alterations and adaptations. It isn’t completely known whether the book was stitched together and attached to wooden boards for support, or whether it had an actual spine of some kind, but whatever it was, it didn’t exactly allow for thumbing through pages while hanging out on the beach.
What if a book was just a collection of loose paper, but all the same size? This is usually called a codex, but codices can also be stacks of other thin materials besides paper, like parchment or vellum, folded so that the sheets are all the same size or bound between wooden covers .
Unlike the spiral-bound or glue-bound books of today, the codex represented an early evolution in bookmaking, where its pages could be turned and read in sequence, a significant shift from the scroll format that preceded it.
Isidore of Seville offers us some potential clarification in his Etymologiae, completed around 625:
A codex is composed of many books; a book is of one scroll. It is called codex by way of metaphor from the trunks (codex) of trees or vines, as if it were a wooden stock, because it contains in itself a multitude of books, as it were of branches.
Clearly, the modern usage of the word “book” has diverged a great deal over the last 1400 years or so. Everyone speaks of the Library of Alexander having more books than anywhere else, and by “books”, they mean what Isidore meant: scrolls.
TL;DR: it’s complicated. Is an audiobook a book? How about an e-book? These are digital versions of the narrowly defined, spine-bound page-turners we grew up with, but how wide should the definition be?
The answer to that is really up to the culture. Sometimes language is an awful lot like a ping-pong ball, bouncing around at the whims of society and culture. My view is that the word “book” will encompass an awful lot of things, becoming more of a broad category than a narrowly defined concept.
Tell me what you think: what makes something a book? Are there any good examples from history (or the modern world) where the definition is stretched a little? How do digital formats challenge or complement traditional notions of what a book is?
What is this "book" thing you speak of? Is it like a paper-based Substack or something?
So many new terms to learn. Thanks, AI!
Interesting that the ebooks I publish today using Pressbooks are much more like scrolls. This can be an asset or a liability.