1115. This week, we talk with Keith Houston about his book, "The Book." We look at how writing technology evolved from clay tablets and bamboo slips to papyrus and paper. He shares some surprising facts, including why books are rectangles, how museums try to deacidify books, and how printing was once political.
1115. This week, we talk with Keith Houston about his book, "The Book." We look at how writing technology evolved from clay tablets and bamboo slips to papyrus and paper. He shares some surprising facts, including why books are rectangles, how museums try to deacidify books, and how printing was once political.
Keith Houston - Shadycharacters.co.uk
Keith's book - "Face with Tears of Joy"
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Grammar Girl here, I'm Mignon Fogarty, and just a heads-up that today's show was originally a bonus episode released back in July for people who support the show, the Grammarpaloozians.
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And now, on to the show.
Mignon: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I am here today with Keith Houston. If you're listening to the main episode, we talked all about his new book, “Face with Tears of Joy,” about emoji, but he has this other great book called “The Book” that is all about the technology of the physical form of the book. And I thought it would be so interesting to talk to him about that in our bonus segment today. Thank you so much for supporting the show. We really appreciate you. Keith Houston is the author of another book also called “Shady Characters,” and he runs the Shady Characters blog, which is about interesting punctuation marks. So he's always doing interesting things. Keith Houston, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
Keith: Thank you.
Mignon: Yeah, so “The Book,” wow. A book about the Book. That is so cool. And it talks about the technology of the book. So we have papyrus, we have parchment, and we have paper. So, you know, do you consider papyrus to be sort of the first book technology?
Keith: I think so. I think that's a reasonable way to go about it. It's funny, when we talked about emoji, we talked about how it's really difficult to nail down what an emoji is, and when the first emoji came along; it's kind of the same with books. So I started out with the idea, I guess I worked backwards from the idea of a physical book, sort of like this one, the new paperback edition of the book. I wanted to see where that came from. And so we think about books as being mostly made of paper, I guess. And then there was a time when they were mostly made of parchment, or before that, there was a time when they were mostly made of papyrus. And in fact, before that, I guess you get back into cuneiform and clay tablets and so on. So people were writing long works, but they weren't perhaps portable. I think there was something about the, you know, what is the definition of a book? And I guess I had in my head it's something which is portable and self-contained. And I feel like a very large book made out of clay tablets is perhaps not quite the same thing.
Mignon: You don't want 20,000 words on a clay tablet.
Keith: No, indeed. In fact, there was one particular time in—or period in history that I was looking at, which was when China—so paper was invented in China, probably in the second century BCE or thereabouts. And before that, books were written on either silk, which was very expensive but very light, or on bamboo slips, they're called. So take a long piece of bamboo and split it into kind of thin strips, which works well for Chinese writing, which is typically top to bottom, right to left. And you'd string these strips together to make a kind of a thing you could roll up. But this was also heavy. And it turns out that Chinese emperors were sometimes, or scholars, in fact, were sometimes talked about in terms of the weight of their knowledge. You know, how many cartloads of books have you read, or how many cartloads of documents have you signed today? So the physical weight of these things was significant and important, and it meant something. And of course, I guess we now, I mean, you know, we have books. They're still—not small, they're not light. But they're a lot lighter than if this was made of bamboo or clay.
Mignon: The last time I moved, my husband said I had too many books. I completely, obviously, disagree, but yeah, imagine moving if you had to move like the bamboo scrolls; they're so much heavier.
Keith: Oh, indeed. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Literal carts to move libraries around, yeah.
Mignon: Wow. So, yeah, the story about paper being invented in China was actually one of the interesting things in the book. I was surprised how many different materials can be used to make paper.
Keith: It ends up being pretty much any sort of fiber, any sort of fibrous plant. So I think the canonical ones at the start were, I think it was largely hemp. So things like old fishing nets which had been made out of hemp rope, made out of hemp rope. But also the bark of the mulberry tree or mulberry bush. There's a particular species of mulberry, which is called the paper mulberry, and it has this, I think it's called white bast, between the outer bark and the wood itself. And these two things, these were the sort of the main ingredients of the very first paper which is said to have been made by this eunuch of a Chinese court called Cai Lun; he probably didn’t make it. Someone else did. Someone else probably invented it a couple of hundred years before he lived, but he got credit for it. And it was said that he went to a pool in his back garden and soaked all of these materials—this hemp, and I think old clothes, and the bark of the mulberry tree—into this kind of soup, almost this sort of white, silky soup, and then used a mold, perhaps made of bamboo, dipped it into this pool, drew it out, and let it dry. And that was the invention of paper, allegedly. And that was basically how paper was made for quite a long time afterwards.
Mignon: Yeah, you made paper for the book. What was that like?
Keith: It was fantastic. I'm a software engineer by trade, and so a lot of the stuff that I do just exists in an incredibly ephemeral way. It's all just electrons; it's all just magnetic charges. To do something which seems—well, you know, books did not seem anachronistic to me when I was writing this, you know, ten years ago or so. But papermaking weirdly felt like I’d never really thought about the process. It’s, you know, where does paper come from? How is it made? So I went to see an artist in Edinburgh, Scotland, who makes her own paper. And she let me try it out. She had a machine called a Hollander Beater, which is a kind of metal tank that just chewed up fiber and made it into this—as I said, this kind of soup. I took a mold, I dipped it in, I drew it out, and I was doing the same thing that Silo and his lackeys had done 2,000 years ago. And it worked. It made this paper, which was really kind of rough and tough. It's hard to imagine writing on it with, say, a fountain pen, but of course in China they used brushes and still do for some traditional calligraphy.
So it didn't matter quite as much. And so just that one experience, I think, taught me quite a lot about the variability of paper. I also then actually went to a paper mill, an industrial paper mill again, in Scotland, quite near where I grew up. That was an entirely different experience. There's this giant, it’s exactly a factory, as you imagine it being. It has giant machines, it has smells, it's warm. There's steam; there's lots of noise. Everyone's wearing hi-vis vests and hard hats. And the paper you get out of that is entirely different. It's white, and pristine, and perfect for a printed book, you know, like these ones. So the gulf between the way that we made it initially and the way that we typically make it now for mass production. It was like looking at the book in a new way, and I meant looking at, I guess, modern society and life in a new way as well, to an extent.
Mignon: Yeah, I thought the section on acid-free paper was really interesting. So does paper always have acid, and the acid can cause papers to degrade, so if you want something to last, you get acid-free paper. But that implies that regular paper has acid in it. Is that from when they were making paper in China, you know, thousands of years ago? Did it have...is there something about the process that makes it acidic, or is it more of the modern way that we make paper that makes it acidic?
Keith: So there are a couple of things. I think it's to some extent a modern problem, and it's largely, or at least partly because we make paper from wood pulp, and wood has in it a substance called lignin that causes it to gradually degrade over time. It's slightly acidic, basically. There's also a part of the paper-making process called sizing, where the paper is treated to make it absorbent or not, depending on what the use of the paper is. I should start that again; sorry.
Mignon: Okay, so lignin.
Keith: Yeah, so the problem started when we began making paper out of wood, which is a relatively modern phenomenon. I think in the last two centuries or so, we've used wood pulp, and, of course, there’s lots of wood around; it's a plentiful raw material. But there is a substance in wood called lignin, which can cause paper to degrade just without doing anything else to it. But there's also a part of the papermaking process called sizing, where the paper is treated with different chemicals to make it whiter, to make it more or less absorbent of ink, depending on the use for the paper. And for a while, the chemicals that were used for that sizing process were acidic, and, again, they would leach into the paper, they’d cause it to degrade over time. The third thing was also just the environment. So during the Industrial Revolution, we were burning huge quantities of coal, and the air and gas, in fact, in people’s homes for lighting and heating. And this meant that the air was relatively acidic, and this hastened the demise of lots of books made at the time. So there was a whole pile of factors that led to this phenomenon of acid paper. In fact, when I was researching the book, I visited the National Library of Scotland quite frequently. You can really see these old, yellowed, brittle papers in books. They don't even have to be that old. Even now, if you buy a relatively cheap paperback, it will go quite yellow. It may not be made with acid-free paper because it's not expected to last for more than a few years or to be needed to last for more than a few years.
Mignon: Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that some museums are trying to deacidify their books.
Keith: This is an interesting thing or an interesting process. I think NASA got involved quite early. They were using one particular substance; I think it's called diethylzinc, and it turned out to be quite unstable. If it mixes with water, it explodes, and there was an explosion. They were trying to immerse or fumigate books with this diethylzinc, and someone incredibly opened a tap that allowed a whole pile of water to flood in. And there was an explosion. I don't think anyone was hurt.
Mignon: Okay.
Keith: But I, yeah, I don't know the current state of it. I know that the Library of Congress in the States does not currently have a mass deacidification project ongoing, and I think their argument is that this is still being developed. As I wrote the book, I got the impression that no one is really sure what the best way is to do this. And it sounds like perhaps that's still the case.
Mignon: Yeah, the book is filled with interesting tidbits, little interesting facts. You know, one relating to books holding up is the ink on the Book of Kells. So, you know, in some ways, these older books have held up better than the current paper books, and the ink on the Book of Kells held up surprisingly well until it went to Australia on a plane, and you said the vibration from the plane caused some damage to the ink.
Keith: So I think I didn't actually dig it up; it was a nice tidbit. I didn't dig up enough into the story. But my suspicion is the ink used at the time was often called iron gall ink. It was made from, I think it was iron sulfate and oak galls. So, you get these little growths on oak trees where, I think, insects basically damage the wood of the tree, and the tree grows a little sort of nodule to repair itself and to protect itself. Often, wasps, I think, lay eggs or otherwise attack the tree and cause these things to grow. So scribes would harvest the oak galls and soak them with iron sulfate to make the ink. This ink is incredibly permanent; it leaches into the… it’s not the papyrus, the parchment and fixes itself really firmly. But what the Book of Kells is famous for is all of the illustrations, and they were done more commonly with paint or with gesso, or even things like egg whites and so on. The paint is, I don't think, as stable or as robust as the ink that was used for the words. And I think probably it was more likely to be the illustrations that were slightly damaged by the journey on the plane.
Mignon: Yeah. Yeah. What are some of your favorite tidbits from the book?
Keith: Oh, that's a big question. That's a really big question. I enjoyed learning about how parchment is made, and as I explain it, that's going to sound really grim. It paints a bad picture of me. Parchment, I imagine your listeners know, is made from animal skins, so sheep, goats, cows, and so on. Just the process by which you make a sheet of parchment is incredibly time-consuming. First, you have to grow a sheep or a goat or a cow. And ideally, you want to slaughter it before it's about a year old, because if you wait any longer, it starts to get marks on its skin. The skin gets too thick. So you slaughter a cow, you take the skin off it, you've got to then soak it in a whole pile of noxious baths with lime and so on until the hair starts to get loose. Then you scrape it off with a knife, then you wash it again until it's clean, and string it up on this kind of frame. You've got to scrape it very carefully until it's even, and then you leave it for quite a long time until it all dries. And that's a sheet of parchment. Finally, you can cut a very big rectangle out of this and then make sheets of parchment for books. I enjoyed learning about the process, but the thing I found quite ironic at the end of it, or not ironic, perhaps surprising, is that the reason books are rectangular is broadly because sheep, cows, and goats are rectangular.
Mignon: Oh.
Keith: When you take one of, when you take like a cow and you make a big sheet of parchment out of it, and you want to make it into something with the right angles, you get a rectangle. If you cut that in half, you get two rectangles. If you cut those in half, you get more rectangles. So the fact that books are rectangular is largely to do with maximizing the use of animal skin for parchment. It's also partly to do with the fact that humans just like books about this size; you know, human anatomy means that books all tend to be roughly the same size. Rectangular books are also rectangular because the spine allows them to be a bit stronger. You know, you don't want to have a very short spine with very long pages. The fact that cows, sheep, and goats are mostly rectangular is also one of the reasons why books are and continue to be rectangular.
Mignon: Interesting. When did we go primarily from parchment to paper?
in the West, we used parchment for quite a long time, kind of up to the past I think sort of 1100 or 1200 CE. We only really got paper because of the Spanish; because Spain was invaded by Moors from North Africa. This was a big deal in Europe at the time, and part of Spain was occupied by Moors for quite a long time. They built paper mills and they brought knowledge of papermaking from basically from the East, from China and so on. It passed all the way from the East to the West via this invasion. Finally, when Spain was reconquered, these paper mills were still there, and the knowledge of papermaking then spread out from there across the rest of Europe and, of course, into the rest of the world. Although China was already making paper quite happily, so we were somewhat behind.
Mignon: Yeah. It was so interesting to me. Just like emoji, paper was political. There was a point where the Holy Roman Emperor was so suspicious of the Moors who brought paper that he said, what did you say—that any government document written on paper was invalid? Like, wow, even paper is political. But was, as it was invented in China. And you know, I think people might be interested to know too, like, China also invented movable type. You think it was Gutenberg, but actually that also was invented in China.
Keith: That was, yeah, that was news to me—when I started researching this, I was quite—I think China is said to have four great inventions. It's gunpowder, the magnetic compass, paper, and printing. So, printing had been around for quite a long time in China. Typically, it was done by taking a large bit of wood, writing or drawing the thing you wanted to print, using a brush on some paper, turning it over, rubbing it onto the block of wood, and then carving out all of the white space, all of the negative space between the characters. Then you've got a block from which you can print from; you can ink it, press another piece of paper onto it, and get an impression from it. But there was a move to, at different times and for different reasons, different Chinese people tried to make this more efficient, and the concept of movable type was thus invented or came about in China, but it never seemed to quite work. I think there were difficulties with getting all of these individual characters level, of getting a decent impression out of it. But also, Chinese script kind of militates against this as well. There are so many different Chinese characters; you need such a big basic vocabulary that it became impractical to have enough of these, they're called sorts, individual characters. It became impractical to have enough sorts to do proper movable type printing in China.
And so, one of the advantages that Gutenberg had when he finally decided to have a go at it is that the Latin alphabet is so much shorter. You know, you've got lowercase, uppercase, a few marks of punctuation, maybe numbers, and you can print lots of things with that very restricted set of characters. So he had this sort of built-in advantage when he first took a look at it and tried to improve the technology.
Mignon: Right. It's maybe a couple, you know, it's not thousands and thousands of characters. And then, yeah, and then Gutenberg, that was one of the revolutions in printing. You said that in the 50 years after the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, there were many books printed, or produced, as in the thousand years before that.
Keith: Yeah, it's interesting. I didn't want to paint Gutenberg as being the inventor of printing; that would've been inaccurate. But I think it's hard to say that it didn't have a massive impact. Spelling, punctuation was standardized to quite a large extent just because you could print so many copies of a particular book. Whereas, you know, if you're copying every single book, every single character by hand, from one copy of a book to the next, you have mistakes creeping in. You've got personal preferences creeping in, and you've got changes in fashion creeping in. And that does happen in printing as well.
But I think, again, I think it's hard to argue that printing didn't have a really big standardizing effect. And of course, you can print so many more of them, right? So many more books than you can copy by hand. We learn more. We are better at transmitting information. I think one of the things when I started, at the very start of the book, when I started to talk about writing, was this idea that, in Egypt, the myth was that writing was handed down by the god Thoth to the king of the Egyptians at the time. And he said, well, you know, thanks, but won’t we just start forgetting things. And there is this kind of moral panic every time there's a new information technology of some kind that it will take away some essential part of our humanity. If you give us writing, won't we forget how to remember things? If you give us calculators, won't we forget how to do maths? If you give us printing, will we forget how to write things?
Every time we come up with some innovation like this, it freaks people out. Then the thing that I remind myself is that I'm allowed to have a terrible memory because writing exists. I can write something down and find it later. Of all the things, you know, I think perhaps the most important thing about books is that they are this reservoir of knowledge. I can carry a book with me, and I don't have to remember. I can read it; I can open it to the index. I can find the thing that I'm looking for. That's what's sort of magical about them and still really useful even today, I think.
Mignon: Yeah. And I mean that. And that is “The Book,” your book, “The Book.” We barely just, I mean, we've just skimmed that absolute top. This is a book with just so much information in it about the history of books and paper and printing and everything. I highly recommend it: "The Book" by Keith Houston. So, and now for books because we love books so much. I want to hear your book recommendations.
Keith: Okay. The first one is, I suspect, very boring and very obvious, but it's “Moby Dick.” If anyone who is listening to this or watching this has not read “Moby Dick,” I urge you to read it. It's a movable feast. It lasts forever for one thing, but you don't want it to end. You inhabit the world of the Pequod. You're there with Ishmael. You're ranging through time and space. It's amazing.
Mignon: I will confess, at the risk of being judged by my listeners, though I have not read “Moby Dick.” I've never read it, and I hear people talk about it. It is actually on my to-read list already. I know I need to read it. I want to read it, so now I'm going to move it up.
Keith: It was a real eye-opener for me. I don't think I can even explain why I like it so much. But I do. And there's that, in “Moby Dick,” there's one particular chapter where Melville is talking about different sizes of whales, and he uses paper sizes. So he talks about octavo whales. So octavo is a single folio, a single big piece of paper, which has been folded to give you eight sheets, and he talks about duodecimo whales, which are when you get much smaller; you get 12 sheets of a piece of paper. So you get folio whales with the big ones, and then octavo whales and quarter whales, and so on. So he uses paper sizes to talk about the size of whales. There you go. So there's a way in.
Mignon: Very cool. Okay.
Keith: The next one is a bit more obscure. It's called “Excession.” So it's E-X-C-E-S-S-I-O-N, and it's a science fiction novel by a Scottish writer called Iain Banks. He was born and grew up fairly close to where I did, and he died relatively recently, I think about 10 or 15 years ago. Too young, I think. But he's written a huge amount of stuff. He mostly wrote quite gritty mainstream fiction, but then later in his career, he started to do science fiction stuff as well. And just the joy and the verve in it. He devises this civilization called the Culture, which is basically people, perhaps relevant now, people plus AIs, which are called Minds. It's a kind of anarchic, quasi-socialist utopia. I suppose. Whether your readers find that interesting or not, I don't know, but just the writing and the feeling of joy. It's a rollicking ride. It's very much a space opera type thing. For me, it was the way into reading much more of his work.
Mignon: Oh, that sounds great. Yeah. My husband and I listen to sci-fi audiobooks a lot together, so that sounds like something we could add to our list, our joint list. Yeah.
Keith: And the last one is called “Shift Happens.” And this is cheating a little bit because I think it's already out of print. It is a massive book. It's a book written quite recently by a kind of internet friend of mine called Marcin Wichary. He works for Figma, the design company or the design website company. And it is three volumes about the history of the keyboard. So, you know, where did the QWERTY keyboard come from? How did it evolve? How did we end up with the smart, you know, the soft keyboards on our smartphones and so on? And it is, again, it's something you get lost in. He's a really fantastic writer, and it seems like such a niche subject, and it is, let's not lie, but it's just a fascinating one to read about. You get into design or you get into sort of mechanical design and graphic design, and language and human, you know, sort of human-computer interaction. I think it's great.
Mignon: Wonderful.
Keith: Buy a copy, but you should, if you can find one.
Mignon: Oh, I wonder if maybe the ebook would be available.
Keith: Oh, that's an interesting one. I know that a lot of work went into making a physical edition. It has a slipcase and everything. So, I don't know if an ebook is available. But if you can acquire one by means fair or foul, I would suggest.
Mignon: Wonderful. Keith Houston, thank you so much. In this episode, we talked about the book called “The Book.” In the main episode, we talked about “Face with Tears of Joy,” his book all about emojis. He's also written “The Empire of the Sum,” which is about calculators, and “Shady Characters,” which is about punctuation marks. So all fabulous books. Keith, where can people find you?
Keith: So my blog, shadycharacters.co.uk, is the best place. You can find me and all my books there, and also links to other places like social media and so on.
Mignon: Wonderful, and thank you again, Keith. Thank you to the Grammarpaloozians for supporting the show, and I'll see you next time.