Tuesday, Jul. 14, 2009
It May Have Been the First Real Book
Goodbye scroll, hello codex. Sinaiticus marked a significant transition in bookmaking history. Early Christians made an unusual choice to reject individual scrolls and gather all their texts into one volume, which was then bound and could be read as a whole. "The codex was one of the greatest technological innovations of its time," says biblical scholar David Parker from the University of Birmingham, one of the institutions involved in the project. "They had to work out a new technology to make one book possible." An advanced binding technique in many ways created the Christian concept of a Bible.