What is a book?

     Briefly, a book is a container for text.  Before mass production and commodification of printed books, especially in the Early Modern Perioid (ca. 1550-1700), "books" might be filled with many kinds of texts that their users thought were convenient to have packed together in one binding.  Printed books were sold and packaged based on standard practices readers knew from medieval manuscript book production.  Indeed, the word, "book," derives from Old English "boec," which comes from the same root as "baece," the word for "beech," the species of tree whose wood was most often used to make the front and back "boards" with which to bind Medieval and Early Modern parchment manuscript books.  No matter how thin parchment was made, it still behaved like animal skin, and tended to curl when exposed to water vapor, so books had to be kept tightly bound so that their "text block" would stay square and the leaves flat for easy reading.

"Boards," the "walls" of a medieval book:
     The analogy between books and wooden boxes can help explain their construction.  Books' wooden boards kept the parchment leaves flat within and kept out moisture and enemies like mold, insects, and mice.  (Perversely, the beech boards of the Walters Art Museum's "Assisi" or "St. Francis Missal," W.75, actually seem to have attracted insects who burrowed through the front and back covers, damaging the front and back leaves.)  A medieval manuscript's boards were joined together at their spines with heavy leather straps, and metal clasps or leather straps to hold their contents securely and tightly.  Armenian and Arabic-language books often were bound with fore-edge flaps to further protect their contents, and top and bottom clasps to further defend the text block.  Front and back boards often were protected from bumping or abrasion by metal "bosses" and "corner guards," like those on medieval knights' shields and breast-plates.  Early manuscript (hand-written) books were built to last as long or longer than houses in which they might be stored.  And like houses, they might contain many "rooms" or kinds of texts.  When manuscripts were expensive to produce and therefore very rare, it would have seemed wasteful and foolish to bind each one separately unless the owners were extremely wealthy or the texts were so huge (e.g., Bibles of 280+ leaves) that they could not accomodate any other texts.  Even so, margins and any spare leaves at the back of the binding routinely were used to store later manuscripts, contracts, land leases, owners' signatures, and the occasional secular work of literature.

Incunabula and Early Modern books:
     In the "Incunable Period" (L. "Cradle," infancy) of the first half-century of hand-press moveable-type printing (1455-1501) and later, these practices continued.  Although most printed editions were intentionally made as separate "works," many bound books contained multiple editions, most with their own title pages.  Some clearly were made by the original owners' request, as they selected from the printers' stock an "anthology" of works on one topic or by a single author and ordered their bookbinders to package them in a specific order, and in a binding they could afford.  These "Sammelbande" (German "bound-together") often deceived later librarians and book-sellers who grew used to commodity-produced single-edition books in the 1700s-1800s and believed their books contained only what was indicated on the first title page they encountered.

Later Uses of "Book" as a Smaller Container within a Larger "Book":
     Readers of Early Modern Literature still encounter the ambiguous concept of "book" when they read John Milton's Paradise Lost, which was first issued from the press in 1667 in a "ten-book" single poem, and reissued in 1674 as a "twelve-book" poem, each "book" 'roughly corresponding to a modern novel's "chapter."  The word "chapter," itself, comes "capitula" or "capital," derived from early printers' attempt to guide readers through long works set in type from manuscripts whose subsections were indicated by large, multi-line initial capital letters, often set out in blue, red, or even gold ink.

       Click here for a description of the most common types of medieval books.