The codex

“By the early centuries of the Christian era, bookshelves had to accommodate, in addition to scrolls, a growing number of bound manuscripts, or codices, which in time whould displace scrolls as the preferred format for books. The codex, named for the fact that it was covered with wood (codex means “tree trunk” in Latin), and which led to the term “code” in a legal context, was made by folding over flat sheets of papyrus or parchment and sewing them together into a binding.”

—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.

[S]crolling

“In ancient times, books did not exist as we know them today. Roman writings were turned into rolls or scrolls, mostly of papyrus, which were termed volumina. It is from the Latin singular voluminum that our English word “volume” comes. . . .

[S]crolling on the computer screens takes its name from the way scrolls worked, and no matter the manner in which it was read, when a scroll was finished it would have to be rewound to be read again, very much as with a modern videotape after it is viewed.”

—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.

foolish and lovely

“She swept back her white hair, pressing it against her head with hands that were pale, nearly translucent. Beneath the shiny skin of her hands the veins were tessellated like a blue mosaic, shining like an intricate blue design captured beneath glass. Now she did something that she had done many times before. She pulled the skin of her face taut over the cheekbones so that the web of lines and wrinkles vanished as if it had been touched by a miraculous and restorative wand; squinting convergently into the glass, she watched the foolish and lovely change: transfigured, she saw smooth skin as glossy white as the petal of gardenia, lips which seemed but sixteen or twenty, and as unblemished by any trouble as those she had held up to another mirror thirty years before, whispering “Dearest” to an invisible and quite imaginary lover.”

—William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness, 1951.

juke-box color

“A rainbow of juke-box color enveloped the restaurant, a lovely spectrum endlessly shifting; a man with a deep, sad voice sang: ‘Take me back and try me one more time.’ Such a hillbilly song, yet it filled her with gentle, genuine, sorrow.”

—William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness, 1951.