The earliest codices
“The earliest codices . . . apparently date from the early part of the Christian era (about the second century), and it has been speculated that the codex form might have been first adopted when the Christian Bible began to be copied on papyrus and circulated in book as opposed to roll form to distinguish it from the scrolled texts of Judaism and paganism.”
—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.
the Greek word for book
“The word [papyrus] is believed to be of Egyptian origin, as is the plant. The Greeks referred to papyrus as byblos, after Byblus, the Phoenician city that was a center of papyrus exportation. Hence we have the Greek word for book, biblion, which in turn gave us the English word “bible,” “The Book.””
—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.
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.
braided in your eyelashes
“You push the door open: you don’t expect any of them to be latched, you know thay all open at a push. The scattered lights are braided in your eyelashes, as if you were seeing them through a silken net. All you can make out are the dozens of flickering lights. At last you can see that they’re votive lights, all set on brackets or hung between unevenly spaced panels. They cast a faint glow on the silver objects, the crystal flasks, the gilt-framed mirrors. Then you see the bed in the shadows beyond, and the feeble movement of a hand that seems to be beckoning you.”
—Carlos Fuentes, Aura, 1965.
like white elephants
“The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.”
—Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants, 1927.
toward the moon
“There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. . . .
‘Go faster,’ she called, ‘fast as it’ll go.’
Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray mounted at the bow. When he looked around again the girl was standing up on the rushing board, her arms spread wide, her eyes lifted toward the moon.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams, 1922.
blank verse
—Walt Kelly, from the daily Pogo comic strip, May 12, 1951. Republished, as is the entire year, in Outrageously Pogo, 1985.