JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Just a quick note about this fine and explicative image: it is a lithograph in color from Gustavus Ragn Schlyter's Monumenta Antiquitatis, printed by Junkopings Lithografica in 1876. It is rather large (19"x14") and the work (on Greek and Roman antiquitiies) it is found in is scarce, as only four copies (two in Denmark, and one each in Sweden and Texas) are found in the librarians' standard cataloguing tool, WorldCat--and the book turns up almost not at all in google and other appropriate searches...its absence is a little curious.
In any event I found the bits and pieces of recording information to be interesting, so I went ahead and identified them for anyone who is curious about the segments of "book" production from 2000 years ago.
Identifying the elements of the lithograph:
- Liber—literally, “book”, in this case being a Roman scroll written on papyrus.
- Cerae—(from the word for “wax”), was similar to the Greek tryptich, a kind of primer that was composed of three hard surfaces, the interiors of which were covered in wax so that they could be reused many times.
- Stilus—“stylus”, was used to incise figures in the wax Cerae, while the opposite (and flat) and was used to basically erase and smooth the wax.
- Arundo—a filament of a hollow-core plant, used as a quill would be used.
- Scalprum—a small cutting instrument
- Graphium—another form of stylus.
- Atramentarium—an inkwell (the inks being made of a mixture of carbon soot, resin, wine dregs, and cutdefish ink).
- Volumina—a collection of scrolls or texts, “volumes”.
- Capsa—a holder for volumina, the attendants of which were called “capsanii”.
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