As has already been said the papyrus manuscripts were ordinarily written in columns at right angles to the length of the roll. These columns were from two inches to three and a half inches in width. They were ordinarily written on one side of the roll only. As the older writing materials were always scarce and expensive, the backs of the rolls were sometimes utilized, but very rarely for the continuation of the matter written on the other side. If writing appears on the back of a roll, except in the rare cases where the handwriting is identical with that on the face, the subject matter is of an entirely different character from the original and may safely be regarded as much younger. The title was ordinarily placed at the end of the book although sometimes it appeared at the beginning or in both places. The title was sometimes written on the outside of the roll but more often was written on a tag which was attached to the end of the roll or to the stick upon which the papyrus was rolled. Very wide margins were left at each end of the roll. The ends of the roll were trimmed, rubbed smooth and sometimes colored. The rolls were sometimes wrapped in cloth and sometimes put in cylindrical cases. Whether or not this was done, the rolls were usually kept in cupboards piled on shelves; hence the usefulness of the tag bearing the title.

When the vellum book took the place of the papyrus roll consideration was at once given to the peculiarities of the material. The hair side and the flesh side of the skin are different in color and texture. Care was taken to arrange the sheets in quires in such way that the two pages which were under the eye together should be made on the same side of the skin. The outside page of a Latin codex was ordinarily the skin side. By reversing the fold of the inner sheets of the quire, pages two and three would be the flesh side, four and five the hair side and so on. When paper began to come into use it was at first strengthened by having a covering sheet of vellum for each quire, very much as we use a sheet of cover paper on the outside of a pamphlet. A sheet of vellum was also sometimes inserted in the middle of the quire so that the paper would be stitched between the two vellum sheets.

Originally the narrow columns of the papyrus roll were transferred to the vellum page but gradually the lines were lengthened until the page had one column or at most two. For example, the Sinaitic codex of the Bible which dates from the 4th century has four columns to the page. The Vatican codex also dated from the 4th century has three. The Alexandrian codex which dates from the very late 4th or the early 5th has two, while the codex of Beza which dates from the 6th century has but one column to the page.

In order to prevent mistakes in the putting together of the quires a quire mark was put on each quire, sometimes on the first sheet and sometimes on the last sheet. In the 11th century catch-words were used to show the connection of the quires.

The scribes took great pains with their manuscripts and ruled them carefully before writing. The lines were pricked off carefully by the use of compasses and ruled with a stylus which made a mark or crease on the vellum. This was ordinarily applied with force enough to make a raised line on the back of the page and sometimes with force enough to show through two or three pages. Later these rulings were colored with inks of brilliant hues and formed part of the decoration of the manuscript. It has been claimed that a certain manuscript, probably dating from the 13th century, shows signs of having been ruled with a lead pencil. This is very doubtful, however. The first distinct mention of lead pencils which we have is about 1565. These pencils were made of wood and strips of natural graphite.

The older literary manuscripts were written entirely in capital letters without any spacing between the words. The cursive or running hand with the letters smaller and more or less connected appears in manuscripts of later date. In the older manuscripts marks were introduced to show the ends of sentences and occasionally dots were inserted to mark the separation of words where otherwise the meaning would be ambiguous. These marks, however, are not related to our modern punctuation.

The tendency to separate words appears first in non-literary documents, such as legal documents or matters of record. As the tendency to separate words developed at first only the long words were separated and for a long time short words were connected with those before them as is still done in Italian. It was not until the 11th century that the custom of spacing all words became general and then only in Latin manuscripts. The correct separation of words in Greek manuscripts was never established until the manuscripts themselves were superseded by printing in the 15th century.

The paragraph appears as early as the 4th century B.C. It was generally indicated, however, by a horizontal mark rather than by spacing. The indenting of the paragraph came later and was followed by the use of the larger letter, first employed to indicate the beginning of the sentences. The development of the sentence itself as a device in composition was somewhat similar to that of the paragraph.

It is difficult to tell where the use of punctuation begins. Some very early manuscripts show the rudiments of it. The first punctuation mark was the stop at the end of the period. This was originally two dots, or our colon. When this became one dot it was at first the lower one that was omitted so that the second form of the period is a dot level with the top of the letter. The period, colon, and comma were each represented by a single dot, the value depending upon whether it was on a level with the top, the middle, or the bottom of the letter. During the middle ages a system of punctuation was developed approximately as we now have it.

Unfortunately words had the same tendency to refuse to fit the line that bothers the modern compositor. The scribe, not being limited by the resources of a font of type, did not hesitate to crowd his letters or reduce them in size in order to get a word into a line. He also made use of various devices of abbreviating words and combining letters to produce the same result. These devices, however, were not very satisfactory and division of words was always more or less practiced. The Greeks usually divided after a vowel with no regard to syllables. They even divided monosyllables in this way. The Romans, however, always practiced syllabic division very much as we do to-day.

Another form of division of the text was what is called calometry, that is to say, the breaking up of the text into short clauses or sense lines to facilitate oral reading. This is done particularly in cases of orations, the Bible, and similar compositions largely used for oral reading. As in the papyrus, the title was ordinarily inserted at the end and accompanied by some account of the work, place of copying, copyist, date, or other information. This sort of appendix was called a colophon. The practice of writing colophons was taken over by the early printers and is the source of much of our most valuable information concerning the early products of the press. Occasionally the title of the work was given at the beginning although the custom of beginning the work with the statement of its title, developing into the title page as we know it, did not become general until some time after the invention of printing. Occasionally a manuscript was even furnished with running titles on the page heads. The pages were not numbered until after the invention of printing.

After the earliest times quotations were indicated by ticks on the margin or by indented paragraphs. Sometimes the substance of the quotation was written in a smaller hand or otherwise distinguished from the body of the text. Scribes were by no means infallible and corrections are not uncommon. Erasures on papyrus were difficult, if not impossible, and therefore other means of correction had to be used. This is particularly the case because writing material was too expensive to be wasted and a copyist’s mistake could not be permitted to spoil a roll of a papyrus or a sheet of vellum. In the case of vellum, however, if the mistake were immediately discovered the ink could be washed off with a sponge. If, however, the mistake were discovered only on revision after the ink had bitten into the vellum, it was necessary to use the knife and to restore the surface as well as possible by rubbing it with some smooth hard substance like the rubber shown in the illustration on page 13. Superfluous letters or words were sometimes removed by drawing a pen through them and sometimes removal was indicated by dots, or small marks, which might be over the letters, under them, or even in the open spaces of the letters themselves. Attempts were occasionally made to make one letter over into another to correct a mistake. Omitted passages or notes are inserted in the margin with some indication of the place where they should be read in the text. Abbreviations and contractions were very extensively used, partly to avoid labor and partly to save material. Phrases of frequent occurrence and perfectly well-known meaning were indicated simply by initials like the familiar S. P. Q. R., Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Roman Senate and People, or the s. s. a. b. s. m. used by Spaniards to close letters, meaning “your faithful servant who kisses your hands.”

Letters commonly occurring together were elided and abbreviated, as was done to a limited extent as late as the 18th century, at which period we see such abbreviations as yt=that. It may be interesting to note that y in this combination and the similar combination “ye,” used as the article, is not the semi-vowel y but is the survival, or revival, of an Anglo-Saxon letter of very similar form called “thorn” and equivalent in value to th. In the “yt” then, we have the y or thorn substituted for th and the vowel elided, but the sign should be pronounced “that.” The sign “ye” as in the familiar phrase of the posters “ye olde folkes’ concerte,” should always be pronounced “the” and never like the pronoun ye.

Another result of the expensiveness of writing material was the practice of erasing whole works in order that the vellum might be used over again. This erasing was done with a knife or pumice stone and when resurfaced by rubbing the vellum could be readily used a second time. A manuscript thus treated is called a palimpsest. The pious monks of the middle ages, naturally believing that the lives of the saints and other religious works were of more importance than the works of Pagan orators, philosophers, and historians, or even than old copies of the Bible which had been superseded by newer and better decorated ones, made extensive use of old manuscripts in this way. Fortunately, however, it is possible by careful treatment to restore the original writing at least sufficiently to make it possible to decipher it. In this way a considerable number of extremely valuable texts which would otherwise have been entirely lost have been recovered from palimpsests.

The reference just made to decoration reminds us that the makers of manuscripts, particularly during the middle ages, took enormous pride in their work and were as anxious to produce sumptuous books as the most ambitious publisher of to-day and were often far more successful. The scribe who was to make a fine manuscript chose his vellum with great care. He laid out his work with compass and ruler with the utmost precision. He was careful that his ink and his pigments should be of the most brilliant color and the finest quality. He looked well to the care of his pen and inscribed each letter with the patient care of the most skillful engrosser of to-day.

The development of the sentence and paragraph had brought the use of letters of larger sizes to mark these divisions. These, especially the paragraph initials, afforded an endless field for his ingenuity and the exercise of his artistic ability. A great initial letter might be made in any fanciful shape of which he could think. It might become a part of a beautifully executed miniature. It might be surrounded by a mass of gorgeous ornamentation extending to the bottom or the other margin of the page and enriched by everything beautiful or grotesque of which the writer could think. All this ornamentation was often executed in gold and colors and was one of the chief methods of artistic expression of the middle ages.In addition to these decorations the ancient books dating from late Roman times onward were often illustrated, sometimes profusely so. Full page pictures were inserted illustrating the text or giving the portraits of persons referred to in it. The oldest of these pictures are in a bad state of preservation on account of the crude methods of the artists. The background was first painted in a solid color. A figure, for instance, would then be put on in another color, clothing would be painted over that, armor over clothing and so on. The picture being thus built up in layers of different paints it was very liable to flake off, leaving only the background. Illustrations dating from the introduction of a better technique are still very beautiful.

No language could adequately describe the beauty and the richness of these decorations, or illuminations as they are termed. They look out to us to-day from the yellowing vellum with all the brilliancy of color and vigor of conception which they originally possessed. They are not only beautiful in themselves but they are a valuable source of information concerning the life of the middle ages. In those days the painters of pictures made no attempt at archÆological accuracy. If they were illuminating a Bible they represented Abraham and Moses, Pharaoh and Solomon, Jesus and Paul and Goliath in the costume of the king, priest, citizen, or soldier of the painter’s own day. Their method of treatment of their subjects, the subjects chosen, the use of materials in ornamentation, every detail of these decorations is eloquent of the life and thought of the ages in which they were produced.