The age in which literature was disseminated and preserved extended from the time of the earliest intellectual compositions designed for communication—as the papyri hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt and the leather and parchment rolls of the early Persian and Jewish peoples; and included also those compositions which had a limited circulating character, like the tablets and cylinders of ancient Assyria—down to the time when the printing-press was invented. This, inclusively, is the period of the manuscript literature. Throughout this entire period of the world's ongoing, for many hundreds or some thousands of years, each and every kind of production, whether in hieroglyph, cuneiform, or alphabetic characters, was made by itself—the producer inscribing, painting, or printing (letter by letter or character by character) through hundreds and thousands of pages. "To the time of the invention of printing, and until the printed book had driven it out of the field, the manuscript was the vehicle for the conservation and dissemination of literature and discharges the function of a printed book."

A book has been defined as "any record of thought in words." This may be a correct definition as far as it relates to literature but not as it relates to the "record of thought." There is a "record of thought" independent of words and, perhaps, long antedating the record in words of any language. A word has been defined as "the sign of an idea." But were there not "ideas" long before they were communicated by words? If there are "songs without words" may there not be, or, at least may there not have been, "ideas without words"? An affirmative answer is admirably illustrated—and the illustration is confirmatory—by a group of six great mural paintings by Mr. John W. Alexander, in the Library of Congress at Washington. These pictures illustrate historically the probable genesis and evolution of the "book." The first painting is of the rude Cairn or heap of stones piled up on the seashore or elsewhere by prehistoric man in order to commemorate some event or achievement, and thus to stand as a "record" or landmark of a fact or truth. The second picture is illustrative of Oral Tradition, and represents the "narration" of facts or doings by the word of mouth. The third is called the Pictograph which consists in delineations of events or experiences as drawn by some implement upon the surface of skins, or on the leaves or bark of trees or plants, and by means of which there was created a kind of permanent "record" of past "happenings" or doings. The fourth is the Hieroglyphics—which brings us to the historic period—in which there were carved on the face of cliffs, on the walls of structures of any kind, or on wood, the pictured and, may be, progressive delineations of events or ideas. The fifth is the Manuscripts or the record contained in written language and which was phonetic, syllabic, or alphabetic,—the end toward which all earlier stages of "record" tended. The sixth and last picture is the Printing Press, the embodiment and consummation of all the earlier phases and stages in the "records of the past." It is the obvious lesson from these great paintings that a "record of thought" by means of "words" was not fully achieved until the manuscript entered upon its world-wide and enduring career, or, in which "words" became the embodiment and depository of permanent and communicable "ideas." The words of Mr. E.C. Richardson are quoted as bearing upon the period of manuscript literature: "Some of the pictures on the cave walls of the neolithic age seem to have the essential characteristics of books and certainly the earliest clay tablets and inscriptions do. These seem to carry back with certainty to at least 4,200 B.C. By a thousand years later, tablet books and inscriptions were common and papyrus books seem to have been well begun. Another thousand years, or some time before Hammurabi, books of many sorts were numerous. At the time of Abraham, books were common all over Egypt, Babylonia, Palestine, and the eastern Mediterranean as far at least as Crete and Asia Minor. In the time of Moses, whenever that may have been, the alphabet had perhaps been invented, books were common among all priestly and official classes, not only in Babylonia, Asyria, and Egypt, but at least in two or three scores of places in Palestine, north of Syria and Cyprus."4

The earliest literature of the ancient Greeks was first preserved in oral traditions, folk-lore, and legendary minstrelsy, and not in written language. It is possible, nay, probable, that in Greece, Egypt, China, Japan, and Persia also, folk-lore and folk-tales were perpetuated through memory by means of recitations, as in the instances of the rhapsodists—the class of professional reciters who publicly declaimed the Homeric literature and the folk-lore of the ages with more or less artistic inflection or intonation of the voice. The proclamations of rulers, the compositions of poets and historians, and the oracles of religion were anciently published orally, often, by heralds, minstrels, and prophets. The great Hebrew Lawgiver embodied a wide-spread principle and practice in his final injunction to the Hebrew nation: "Now therefore write ye this song for you and teach it to the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel." (Deut. 31:19.) Aside from narrower applications of this practice, the great achievements and deliverences of the Israelitish people were celebrated and perpetually memorialized in song and psalm. On the shores of the Red Sea, Moses and his people sang their song of deliverance from the hand of their enemy. And when, at a later age, the Ark of the Covenant was borne to its resting place within the Sacred City, it was amidst the antiphonal chanting of the psalm which David, himself, had composed for the occasion. The psalms in themselves—as one of the purposes of their composition—were a partial witness to the place and prominence of song and chant in teaching religious truth and thus in keeping faith alive on the earth. Plato states that the first laws of all nations were composed in verse and sung. There is a remembrancer in Plato's statement concerning the first laws of nations of our own primitive pedagogical methods within certain departments of learning. And so, by tradition, recitative, minstrelsy, and psalmody—of wide application in the early ages—both a wider currency and a more tenacious hold was taken by these laws, proclamations, and truths upon the popular mind. Especially so as the popular mind was deficient in the art of reading, even when literature had been embodied in writing. And this was true in both sacred and profane history. Thus, minstrelsy, chant, and tradition have performed an important function in the beginnings of many ancient peoples. And, strange as it may seem to us, Plato, notwithstanding his voluminous writings and his place in the literary world for nearly three thousand years, put a low estimate on the importance of written as compared with oral teaching.

The Greek classics—the matchless monuments of ancient literature—as represented in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns were preserved, perpetuated, and disseminated for generations if not for centuries, not by written records—as later literature has been handed down by the written or printed page—but through ballads, minstrelsy, and recitation. "The Æolic emigrants who settled in the north-west of Asia-Minor brought with them the warlike legends of their chiefs—the ArchÆan princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads of the Æolic minstrels, and from them passed southward into Ionia, where the Ionian poets gradually shaped them into higher artistic form."5 "Mahaffy and Jevons are in accord," says Mr. Putnam, "in pointing out that the effort of memory required for the composition and transmission of long poems without the aid of writing, while implying a power never manifested among people possessing printed books, is not in itself at all incredible. Memory was equal to the task, and the earlier Greeks poems, memorized by the authors as composed, were preserved by successive generations of bards." And again he says, "It is to be borne in mind that the (to us) extraordinary extent to which the Greeks were able to develop their power of memorizing enabled them often to trust their memory where modern students would be helpless without the written (or printed) word.... The boys in school were given as their daily task the memorizing of the works of the poets, and what was begun under compulsion appears to have been continued in later life as a pleasure."6 And in the preface of the book from which the foregoing statements are quoted, the author says, "It is evident that there were literary productions in advance, and probably very far in advance, of the discovery or evolution of literary characters, and also long after the use of script by authors, the greater portion of the public in all ancient lands received their literature, not through their eyes, but through their ears,—not by reading the text, but by listening to reciters, story-tellers, and 'rhapsodists.'" (P. xiv.) We quote the following from Mr. E.C. Richardson: "The Vedas were, it is alleged, handed down for centuries by a rigidly trained body of memorizers. The memorizing of Confucian books by Chinese students and of the Koran by Moslem students is very exact."7 "The office of reading," says Professor DobschÜtz, "was esteemed so highly that it was regarded as based on a special spiritual gift.... The reader had to know his text almost entirely by heart to do it well. From the 'Shepherd of Hermes,' a very interesting book written by a Roman layman about 140 A.D., we learn that some people gathered often, probably daily, for the special purpose of common reading and learning. But even granted that the memory of these men was not spoiled by too much reading, as is ours, so that by hearing they were able to learn by heart (it is said of some rabbis that they did not lose one word of all their master had told them, and, in fact, the Talmudic literature was transmitted orally for centuries), nevertheless, we must assume that these Christians had their private copies of the Bible at home."8 Prescott says of the pre-historic Mexico: "Besides the hieroglyphic maps, the traditions of the country were embodied in songs and hymns.... These were various, embracing the mystic legends of a heroic age, the warlike achievements of their own, or the softer tales of love and pleasure."9 Of the early times of English literature, D'Israeli states that "before the people had national books they had national songs," and that "these songs and these fables, these proverbs and these tales,—all these were a library without books."10 And an anonymous author, recently traveling in a remote portion of northern Albania, records it that "the wild, inaccessible country is under various independent tribes, ruled by a chieftain according to unwritten laws handed down orally from remote ages." He also states that "the country has no written language and no literature."11 Thus, from very early if not from pre-historic times, down to the present moment there have been repeated if not continuous examples, and widespread on the earth if not universal, of the place and importance of oral tradition as a datum of history and source of literature. Says Professor Sayce: "ArchÆological research is constantly demonstrating how dangerous it is to question or deny the veracity of tradition or of an ancient record until we know all the facts."12 This much must be conceded, in holding that oral tradition is secondary to written records. The reason for their secondary value is obvious from the fact that "ear impressions tend to be less exact than eye impressions because they depend on a brief sense impression, while in reading the eye lingers until the matter is understood. Memory copy tends to fade away rapidly. This is shown by the great variety in the related legends of closely related tribes."13

But from very early times—just how early cannot be determined, inasmuch as historiographers and chronologists differ as to the beginning-times of written literature in the respective civilizations—literary compositions of every sort, both sacred and profane, were recorded and disseminated, so far as they were recorded and disseminated, by the tedious and laborious process of writing or carving or impressing by hand. Literature, almost entirely, throughout this long period was contained in and continued by the manuscripts. The cuneiform writing on tablets and cylinders, though so voluminous in quantity, seems to have been lost sight of and disregarded for millenniums of years while they were a sealed literature; and the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt remained undeciphered for, perhaps, an equal period of time, down to the close of the eighteenth century.

It is the obvious fact, then, that, in an age of the world's history when the printing-press with its almost limitless capacity for extending and preserving literature was yet unknown, all literary productions of all kinds—including the Bible—must have been meager in the extreme as compared with the present rapid increase of the printed page when steam and heat and electricity are motive powers. A present-generation occurrence will fitly and forcefully illustrate this proposition: It will be recalled to mind that the Revised New Testament was issued simultaneously by the Oxford Press in both London and New York on a designated day of 1881; it may not be remembered, however, that an enterprising Chicago daily had the entire New Testament telegraphed from New York, immediately at its issue in that City, in order that it might be secured and printed in Chicago in an enormous edition a few hours in advance of the mails and express, put into circulation and sold to the financial advantage of that newspaper. Compare that achievement of printing hundreds of thousands of the New Testament, accomplished within a few hours' time, with the transcription of a single copy of a book, and you must have a new sense of the importance of the printing-press in relation to all literature. And contrast, if you will, the slow and inadequate composition and dissemination of intelligence by the laborious process of handwriting with the present-day marvelous facilities for publication when the linotype is mostly employed in setting the type-plates for periodicals and books, and when a single press will print and fold about thirty thousand copies of a metropolitan journal in one hour's time, and, from both comparison and contrast, you must have a higher appreciation for the printing-press as an instrumentality for the spreading of intelligence and the progress of civilization.

Consider, too, the all but prohibitive cost of books, when made by hand and estimated by the labor of their making, and you must have a new and a truer basis of valuation for manuscript literature. A few facts and incidents will illustrate and enforce the foregoing observation: It required nearly three years in the time of Wycliffe (who died in 1384) for a copyist to transcribe the entire Bible, and this labor cost the equivalent of $1,500. Even tracts of Wycliffe, containing isolated texts of scripture, were sold for forty or fifty dollars as the money of that day would be estimated in our currency. (Christ in the Gospels.) It is credibly stated that, in the century before Wycliffe's time, "an ordinary folio volume probably cost 400 to 500 franks," or the sum of eighty to a hundred dollars in present values. Very few books could be bought at all, at some periods of time, for less than the equivalent of one hundred dollars; and illuminated or illustrated and embellished books, of which there then were and there yet remain exquisite examples, cost much more than this amount. And yet books never seem to have been a "drug" upon the market. And while it required four years for Gutenberg to print his first edition of the Bible (consisting of a hundred copies) yet the time employed in its making, if compared with the time and labor requisite for the transcription of a hundred copies of the Bible by hand, would represent a net gain or saving, in time, of nearly seventy-five years and, in money, of more than a hundred thousand dollars. It would represent other values: as uniformity of text, economy of material, and larger aggregate immunity from error. It is stated that the common price of a Bible in the thirteenth century ran as high as $300, and that in the fourteenth century Bibles were sold for as much as $2,000. It is said that Bibles were left as precious bequests to relatives and friends and that they were even given as security for large debts.

The cost of materials and of the transcription of books added immensely to their appraised valuation in the different ages. We quote from a volume by Mr. Geo. H. Putnam concerning books and their making in pre-Christian times: "It appears from such references as we find to the prices paid that, as compared with other luxuries, books remained very costly up to the time of the Roman occupation of Greece, or about 150 B.C. ... Plato is reported to have paid for three books of PhilolaÜs, which Dion bought for him in Sicily, three Attic talents, equal in our currency to $3,240,—and the equivalent, of course, of a much larger sum, estimated in its purchasing power for food.... The cost of books depended, of course, largely upon the cost of papyrus, for which Greece was dependent upon Egypt. An inscription of the year 407 B.C., quoted by RangabÉ, gives the price of a sheet of papyrus at one drachma and two oboli, the equivalent of about twenty-five cents."14 Ptolemy Philadelphus is said to have authorized the giving of fifteen talents of silver, the equivalent of about $16,200, in addition to a shipment of corn, to the famishing Athenians for certain authenticated copies of the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the Alexandrian Library. (Putnam.) And, later, in the early part of the Christian Era, the price of copying books was estimated by the number of lines they contained. Diocletian, it is said, fixed the wage of the copyers of his time at forty denarii or at about twenty-five cents per one hundred lines. Late in the thirteenth century, the price of transcribing a Bible containing a commentary thereon, written in a fair hand, ranged from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars, though earlier in that century the purchasing power of money was so great and labor so cheap that two arches of London Bridge were built for the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five dollars, or less than the cost of transcribing a Bible with a commentary. In 1272 the wages of a laboring-man were less than four cents a day, while the price of a Bible at that time was about one hundred and eighty dollars. (The Book Record.) In other words, a common laborer must then have toiled for thirteen years, according to the current labor values of the time, in order to secure the purchase-price of a Bible; though in an age when few could read, this was not so large a deprivation. Now, the American Bible Society can furnish the entire Christian scriptures, creditably bound in cloth with fair and readable type, for less than twenty-five cents. A common laborer, who generally has a rudimentary education at least, can now secure the Bible at the purchase-price of two hours' toil, or the New Testament for less than a half-hour's toil; and, what is more, the common laborer can, in most instances, not only read the Bible but has the respite from excessive labor to do so.