The Swerve

The first sheet, on which the contents of the roll could be noted, was called in Greek the protokollon, literally, “first glued”—the origin of our word “protocol.”

word “volume” comes from volumen, the Latin word for a thing that is rolled or wound up.

Poggio, the former apostolic secretary of a disgraced and deposed pope, had few cards to play.

If he was asking for a pagan book, he began, after making the general sign, to scratch behind his ear, like a dog scratching his fleas.

These strange, layered manuscripts—called palimpsests; from the Greek for “scraped again”—have served as the source of several major works from the ancient past that would not otherwise be known.

unique fourth-century copy of Cicero’s On the Republic remained visible beneath a seventh-century copy of St. Augustine’s meditation on the Psalms

Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. What had begun as an active campaign to forget—a pious attack on pagan ideas—had evolved into actual forgetting.

repairing the spot with a mixture of milk, cheese, and lime, the medieval version of our own product for whiting out mistakes.

in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress:

Christians had almost completely opted for a different format, the codex, from which our familiar books derive. The codex has the huge advantage of being far easier for readers to find their way about in: the text can be conveniently paginated and indexed, and the pages can be turned quickly to the desired place.