TYPI FIXI (printing).—The term formerly given to the letters used in block books.-REES' Cyclopædia, Art. PRINTING.

TYPI MOBILES (printing).—The name formerly given to movable types to distinguish them from those in block books. -REES' Cyclopædia, Art. PRINTING.

UNCUT BOOKS.-See BOOKS UNCUT.

UNCUT EDGES (binding). — French, non coupé; German, unaufgeschnitten, contracted to unaufg. Books that are not cut open with the paper-knife.-French, non rogne; German, nicht beschnitten. Edges not ploughed by the binder.

VELLUM (binding).—Principally used by stationers for account books.

VELVET (binding).—Principally used in binding for Bibles and Prayer-Books, costly manuscript books, albums, etc.

VERSO (bibliography).—French, verso; German, kehrseite, rückseite. The page of a book on the reverse or left hand side, in contradiction to the recto. Always the even number in the pagination.

WASTE (printing).

German, maculatur, maculatur-bogen. The overplus sheets of a work after all the copies have been made up by the gatherer, and from which the binder is supplied with any imperfections.-Hannett.

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WATER LINES (paper). The transparent perpendicular marks on paper, called in French, pontusaux; in German, vassermarke. Crossed at right angles by the wire marks, French, vergeures.-NAMUR's Manual, page 212. German, formstreifer.

WATER-MARKS (paper).-French, filigrane; German, vasserzeichen. Ornamental figures in wire (or thin brass) sewn upon the wires of the mould, and, like those wires, they leave an impression by rendering the paper, where it lies on them, thinner and more translucent.-TOMLINSON'S Cyclopædia, Art. PAPER. For further remarks on paper water-marks, see Sotheby's Princip. Typ., Vol. 1.

WRAPPER (binding).—French, couverture; German, umschlag. The paper cover of a book or pamphlet; more used in Continent Europe for thick books than in this country; its only advantage is, that it enables the purchaser to have the work bound to his own taste.

XYLOGRAPHIC BOOKS (bibliography).—Greek, xulon, wood, grapho, to write; French, xylographie; German, zylographische drucke. Block book, q. v.

Many terms, not mentioned in this part, will be found in Miscellaneous, under the following heads, viz.: Bindings and Sizes of Books; Booksellers' Contractions; Sizes and Names of Paper, in French and German, etc., etc.

PART VII. MISCELLANEOUS.

BOOKS AND BOOKBINDING.

The following article on Books and Bookbinding is taken from the introduction to one of the last official Abridgments of Specifications published by order of the Commissioners of Patents.* As it embodies briefly most of the information on the subject which is of interest, without entering too minutely into details, we offer no apology for reproducing it in full:

"Book and bookbinding, in the modern acceptation of the words, were unknown to the ancients. In Coptic, the equivalent for book is djon or djoome (original meaning, volume); in Chinese, shoo (made up of two characters, one of which stands for pencil, the other for speak); in Sanscrit, grantha (binding or fastening); in Arabic, kitáb (from a root which signifies write); in Hebrew, sepher (write); in Greek, byblos or byblion, afterwards biblos or biblion; biblos is the Coptic word for the inner rind of the papyrus; and in Latin, liber, the name given to the inner bark or rind of a tree. Our word book' is, according to Mr. Wedgwood, the Anglo-Saxon boc, from the Gothic boka (letter, writing); others connect the word with another meaning of boc (beech); "because the Teutonic race wrote on beechen boards.""

The commandments delivered to Moses were carved on stone, and the obelisks, tombs, and other monuments of stone brought from Egypt are covered with sculptures. A softer material would soon be required, and clay was early used for the purpose of writing on; of this the Babylonian tiles and the Assyrian tablets and cylinders (of which there are some thousands in the British Museum) are a proof. The clay, after being stamped o written on, was sun-dried or hardened by fire. The material o which Moses wrote his books of the law cannot be ascertained, but as the roll is the form still adopted in Jewish synagogues, a opinon may be hazarded that he wrote on skins.

* Abridgments of Specifications relating to Books, Portfolios, Card Cases, etc., A.D. 1768-1866. Printed by Order of the Commissioners of Patents. London. 1870. 8vo, pp. xvii, 198.

The papyrus of the Egyptians, however, became so generally used that it may be termed the ancient paper, and it held its place against parchment and vellum until the seventh century of the Christian era, when it was superseded by them (Penny Cyclopædia). Livy, in several places, mentions libri lintei (book of linen), an ancient chronicle of the Roman people preserved in the temple of Juno Moneta; and Pliny states that, before the introduction of papyrus, private records were kept on linen or wax.

Pieces of papyrus were joined together side by side, so as to form one broad sheet; the writing was executed on one side only, in columns four or five fingers broad, with a blank space of about a finger's breadth between; when the writing was finished, the papyrus was rolled round a stick, and from this rolling a completed work was called a volume or roll. A painted boss or ball was fastened to each end of the stick, and usually projected above and below. The ends of the roll were carefully cut, polished with pumice-stone, and colored black (Ovid's Trist.) The back of the papyrus was stained with oil of cedar, to preserve it from decay; the title was written on a small strip in a light red color, and attached to the outer end of the roll, or on a kind of ticket, and suspended from the roll; a portrait of the author was prefixed to the first column; the roll was protected by an outer case stained with a purple or a yellow color; and the whole was placed vertically in a cylindrical box (generally made of beech-wood, Pliny, xvi), or horizontally on a shelf. It is not to be supposed that every roll was finished off in such style; the foregoing is the description of a complete first-class roll or book, as may be verified by notices in Pliny, Ovid, Seneca, and Martial. Sometimes there was a stick at each end of the roll, so that the whole formed, as it were, a double roll.

The nature of the paste or cement for joining the pieces of papyrus is not known. Pliny tells us that it was the turbid water of the Nile which had a glutinous quality! The Jews must have been very expert in preparing the skins of their rolls, and in joining them together, as we read in the twelfth book of Josephus that, when they presented to Ptolemy Philadelphus (who died B.C. 247) a roll of their laws written in golden letters, the king stood wondering for a long time at the thinness of the skins and the invisibility of the joinings. They were far ahead of the Athenians, who, as late as A.D. 407, erected a statue to Phillatius for teaching them the "art of gluing."

In the time of Augustus, books, still in the form of rolls, were abundant and surprisingly low-priced. Horace informs us, in his

epistle ad librum suuam," that the Sosii were his publishers; he seems to complain of his works getting into the hands of the common people and becoming school-books. In his Ars Poetica, he writes of a poet "rich in lands, rich in money laid out at interest;" a proof that authorship was sometimes a lucrative profession. Martial tells us that he is read throughout the whole globe, and in all nations under the rule of the Romans; that he is in everybody's pocket or hand. In one epigram he informs us that a copy of his thirteenth book (fourteen pages of modern print, 8vo) may be bought for four nummi (about 8d.), and that if the bookseller Tryphon were to sell it for half that sum he would still get a profit. In another epigram he writes that a copy of his first book (twenty-nine pages of modern print, 8vo), polished with pumice-stone and encased in purple, may be bought at Atrectus' for five denarii (about 3s. 63d.) "Slave labor," says Mr. Humphreys, in his Art of Printing, "was the printing press of the Romans, and a very effective one, too." The transcribers were slaves, cheaply fed and hard worked, and one reader dictated to many transcribers. Both Horace and Martial hint that the publishers of their day produced at times larger editions than could be sold; the remainders, as modern publishers call them, were often doomed "to feed bookworms,' or "to wrap up pastry and spices." As a proof of the number of copies of some works, Pliny (Ep. IV, 7) writes that a certain Regulus, who wrote a biography of himself and his son, had a thousand copies of it dispersed throughout Italy and the provinces. Nero, too, ensured the diffusion of a large edition of his verses by commanding that they should be given to school-boys as examples.

When the change from the roll to the modern-shaped book took place is very uncertain. Some writers assign the change to Eumenes 11, King of Pergamus, in whose reign (B.C. 197-159) parchment was invented, or more probably improved, as Herodotus mentions writing on skins as common in his time, and Ctesias and Diodorus describe the ancient Persian records as written on leather. Other writers affirm that the Latin word liber means roll, and the word codex (literally the trunk or stem of a tree) a square book.. The only authority for the former assertion is, that both sides of the skin were so cleaned that either siae could be written on; and a careful comparison of the passages in which the word codex occurs shows that it was applied to the wooden memorandum tablets which were jointed together and lined with a coat of wax. There is not a doubt that when, at a later age, parchment or paper was substituted for