This chapter considers the physical production of writing in a pre-print world, from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia through the papyrus scrolls of antiquity to the birth of the parchment codex in the early Christian period. There follows a discussion of the speed and number of scribes in the world of the medieval parchment book.

This chapter charts the historical development of a series of technologies for transmitting handwritten literary texts. It focuses on writing surfaces such as clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper; book formats such as scrolls and codices; scribal practices such as the introduction of spaces between words; and the social organizations through which manuscript texts were produced and circulated, such as the medieval scriptorium. Mak argues that the human hand in particular “supports the production and circulation of ideas in manuscript, printed, digital, and other forms.” It is, she argues, central to all textual transmission, “whether it be slave scribes who took dictation in antiquity, stonecutters who fashioned the inkstones to the world of scholarship and art in China, or the legions of students and overseas workers who manually transcribe and encode literary, medical, and other texts in service of their digital use.”

An overview of the documentary typologies to be found in the archive, with notes, updated bibliography, and comparisons with similar documents from other corners of the Roman Empire.

This chapter examines how Faulkner uses the trope of parchment skin in his 1932 novel Light in August to describe his racially ambiguous protagonist Joe Christmas who becomes marked as Black through a range of media forms including magazines, Bibles, blackboards, and a Kodak print. While Faulkner can be patronizing in his depictions of writing by African American characters, the use of African drumming in his story “Red Leaves” (1930) to communicate over long distances in an earlier form of writing-at-a-distance that we find in telegraphy exemplifies powerful kinds of communication by Black characters. The chapter shows how Faulkner reworks the issue of race and writing materials in Intruder in the Dust (1948), refiguring the white pencil of the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse in his fictional town of Jefferson into the white pencil of a flashlight beam that portends racial change. The chapter concludes with a discussion of writing by American Indian characters that range from lampoons to meditations on genre where Native literacy undercuts romantic stereotypes.

Chapter 2 discusses the scribes’ handling of damage and irregularity in parchment in manuscripts of English literature. It sets out how damage and irregularity arose and describes the methods scribes used to repair or counteract those features of parchment. From these methods, the author infers that scribes ignored and even obscured the organic oddity and damage in parchment, instead hylomorphically pursuing an idea of the page more perfect and more rectilinear than was the matter on which they imposed it, and in some cases worried about disruptions to the text’s appearance and reception. Rather than engage with the agency of their materials, they imposed on them immaterial ideas about the book and the use of its texts.