farfel_n02_150_123

Treasures of the Library of Congress A 708.153 G65 (Santa Clara)
The scrolls were hand copied from each other (as the medieval
vellum manuscripts had been). The day of teh scroll ran
from tabout the year 428 AD to 1000AD. About the year 1000
the scroll began to yeild to folded panels in much the way the
Vellum rolls became the codex in the West. In the West the
folded scroll became the codex, the folded page became a single
sheet with writing on front + back, + the sheets became a book
sewn at the spine. In the East because the brush written
characters were so folded with black ink that they immediately
soaked through to the back of the pages, the fold had to be
retained. Thus the Chinese book continued as a single series
of folded pages right up to modern times. Every "page" in a
traditional Oriental volume is written on one side with either
nothing or smudges on the other.
Chinese printing is the story of block printing. In
Europe printing is moveable Type. In Europe it was
simpler to (?bup?) 26 letters + make up words as they were
needed. But this would not work for Chiese because of
the nature of the written words, it required at least one or
2 characters for every word + were as early as 1300 the
printer had to stock over 30,000 different characters to cope
with even a basic vocabulary. The result of all these
complexities, was that for centuries byond the time the Europeans
were setting type, the Chinese + the Japanese were still cutting
single page wood blocks - but the revese was that for
centuries before the Europeans began to print books at all,
printed bookds were common througout the Orient.
-Whereas the introduction of printing in the West expedited
the reduction in the number of characters used by the scribe,
in the East printing (by woodblock) allowed for a continnation
of the vast number of characters still in use Today.

Bunyiu Narjio - Catalogue of Chinese Translations of the Tripitaka
Oxford 1883 Ref Z7059 N18. *