Of course, I had learned better before this class, but it was still interesting to think and talk about the disadvantages of scrolls that I never thought about as a kid. However, in this class, I've already gotten used to looking at the advantages and disadvantages of all types of record-keeping. It wasn't until the scrolls that I again looked at the materials we handled with a kid-like wonder.
The modern scroll we looked at, the artist's "book" (still not sure if we call it a book or not), was legitimately beautiful. For some reason I loved how tightly it was rolled and the color of the paper. Obviously as an artist the writer knows quite a bit about aesthetics. It made me wonder if the ancient scrolls once looked like that. They didn't have anything like the machines we have today for producing things like that, and I can't remember if that book was hand-made or not, but I like to think that some of their literature looked very similar. I think it's cool to imagine kings' decrees written in calligraphy on beautiful, long scrolls that wound up tightly and hopefully had two spool-things for convenience. Even the boxing match illustration, though much older, was pretty. Maybe, in the future, if paper books aren't even used except in private collections, they'll look at our books in the same way.
I really thought the artist's scroll was amazing, too. I really like to doodle, and seeing something like that, so ornate and so intricate, made me astonished - I bet that drawing and coloring that project took a very long time! It's interesting to see the drawing styles from different generations; sometimes I forget that people liked to draw cartoons in older generations too. We generally think of cartoons as a modern drawing style, but clearly they go back a ways.
ReplyDeleteScrolls are really neat, but I agree that they're impractical. Where would you store them? Although not always quite as interesting-looking as scrolls, I think the format of modern books was definitely the way to go.
This caused me to think about how scrolls are printed on with different orientations- horizontally or vertically. I am more used to picture scrolls being opened vertically like when a royal decree is being read. I am curious as to the pros and cons of each alignment.
ReplyDeleteA unique benefit of scrolls is they can be hung up or displayed. You can't very easily hang a book open on a wall. People do use books as decorations, just in a different way like creatively stacked on shelves or displayed in cases.
I think the big difference between modern day books and scrolls back when they were commonly used is the amount of information written on them. While I understand there are exceptions to every notion, it was my understanding that scrolls were mostly used for bookkeeping (so to speak, and no pun intended) and number handling, where as today we have hundreds of pages in one book for fictional characters. While a scroll for literature would be incredibly inconvenient, using a scroll for often-access data wouldn't be too bad. It would take a long time to fill up a scroll if you just wrote how much revenue, cost and profit you made each day.
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