How to fold a goat

So. My original plan was a logical one. Next week, I’m going to be doing a live webinar with JW members, in which I’m going to edit members’ work live on screen, talking about my thought process as I do so. The hope is that we all learn something about the working process, and the thinking process, behind that self-editing task.

OK. That seems like a nice sensible idea for a webinar. And my equally sensible idea for this email was that I’d talk about about that self-editing task (one I love) as a way of geeing you up for the webinar.

And –

Well, we’ve got to Friday, and I don’t feel like talking about self-editing. I want to talk about goats. So goats it is.

(And, by the way, before you commit any more of your ONE AND ONLY LIFE ON EARTH to reading this stuff, I should tell you, hand on heart, that you will learn absolutely nothing of practical value here. Despite the subject line of this post, I am not even going to tell you how to fold a goat.)

Right-ho.

Now, for a long time, up to the birth of Christ and for the next century or so afterwards, the ancient world had plenty of written texts, but the longer, more complex ones were all written on scrolls. The scrolls were mostly papyrus, a paper-like sheet made from the pith of the eponymous plant.

Scrolls were great. Writing was easy. Reading was fine. The things were easily stored and transported. You didn’t have to carve stone or store wax tablets.

But, they were also a pain. The damn things didn’t lie flat. There was no easy way to navigate within the text. Storage was wasteful, because of all that empty space in the middle.

By about the first century AD, a new technology arrived: the codex, where the written sheets were laid flat, one on top of the other, and sewn along one side. Every page lay flat. Navigation was easy. Storage was a doddle. (Except, oddly to us, the spine of the codex was generally stored in, facing the wall, a fact that presumably enraged all professional authors of the age.)

The codex was such an improvement that, in the Western world at least, the scroll was pretty much dead within a mere four centuries – a pace of adoption which counts as shockingly fast by ancient-tech standards.

At the same time, papyrus too went out of fashion. It didn’t fold well and cracked easily. So, over the first few centuries of the Christian era, the papyrus scroll was replaced by the parchment codex.

And ‘parchment’ might sound like a term that denotes any kind of old manuscript, but it doesn’t. A parchment is made from a sheepskin, stretched out, scraped down, cleaned and dried. It was then rubbed down with pumice stone for a perfectly smooth finish. Then given a light dusting of powdered chalk.

The very first parchments were as clumsy and thick as you might imagine them to be. By the later middle ages, parchment achieved a kind of tissue-like thinness. And if you didn’t have a sheep, then you could use a goat, or a calf, or a lamb, or a kid. If you split the skin into two layers (as you did with sheep), you called the resultant product a parchment. If you didn’t split the skin into layers (as often with goats), the result was a vellum. 

But what next?

Let’s say you have a pile of goatskin vellum and you want to assemble it into your witty chick lit masterpiece, you have a range of choices.

You could simply take cut the largest rectangles you can out of your goatskin, pile em up, sew one edge, and bingo – you would have an extremely giant and goaty book.

But all the convenience of the codex would be largely lost. How would you manouevre such a thing? Except for impressing people, or display purposes, you wouldn’t really want something of such bulk.

So the goatskins were folded and sewn, and any remaining folded edges cut, so you could read them.

An once-folded goat made a giant book – a folio.

A twice-folded goat made a handsome, but smaller book – a quarto.

A thrice-folded goat made an octavo.

You could go on folding your goat, if you were patient enough, to form a duodecimo or a sextodecimo.

Because goats varied in size (and ditto sheep, kids, lambs and calves), these terms didn’t really denote a specific size. A goat-kid quarto might not look so different from a calf-skin octavo.

But still. As paper came to push aside parchments, printers still used the same terminology to describe their products, which were still made by the same process of folding, sewing and cutting.

The standard US definition of a medium octavo book gives you a book of six-and-a-half by nine-and-a-quarter inches, or about 17 cm by 23 cm. The most common format, the mass market paperback, is the duodecimo, or about 13 cm by 19 cm. The standard “B-format” paperback in the UK is roughly the same size.

And, one day in California, a man named Jobs decided it would be fun to make an electronic device that could store and display writing and images. But what size to make it? There was no particular boundary on what could have been made. A square screen? A very long one? A very giant one? Or what?

Well, the natural device to think about was the codex, a technology honed over two millennia and beautifully shaped for the human hand.

The 10.5” iPad has a screen size of about 13 cm by a handsome 23 cm – which is, near enough, the modern duodecimo format.

And that, my friends, is what I wanted to tell you today. Fold a goat – get an iPad.

I just thought you needed to know.