Book Binding Quotes

“The technology of the codex did not reach the point of being able to hold anything close to an entire canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures until the fourth century. Nor was there any such thing as a closed canon of those Scriptures until that time. The closing of the canon and the binding of it into a single big book seems to have gone hand in hand. ... The main point I want to make here is that neither Jesus nor his followers nor Paul nor any of the authors of any of the texts now in the New Testament, let alone any Christians who lived during the first three hundred years of Christianity, could possibly have imagined the Bible, a single book containing a closed canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It was both physically and socially impossible. Not only were there just too many different varieties of Christianity with too many different important writings with too many variants in too many different languages; there was simply no medium to bear anything close to that large of a library. It took the twin emergences of a top-down imperial Christianity and a big enough book to make the Bible possible.”
― Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book

“Your stitching is what will hold the story together.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder