§393. Books.--Almost all the materials used by the ancients to receive writing were known to the Romans and used by them for one purpose or another, at one time or another. For the publication of works of literature, however, during the period when the great classics were produced, the only material was paper (_papyrus_), the only form the roll (_volūmen_). The book of modern form (_cōdex_), written on parchment (_membrānum_), played an important part in the preservation of the literature of Rome, but did not come into use for the purpose of publication until long after the canon of the classics had been completed and the great masters had passed away. The Romans adopted the papyrus roll from the Greeks; the Greeks had received it from the Egyptians. When the Egyptians first made use of it we do not know, but we have preserved to us Egyptian rolls that were written at least twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era. The oldest Roman books of this sort that have been preserved were found in Herculaneum, badly charred and broken. Those that have been deciphered contain no Latin author of any value. A specimen of the writing on one of these, a mere fragment by an unknown author, is shown in Fig. 188. At the time it was buried there were still to be seen rolls in the handwriting of the Gracchi, and autographs of Cicero, Vergil, and Horace must have been common enough. All these have since perished so far as we know. §394. Manufacture of Paper.--The papyrus reed had a jointed stem, triangular in shape, and reached a maximum height of perhaps fourteen feet with a thickness of four or five inches. The stem contained a pith of which the paper was made by a process substantially as follows: The stem was cut through at the joints, the hard rind removed, and the pith cut into thin sections or strips as evenly as possible. The first cut seems to have been made from one of the angles to the middle of the opposite side, and the others parallel with it to the right and left. The strips were then assorted according to width, and enough of them were arranged side by side as closely as possible upon a board to make their combined width almost equal to the length of the single strip. Across these was laid another layer at right angles, with perhaps a coating of glue or paste between them. The mat-like sheet that resulted was then soaked in water and pressed or hammered into a substance not unlike our paper, called by the Romans _charta_. After the sheets (_schēdae_) had been dried and bleached in the sun, they were rid by scraping of rough places and trimmed into uniform sizes, depending upon the length of the strips of pith. The fewer the strips that composed each sheet, or in other words the greater the width of each strip, the closer the texture of the _charta_ and the better its quality. It was possible, therefore, to grade the paper by its size, and the width of the sheet rather than its height was taken as the standard.