16th Century Book Can Be Read Six Different Ways

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/16th-century-book-bound-dos-a-dos

by Hooke • 11 years ago

57 17 11 years ago

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ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

That is pretty cool, now I just need Meade or someone to make a six subject notebook like this :-)

AstroJetson• 11 years ago

I'm in for two! Actually it would be good to see an instructable on how to make one.

morqon• 11 years ago

This was basically built for Hopscotch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Julio_Cortázar_nove...

vijayr• 11 years ago

Reminds me of the ancient Indian poet whose poems gave one meaning left to right and totally different meaning right to left

shared4you• 11 years ago

Indeed, Venkatadhvari's 17th century Sanskrit work Raghava Yadaveeyam narrates the story of Ramayana (left-to-right) and Mahabharata (right-to-left) simultaneously.

http://www.sanskritebooks.org/2009/09/raghava-yadaviyam-with...

nsns• 11 years ago

It's a whole genre actually.*

*http://cup.columbia.edu/book/extreme-poetry/9780231151603

arjn• 11 years ago

Pretty Amazing.

shas3• 11 years ago

They were a whole genre of poems called "adhama kavyas." Literally, in Sanskrit, it means 'inferior poems'. Here's a nice (though a little flowery) exposition on these: https://www.dropbox.com/s/swivmkyr138wd01/14339015-The-wonde...

They were deemed inferior because they were low on traditional poetic quality- meaning, prosody, and language, and high on a sort of acrobatics.

There are fascinating poems, including palindromes, meaningful poems written by repeating the same letter, nested structures, etc.

tzs• 11 years ago

So if I'm understanding this correctly, it is a way to cleverly package 6 books as one unit so that there are six different ways to open the package, each way giving you access to a different one of the six books.

Is there any advantage in this method for the reader over the usual method of simply printing all 6 books in one normal volume, with something between each adjacent pair so you can quickly open it to the book you are interested in? Or is this just one of those "do it because it is cool" things?

ryanmcbride• 11 years ago

Hard to say what the intent of the people that made this was, but even if it's not terribly useful, it's pretty clever. Maybe they would use it to bind 6 volumes of a series together?

gcb02• 11 years ago

i think the only advantage is that binding books back then was expensive as hell... so maybe this crazy 6-way binding could have cost 2x or 3x and it would still be cheaper then paying the normal 6x.

not to mention you save the weight of extra 10 front and back covers.

now, why they didn't simply make the 6 volumes in the same book and put some tabs protruding from the pages, i will never know. there is a russian book binder faux anecdote there...

wahsd2• 11 years ago

I'm rather confident in saying that this was more of a novelty to show off book binding mastery and was probably some gift to a noble.

wahsd2• 11 years ago

What I find most fascinating about things like that is that when you look at the pictures of the book you see an old, shriveled up, bent, corroded, bland, demure type of book; but I am sure that when this book was new it was an object of perfection.

It's kind of like how when we look at old pictures of "olden times" there is a certain perception or assumption about things and way of life because you are looking at images that are black and white and washed out and people have that corpse look to them simply due to the nature of the technology. Reality was quite different though, in reality that world that we think of as being black and white and populated with corpse looking people was more or less just as colorful as the world you and I live in.

I don't even know if it would be possible with this artifact, but I am sure you could assemble some master book binders and maybe some metallurgists or blacksmiths in order to painstakingly reconstruct the book using the same techniques and materials, yet without the possible exponentially more experienced skill level of the original master artisan.

The old masters or centuries ago, the men and women that created things by hand and skill that had been passed down for generations and which have largely been lost with industrialization have my utter most respect and reverence.

16th Century Book Can Be Read Six Different Ways

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