Page 104 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

manuscript copies, citations had to refer to chapters or other clearly defined parts of texts. The earliest codices were usually not paginated.
For example, probably the most famous early codex, the Codex Sinaiticus (circa 350 CE) had no pagination but incorporated two ancient systems for numbering the quires rather than its leaves or pages. Inevitably there may have been exceptions to non-pagination, or non-standardization of pagina- tion in manuscript codices, but they would have been rare. In The Footnote: A Curious History (1997), Anthony Grafton referred to an example of what might have been an extremely early use of uniform pagination in the late fifth century CE. The case in point concerned the Collatio legum Romanarum et Mosaicarum, a fourth-century legal treatise which argued that the laws of Mo- ses were compatible with those of Rome. Three primary manuscripts of this text survive, of which the Berlin codex, dated by various scholars from the eighth to the tenth century, is considered the earliest and most authoritative. From the standpoint of book history this text is significant for its precise references to Roman laws, and the way in which these could be precisely cited. Grafton writes on p. 30: “Fragmentary preserved notes on a legal lec- ture from the late fifth century C.E. reveal that professors referred students to their sources [in the Collatio] not only by book and chapter divisions, but also by the page number, in what were evidently uniform copies.” Standard- ization of pagination within a printed edition resulted in more accurate and usable indices with references to folio or page of a printed volume or set, as well as more accurate citations when information in the printed edition was cited by other scholars.
Besides greater portability and cost and space-saving, digital books have the advantage of being searchable almost instantly by keyword or phrase. This advantage may be so useful, especially for printed books that contain unsatisfactory indexes or no index at all, that I sometimes find myself search- ing the electronic edition when I have the physical book in front of me. Though these engineered advantages of eBooks and eBook readers might seem to be their selling points, another advantage they are turned out to have was privacy, at least for some readers. According to an article published
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