Manuscripts in Special Collections

In Asia, silk was a common medium before the invention of paper in China, which occurred during the Eastern Han period (25–220 AD). To try making your own paper, check out this tutorial.

Chinese manuscripts were bound in a variety of ways, detailed below.

Pothi or palm leaf books

Before using the codex format, Chinese bookbinding used a series of wood or bamboo leaves connected together. The text was read right to left. This early binding is similar to the Indian pothi that were later imported as Buddhism spread (4th century). Dried palm leaves are cut, incised with writing, bound by a string passing through the leaves, and sandwiched between two boards. 

There are a few examples of Chinese pothi from the 9th century, but for the most part this structure did not suit because early paper was made to imitate silk rather than a stiff palm leaf.

Whirlwind binding

The whirlwind binding was developed during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Colin Chinnery, a former contributor to the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, cites the popularity of rhyming dictionaries and poetry as one reason why books were no longer bound as scrolls; it is hard to consult multiple parts of a text when you have to continually roll and unroll a scroll. By the Song dynasty (960-1279), other forms of bookbinding evolved to replace this format.

Concertina or accordion books

Similar to pothi, accordion bookbinding was introduced via Buddhism. Combining the pothi and scroll structures, the accordion format was used for binding sutras. The accordion format is one step closer to a codex in that there are separate pages and it can be more easily transported.

Butterfly binding

This was the first structure to break away from the scroll format and the dominant bookbinding style of the Song dynasty (960-1279). A butterfly bound book is made by folding a sheet of paper in half and gluing the folded edges together to form the spine of a book. These individual leaves work well for printing books and for producing a variety of texts; the butterfly binding is not historically connected to a certain genre.

Stitched or stab bindings

Stitched bindings or stab bindings became the predominant binding structure during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and the structure remains popular today. It is believed that people first started stitching their books to repair earlier butterfly bindings.