In a series of earlier posts, I examined some of the vocabulary used to describe papyrus rolls, especially those deluxe literary rolls described by Latin poets. One additional feature of these rolls that is sometimes mentioned is a parchment cover. For example,
Tibullus [Lygdamus], Elegiae 3.1.9:
lutea sed niveum involvat membrana libellum
“But let yellow parchment wrap the snowy white roll”
What seems to be envisioned here is a protokollon (the first sheet in the roll) made of parchment that would serve as a cover by wrapping (involvere) the closed roll. I am not aware of surviving examples of this phenomenon for literary texts (I’m happy to be corrected in the comments if anyone knows of examples). But there appears to be a very nicely preserved example of this in the form of an official document of the prefect of Egypt, Subatianus Aquila copied in 209 CE, P.Berol.inv. 11532:
This document is quite short (it is fully preserved), which would explain the relatively small size of the parchment cover; the rolled up document would not produce a very thick cylinder. A longer literary roll would presumably have a correspondingly larger parchment cover.
The writing on the papyrus is inscribed along the horizontal fibers, but at the point at which the parchment is joined to the papyrus, a large proportion of the vertical fibers appear to be missing. It appears that they were missing when the parchment was originally attached to the papyrus (it would be hard to explain their loss otherwise, since the horizontal fibers would presumably have “protected” the vertical fibers beneath them). This seems curious to me:
This papyrus was published in 1910, and it is actually quite famous because of its striking handwriting–a neat upright chancery hand, sometimes called (with this papyrus as the paradigmatic example) the script of Subatianus Aquila. The papyrus is therefore reproduced with some frequency in handbooks, but the parchment strip is usually (or always?) cropped out. So, this interesting feature can go unnoticed.
It’s always nice to see an uncropped image (or better yet, the object itself!).
One of the most interesting manuscripts to come to light in recent years is the Faddan More Psalter, a parchment codex in a leather cover that contained the Psalms in Latin. It was discovered by a worker harvesting peat for fuel from a bog in central Ireland in 2006. The acidic environment of bogs, famous for preserving human bodies, also preserved parts of this codex in a remarkable way. I first crossed paths with this book several years ago during a visit to the archaeological branch of the National Museum of Ireland. I was just able to see it again this past weekend. It is a truly remarkable survival.
The codex did not look so great when it was first brought to the museum for conservation:
The Faddan More Psalter before conservation; image source: Anthony Read, The Faddan More Psalter: Discovery, Conservation, and Investigation (National Museum of Ireland, 2011), p. 25.
The leaves of the book are heavily damaged, and given the state of the codex when it was found, it’s incredible to see what the conservators were able to recover. Some footage of the conservation process can be seen in this video. A fuller discussion is available in a very nicely illustrated book (from which much of my discussion is drawn): Anthony Read, The Faddan More Psalter: Discovery, Conservation, and Investigation (National Museum of Ireland, 2011).
The book probably dates to the late eighth century (on the basis of combined palaeographic and radiocarbon evidence). It consisted of 30 bifolia arranged in five quires (presumably five three-sheet quires, although I have not found this information specified anywhere). The pages are relatively large (26 cm wide and 30 cm high). Only about 15% of the overall surface area of the leaves survive, but the structural elements can be reconstructed with some confidence. A segment of binding thread survives, as well as the leather cover inside which the parchment leaves were found. Subsequent excavation of the bog at the find site suggests that the book was deposited in the bog not long after it was produced.
There are some fascinating quirks of preservation. Metallic inks can damage or destroy the parchment over time. But under the conditions of the bog, the ink of the Faddan More Psalter sometimes preserved the parchment, such that only the isolated letters survive while the surrounding uninscribed parchment has disintegrated. This is the case in some of the lettering of the decorative opening line of Psalm 51, Quid g[loriatur]:
Surviving portion of the opening line of Psalm 51 in the Faddan More Psalter; image source: Anthony Read, The Faddan More Psalter: Discovery, Conservation, and Investigation (National Museum of Ireland, 2011), p. 67.
For a sense of how the book looked in its prime, the museum provides a very nice reconstruction of the book, opened to the beginning of Psalm 51.
Reconstruction of the Faddan More Psalter in the National Museum of Ireland; image source: Brent Nongbri, 2021
The leather cover of the codex survived in relatively intact (after some diligent conservation work). It is a fairly simple construction–a rectangular length of leather (58 cm long and 33 cm high) folded around the codex and latched with three buttons. The cover is now on display wrapped around a filler block:
Leather cover of the Faddan More Psalter in the National Museum of Ireland; image source: Brent Nongbri, 2021
There are several puzzles connected to this cover. According to the experts who have examined the codex, the cover does not properly fit the surviving parchment leaves, in terms of both the dimensions of the leaves and the thickness of the quires. The cover would have first leaves with a width of about 22.5 cm and a height of about 33 cm. It also appears that the cover simply acted as a folder to protect the leaves, as the quires seem not to have been attached to it.
The exterior of the cover is incised all over with various decorative patterns executed with varying levels of skill.
A good deal of black pigment was found on the exterior of the cover. When analyzed, the pigment was found to be lamp black, but it also contained traces of gold leaf. The presence of gold leaf is a mystery, as gold leaf seems to not to have been used in Ireland in this period.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the cover was the discovery that it was lined with papyrus. These last two facts (the presence of gold leaf in the pigment on the cover and the presence of papyrus lining) have led researchers to conclude that the cover is an import. But, as the researchers also point out, the three-button cover is a type that appears to be illustrated in contemporary Irish manuscript illuminations:
Illumination from the Macdurnan Gospels (Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1370, f.115v); image source: Lambeth Palace Library
So, the cover raises a number of questions: Was it produced in Ireland, or was it imported from elsewhere? If it was imported from elsewhere, is that also the case for other similar covers, such as those depicted in the contemporary illuminations?
A cursory search did not turn up too much academic bibliography on the Faddan More Psalter. If anyone has suggested reading, please add it to the comments.
An anonymous commenter links to the resource below, which appears to show some developments in the civil case against Professor Obbink. I have not accessed the documents in the linked here, as they are behind a paywall:
So, my writing about topics related to codicology will mostly take place on the project website. In the last couple days, I’ve posted there about the publication of an important new work (or perhaps I should say an important old work that is now finally available) on early bookbinding, Theodore Petersen’s Coptic Bookbindings.
Another post deals the question of “When is a Codex Not a Codex?” I take a look at an example of what we might call “ambiguous cases,” when a manuscript is classified as a codex even when there are characteristics of the manuscript that seem to resist that classification. Being aware of these ambiguities is important when we talk about numbers of surviving codices, especially in the very earliest period of the development of the technology of the codex.
For those interested in early codices, I encourage you to follow the EthiCodex blog or subscribe via the WordPress or email options at the bottom of those posts.
I’m excited to say that my colleague Liv Ingeborg Lied and I recently signed a contract with Yale University Press to co-author a book tentatively titled Working with Manuscripts: A Guide.
The goal of the book is to demystify manuscript studies by providing a step-by-step guide to the ethical and practical challenges associated with the study of premodern manuscripts.
Both of us benefitted from what might be described as a philological education. We learned languages, and we were trained in the traditional rules of exegeting ancient texts. Along the way, however, we both became increasingly interested in the physical manuscripts that carried these texts.
As our research carried us more deeply into the arena of manuscript studies–in my case mostly Greek manuscripts and in Liv Ingeborg’s case mostly Syriac manuscripts–we gained an awareness that studying actual manuscripts really did offer great rewards, but it also posed numerous unexpected challenges–from ethical questions about manuscript provenance to practical questions about accessing manuscripts and learning the unspoken rules of manuscript reading rooms. While our training prepared us to handle some of these obstacles, in many cases we had to learn new skills and seek out expert guidance.
It would have been ideal if there had been a “one-stop” book that could have helped us navigate these mazes, and this is the book we are writing. Working with Manuscripts will cover the whole research process, from considerations of provenance, ethics, and access to the practicalities of on-site research, analysis, and publication. We want to encourage students and scholars to work with manuscripts and at the same time help them to be aware of the necessary skills, customary processes, legal guidelines, and ethical issues that the study of manuscripts entails.
We hope Working with Manuscripts will be a useful resource and would be happy to have input about what issues readers might want to see raised in the book.
It is well known that a few of the best preserved Dead Sea Scrolls spent some time in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. The Syrian Archbishop Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel brought four scrolls to the US in 1949: the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), the Rule of the Community (1QS), the Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab), and the Genesis Apocryphon (1QgenApoc). Mar Samuel took the scrolls on a publicity tour and then famously placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal (1 June 1954) in order to sell the scrolls. And he did sell them (unwittingly) to the state of Israel, through Yigael Yadin, who saw to their return to Jerusalem.
It is less widely known that Mar Samuel retained a few fragments of scrolls for himself. He is said to have acquired these small pieces on a different occasion, perhaps around July or August of 1948, (allegedly) through the illicit excavations of George Isha’ya. Most of the fragments were mashed together in a clump and stored in a cigarette box. The clump was disassembled and the fragments photographed by John Trever at Yale University in February of 1949. When Mar Samuel died, these fragments passed into the care of the Syrian Orthodox Church in New Jersey. In 2009, these fragments were photographed by the West Semitic Research Project. In connection with my work on the scrolls usually associated with Qumran Cave 1, I wanted to check on the status of these fragments to make sure they were still in New Jersey (since it was in 2009 and 2010 that sales of “Dead-Sea-Scroll-like-fragments” really began to intensify, when Hobby Lobby and other institutions were buying them up). Unfortunately, I was never able to get a response from officials at the church despite several attempts at communication.
But I recently came across a decade-old article in The Jewish Standard, “From Qumran to Teaneck,” that discusses these fragments and even provides a nice picture of one of them:
This is one part of a group of fragments known as 1Q34bis, a fragmentary scroll containing what is usually called a liturgical prayer. If we place this image next to one of the images taken by John Trever when he first separated this fragment from the clump, it appears that a piece bearing the letters שמח in the upper left corner has been lost (or is no longer framed together with these fragments):
A portion of 1Q34bis in 1949 and circa 2010; image sources: upper image adapted from John C. Trever, “Completion of the Publication of Some Fragments from Qumran Cave I,” Revue de Qumrân 5 (1965), plate IV; lower image: The Jewish Standard
This kind of deterioration is always a possibility with manuscripts copied on ancient animal hides, especially those that have at some point been exposed to moisture.
This particular part of 1Q34bis is one of the more intriguing pieces among Mar Samuel’s fragments. It actually seems to join to one of the fragments excavated by de Vaux and his team from Cave 1, 1Q34:
1Q34 and a portion of 1Q34bis; image adapted from John C. Trever, “Completion of the Publication of Some Fragments from Qumran Cave I,” Revue de Qumrân 5 (1965), plate IV
This fact has been taken as evidence that the whole clump, and indeed all of Mar Samuel’s loose fragments, must have come from Cave 1. Trever, who had the advantage of examining the clump before separation, had no doubt that the fragments had been in such a clump since antiquity, and he even offered a surprisingly detailed story of how they came to be in just such an arrangement:
“With the Roman antipathy toward the Jews and the latter’s devotion to sacred writings, it is not difficult to imagine some Roman soldier ripping apart some scrolls found in the Community Center during the attack (or perhaps snatching some scrolls from a member of the community as he sought to flee with them to a place of safety). Once torn apart, these pieces appear to have been cast down and deliberately trampled upon. Seeing such desecration, some member of the community may have gathered up the trampled fragments and succeeded in carrying them to the cave for a hasty deposit.”
Such an origin is, of course, possible, but the theory is not without problems. For instance, one of the fragments of the book of Daniel extracted from the clump, 1QDana (=1Q71) seemed to Trever to be copied in a script that suggested a rather late date, “perhaps as late as A.D. 60,” which is considerably later than the dates assigned to most other material from Cave 1. The most recent editors of this fragment have gone further, concluding that “the late palaeographical features of 1QDana would be more readily understood if this scroll belonged to a post-70 deposit” (Torleif Elgvin and Årstein Justnes in Gleanings from the Caves, p. 250). Another way of describing this situation would be to say that, in terms of its estimated age, 1Q71 doesn’t really fit the profile of the items that archaeologists excavated from Cave 1. I wonder how confident we can be that all the parts of this clump had been together since antiquity. Might some of the fragments have simply been crushed together due to rough handling in 1948? How sure are we that the contents of Mar Samuel’s cigarette box represent the results of a single trip to a single location? I am reminded of the way Trever introduced his edition of these fragments. His parenthetical question really seems quite important.
“Not long after July 18, 1948, the beginning of the second truce in the Arab-Jewish conflict of 1948, Cave I was again visited by George Isha’ya who picked up some (or all?) of these fragments and delivered them to the Syrian Metropolitan of St. Mark’s Monastery.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls of New Jersey still present some puzzles.
A visit to the Vatican Museums almost always yields something new. You can never know which rooms will be open, so occasionally there is the pleasant surprise of getting to see material that is usually hidden away. There are also times that your eye catches something that is always on display but that, for whatever reason, you have missed before. In this instance, it was a couple items in the Museo Gregoriano Egizio. In a cabinet of miscellaneous near eastern artifacts, and facing away from the intense “flow” of directed traffic in the museum, are two small animal hide fragments inscribed with Hebrew text and framed upside down.
“Dead Sea Scroll” fragments on display in the Vatican Museum, inv. 57241 and 57242; image: Brent Nongbri 2021
They carry the label “Inscribed fragments of Qumran Scrolls.” I was surprised to see these items here, not only because I had never noticed them on several previous visits, but also because I must admit that I did not know that the Vatican had any scrolls. I was aware that the Vatican Library financially supported the excavations in the Qumran caves in the 1950s, but unlike some other institutions, the Vatican did not receive any scrolls. And in fact, as the label indicates, these two fragments (inventory numbers 57241 and 57242) are not “excavation” fragments; they come from the personal collection of Salvatore Garofalo (1911-1998), a priest and theologian who spent some time in the Levant in the 1950s and 1960s.
Salvatore Garofalo; image source: Lorenzo Nigro, Gerusalemme e la Palestina: Uno sguardo tra Bibbia e Archeologia: La Terra Santa nelle fotografie di Monsignor Salvatore Garofalo (Vatican City: Vatican Museum, 2008), p. 13.
The fragments seem to have been donated to the Vatican in the late 1990s. One of the fragments, written in a paleo-Hebrew script, was published in 2000:
Puech suggested that this paleo-Hebrew fragment may belong to 11Q22. The other fragment seems to be unpublished and, as far as I can tell, unstudied.
For provenance, little information is available, only Lacerenza’s statement that these pieces came from a private collection and that an earlier owner (presumably Garofalo) had acquired them during his time in Jerusalem:
“Ce fragment se trouve depuis quarante ans et plus dans une collection privée, à Rome, où je l’ai examiné récemment. Son existence m’est, néammoins, connue depuis longtemps, grâce à un renseignement du propriétaire précédent, qui l’avait en son temps reçu à Jérusalem, ainsi qu’un deuxième fragment, provenant également de Qumran.”
Lacerenza continues in a footnote: “II semble que les deux fragments aient été achetés séparément; malheureusement, les grottes de provenance étaient restées inconnues du proprietaire lui-meme.”
“Dead Sea Scroll” fragments at the Vatican Museum, inv. 57241 and 57242; image source: Rossana Nicolò, “Gerusalemme e la Palestina,” Fogli e Parole d’Arte (2009)
It is not clear to me how Garofalo came to be in possession of these fragments. I wonder if readers have any insights?
I’ve written before on a few occasions about the Van Kampen Collection of ancient manuscripts, a kind of predecessor of the Green Collection. In fact, it was Scott Carroll, the main architect of the Green Collection, who was also the force behind assembling this collection for the evangelical investment banker Robert Van Kampen in the 1990s.
The Van Kampen Collection was formerly based in “The Scriptorium” in Grand Haven, Michigan before it was moved to Orlando, Florida to become “The Scriptorium Center for Biblical Antiquities,” a subsection of “The Holy Land Experience” theme park. Now the news has broken that the theme park is closing down (see the article in Christianity Todayhere, which also includes an interesting financial history of the park).
The Christianity Today story does not specifically mention the Van Kampen Collection of manuscripts, but I sent some queries to the contacts at the park, and I’m told that the collection was moved from the premises and is back in the care of the Van Kampen Foundation. I am not certain exactly where the items are physically located at present.
Among the items in the collection are the leaves formerly known as Mississippi Coptic Codex II, which form part of the same book as P.Bodmer 22. Together, they were once part of a parchment codex usually assigned to the fourth or fifth century that contained Jeremiah 40-52, Lamentations, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and Baruch in Coptic (LDAB 108176). I believe the Van Kampen leaves of this codex (now rebound in a modern binding) are the second book from the left in this image from the Orlando display:
Manuscripts of the Van Kampen Collection; image source: Phoenix Rising
In discussions of the early codex, one often finds statements about the obvious technological superiority of the book with pages over the roll. Sometimes these claims will push further and say that rolls were not only relatively less easy to use than codices, but that they must have been essentially awkward and difficult to handle in general. Users must have always struggled with unwieldy rolls (“hefty and unmanageable things,” according to Pelling, “Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives”).
I can see why people make these statements (I’m sure I would have a difficult time navigating a roll myself). But I’ve never found these views very persuasive for a couple reasons. First, if all of your reading experience for your entire adult life involved reading from rolls, you would likely gain a level of dexterity in using them. But beyond that, when we think across generations, the roll format was used for centuries. The accumulated knowledge over that time would probably lead to increasingly effective ways to read and use these rolls. I imagine that by the Roman imperial period, regular readers were very comfortable and adroit users of rolls.
In a comment to my previous post, Stephen Goranson draws attention to an article that may also point in this direction:
Wood discusses two ivory panels found at Pompeii. The panels are elaborately decorated and have two pairs of holes near the lower edge and a hole in each upper corner. An image of one the panels is below:
Ivory plaque from Pompeii, Naples Archaeological Museum 109905 A; image source: Wikimedia Commons
Similar panels have been found elsewhere in Italy and around the Roman world. A drawing of an example excavated at Ostia was published in 1912:
Wood’s article discusses a possible use for these panels. She compared the panels found at Pompeii with better preserved, though less elaborately decorated, artifacts found at Nîmes and an example now kept at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that all show a similar shape and pattern of holes. In addition, these panels have survived together with some additional parts. The set in Cambridge is especially well preserved:
So, it appears that rods passed through the lower sets of holes and knobs were fitted in the upper sets of holes. According to Wood, these artifacts would be used to hold papyrus rolls in place, showing a single column of text and freeing the reader’s hands for other activities (copying the exposed text is one possible use that comes to mind). One end of the papyrus roll would be threaded under the lower rod, over the two upper rods and then under the other lower rod, and then curled until the desired text was exposed over the two upper rods, with the excess roll then curled on either side of the apparatus. It’s reminiscent of (though not identical to) the way rolls of microfilm used to be mounted in some old microfilm readers.
The fairly narrow distance between the two upper rods would reflect the characteristically narrow written columns found especially on deluxe copies of prose texts on rolls.
Wood’s article contains an image of a nice looking replica made by her colleagues, but the key feature (“hands free”) is unfortunately not illustrated by the photograph:
I would very much like to see the model in action with a papyrus roll to see how well it actually functions in keeping the roll open to a particular column without anyone holding the edges. In any event, the interpretation that Wood offers seems at least plausible to me. It’s a fascinating article, and I highly recommend it.
In an earlier post, I raised some questions about the description of papyrus rolls. This generated some very helpful discussion in the comments. I now want to look at some of the ancient terminology for rolls.
A good place to begin is with the word frons. Amongthe meanings for frons in the Oxford Latin Dictionary are four grouped under this larger heading: “applied to one or other extremity or face of a thing”:
a. the outer or inner surface (of a wall, etc.)
b. either of the flat ends (of a papyrus roll)
c. the top or bottom end (of a trench)
d. the broad side (of something rectangular)
The definition as applied to the papyrus roll was not entirely clear to me at first glance. Lewis and Short’s comparable definition (“the outer end of a bookroll or volume”) was also a little unclear to me. The examples provided in the OLD, however, help to clarify the meaning and also introduce the other terms that interest me here, cornua and umbilicus. Here are the passages, with a little extra context provided. Text and translations from the Loeb editions (with a couple small changes):
Tibullus [Lygdamus], Elegiae 3.1.9-14:
lutea sed niveum involvat membrana libellum,
pumex et canas tondeat ante comas,
summaque praetexat tenuis fastigia chartae
indicet ut nomen littera facta tuum,
atque inter geminas pingantur cornua frontes:
sic etenim comptum mittere oportet opus.
“But first let yellow parchment wrap the snow-white roll and pumice shear its hoary locks, and letters traced to show thy name border the high top of the fine papyrus, and let the horned knobs ‘mid both its fronts be painted. For in such trim guise must thy work be sent.”
Here, the frontes (translated somewhat curiously as “fronts”) might best be described as the top and bottom of the rolled-up roll. The type of deluxe roll being described here would be wrapped around a wooden rod (an umbilicus) with knobs on each end (the cornua), which are recommended to be painted in this passage. Note the wordplay here on the more typical meanings of these words, the cornua (horns) sit atop the frons (forehead).
There are not many unambiguous ancient Roman images of such a deluxe roll with an umbilicus and colored cornua. The fresco below from Pompeii is one possible example that may show cornua, but it’s tough to say when looking at different images:
Fresco depicting a woman reading a papyrus roll, possibly showing cornua, found at Pompeii (VIII.2.39), now in Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, inv. 8838; image sources: Getty Images (left) and Pompeii in Pictures (right)
I don’t know of any surviving Egyptian papyri that show evidence of attachment to an umbilicus, but Capasso (Volumen: Aspetti della tipologia del rotolo librario antico) reports the existence of several umbilici among the Herculaneum papyri. Moving on now to the next passage in the list for frons:
Ovid, Tristia 1.1.1-12:
Parve — nec invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem.
ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!
vade, sed incultus, qualem decet exulis esse;
infelix habitum temporis huius habe.
nec te purpureo velent vaccinia fuco —
non est conveniens luctibus ille color —
nec titulus minio, nec cedro charta notetur,
candida nec nigra cornua fronte geras.
felices ornent haec instrumenta libellos;
fortunae memorem te decet esse meae.
nec fragili geminae poliantur pumice frontes,
hirsutus sparsis ut videare comis.
“Little book, you will go without me and – and I grudge it not – to the city. Alas that your master is not allowed to go! Go, but go unadorned, as becomes the book of an exile; in your misfortune wear the garb that befits these days of mine. You shall have no cover dyed with the juice of purple berries – no fit color is that for mourning; your title shall not be tinged with vermilion nor your papyrus with oil of cedar; and you shall wear no white bosses upon your dark edges. Books of good omen should be decked with such things as these; ’tis my fate that you should bear in mind. Let no brittle pumice polish your two edges; I would have you appear with locks all rough and disordered.”
In this instance, (if this were a happier book) the frontes (here rendered as “edges”) would again be adorned with the painted cornua, or knobs, of the umbilicus. But the frontes would also be “dark” and “polished with pumice.” This is an interesting description. I’m not quite sure how this would work (I’ve got another post coming on pumice and papyrus, but I don’t want to get bogged down in that now). The roll would be further decorated with a colored titulus, or tag that hung from the end of the papyrus roll and identified the contents of the roll.
Ovid, Ex Ponto 4.13.7-8:
ipse quoque, ut titulum chartae de fronte revellas,
quod sit opus, videor dicere posse, tuum.
“I, too, though you should tear the title from the head of your roll, could tell, I think, what work is yours.”
Here, the frons is the top end of the closed roll, to which the titulus is attached.
Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi 9.6:
"'Honestius,' inquis, 'hoc se impensae quam in Corinthia pictasque tabulas effuderint.' Vitiosum est ubique, quod nimium est. Quid habes, cur ignoscas homini armaria [e] citro atque ebore captanti, corpora conquirenti aut ignotorum auctorum aut improbatorum et inter tot milia librorum oscitanti, cui voluminum suorum frontes maxime placent titulique?"
“‘It is more respectable,’ you say, ‘to squander money on these than on Corinthian bronzes and on pictures.’ But excess in anything becomes a fault. What excuse have you to offer for a man who seeks to have bookcases of citrus-wood and ivory, who collects the works of unknown or discredited authors and sits yawning in the midst of so many thousand books, who gets most of his pleasure from the outsides of volumes and their titles?”
Here, the English rendering of voluminumfrontes as “outsides of volumes” conjures (for me at least) a modern bookshelf with codex spines. If we apply the meaning of frons indicated by the previous passages, what comes to mind instead is the drawing of the lost relief from Trier showing a shelf full of rolls with frontes and tituli facing out [[Update12 July 2021: …if in fact they are papyrus rolls and not cloth; see Jan Heilmann’s note in the comments below]]:
Image source: Christoph Brouwer and Jakob Masen, Antiquitatum et Annalium Trevirensium (Liége: Jo. Mathiæ Hovii, 1671), vol. 1, p. 105.
Martial, 1.66.9-12:
mutare dominum non potest liber notus.
sed pumicata fronte si quis est nondum
nec umbilicis cultus atque membrana,
mercare: tales habeo; nec sciet quisquam.
“A well-known book cannot change author. But if you find one whose face is not yet smoothed by the pumice stone, one not embellished with bosses and parchment cover, buy it. I have such, and nobody will be the wiser.”
Here again we find the suggestion that the frons of a very fine book, unlike the one being sought here, would be “polished with pumice,” and that treatment is paired with an umbilicus and a nice parchment cover.
Martial, 3.2.1 and 6-11:
Cuius vis fieri, libelle, munus?
...
Faustini fugis in sinum? sapisti.
cedro nunc licet ambules perunctus
et frontis gemino decens honore
pictis luxurieris umbilicis,
et te purpura delicata velet,
et cocco rubeat superbus index.
“Whose present do you wish to be, little book?…Do you fly to Faustinus’ bosom? You are wise. Now you may walk oiled with cedar, your twin brows handsomely adorned, luxuriating in your painted bosses, clothed in dainty purple, your proud title blushing scarlet.”
Here the fancy roll again gets all the treatment: oil of cedar, painted umbilici (two of them apparently – one at the beginning and one at the end?), purple cover, and red title (here index as a synonym for titulus).
So, it seems pretty clear that the frontes are the top and bottom of the closed roll. But then what can it mean to polish the frontes with pumice? I will dedicate a separate post to this issue.
Variant Readings 