Famous Old Books and Scrolls

A book can take the form of a painted papyrus roll, a folded strip of bark paper, or a stack of printed pages. These surviving examples show what those forms could do, from guiding the dead through an Egyptian judgment scene to preserving plays that had never appeared in print. The photographs and scans let you compare the marks on the page, including the cramped Greek columns of a Bible and the strange plants and unknown script of the Voynich manuscript.