Tied and Bound: A Tight Preface

If we stay with the concept of book as a definite physical unit – and do not concede to literary metaphors or metaphysical speculations conceiving of the universe as a book – we can safely state that there is hardly any book without a device to secure its physical borders and inner consistency. Assuming that ‘codicological units’ exist in whatever manuscript cultures and that they, in turn, are often composed of discrete elements, the issue of the cohesion of these elements and codicological units is a general and even universal one. The aim of the present volume is that of presenting a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted by different manuscript cultures to put this cohesion in place in order to provide a comparative frame for the understanding of a phenomenon that appears to be of essential importance in the study of manuscripts.