Script first appears in China more than four thousand years ago.

The jiance or jiandu on a roll of thin bamboo or wooden strips inscribed by brush with indelible ink and fastened with cord, may be considered the earliest true book form on China from around the 6th Century BC. As early as the 5th Century BC books were commonly referred to as Zhubo (bamboo and silk) which points to the use of silk as a writing material. Silk books were also in the form of scrolls. The jiance arrangement of text from right to left in narrow vertical columns hfurther influenced early manuscript copying on silk and paper. Eventually the custom left its mark on the layout of manuscript books and the printed page. These books of wood or bamboo were heavy and impractical for the wider circulation of texts. It was not until the invention of paper, usually associated with the Han eunuch Cai Lun (d 114) who presented his method of paper manufacture to the emperor in AD 105. Although we know that true paper existed least two centuries before this. Han Silk is dear and bamboo heavy, so they are not convenient to use. The significance of paper cannot be over stated as the most important material in the evolution of the book. The earliest manuscripts made of paper were constructed by horizontally pasting sheets of paper end on end and rolling them. This developed as folding the paper was experimented with and led to a sutra folded binding giving us the first codex from China. Books began to reflect the natural for of a sheet of handmade paper. This lent itself too the earliest forms of printing, laying a sheet over an inked block and rubbing to lay down the print then covering them in protective bindings. Despite the advance of printing, manuscript books were not suddenly eclipsed by printed books. Conservative scholars were sceptical of the textual quality of impersonal, printed text and they were expensive. By the end of the 12th Century the imperial library in Hangzhou possessed several thousand titles but only about one quarter were printed. The social significance of calligraphy training, the practice of sutra copying by Buddhists, the belief that the best way to read a book was to copy it contributed to the prevalence of manuscript books for hundreds of

years.