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This piece of vellum has writing on both sides, the text is the litugy for the evening service of Simhat Torah. Until the advent in the west of a true "paper", and after it became impractical to use papyrus, all books were written on vellum: generally the skin of sheep, goats, or calves, washed, dressed, and rubbed smooth on special stones. Smaller books or more delicate works were written on the finer uterine vellum, which is the skin of an unborn calf or lamb. Vellum is one of the best materials ever used in book production. It is smooth, white, tough and lasting; the only disadvantage is its high cost. Picture this: it requires the skins of about 225 sheep to provide sufficient vellum to produce a single copy of the Holy Bible, each sheep yielding somewhat more than a square yard of usable vellum.
The scribe would write on lines ruled with a blunt instrument called a "scriber", which makes hollows on one side of the leaf, ridges on the other, the spacing of the lines having first been indicated along each margin with an awl. The pen was a reed or quill, cut with a penknife; the ink was made of soot, gum and water or, alternatively, galls, sulfate of iron and gum. The incredible colors applied to initial letters, margins and illustrations point to an art lost among the mass-production techniques of later centuries.
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