
16th Century Book Can Be Read Six Different Ways - Hooke
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/16th-century-book-bound-dos-a-dos
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tzs
So if I'm understanding this correctly, it is a way to cleverly package 6
books as one unit so that there are six different ways to open the package,
each way giving you access to a different one of the six books.

Is there any advantage in this method for the reader over the usual method of
simply printing all 6 books in one normal volume, with something between each
adjacent pair so you can quickly open it to the book you are interested in? Or
is this just one of those "do it because it is cool" things?

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gcb0
i think the only advantage is that binding books back then was expensive as
hell... so maybe this crazy 6-way binding could have cost 2x or 3x and it
would still be cheaper then paying the normal 6x.

not to mention you save the weight of extra 10 front and back covers.

now, why they didn't simply make the 6 volumes in the same book and put some
tabs protruding from the pages, i will never know. there is a russian book
binder faux anecdote there...

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wahsd
I'm rather confident in saying that this was more of a novelty to show off
book binding mastery and was probably some gift to a noble.

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gcb0
or that is the heavily modded 'workstation' of a geek that needed to travel
with those 6 books?

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wahsd
What I find most fascinating about things like that is that when you look at
the pictures of the book you see an old, shriveled up, bent, corroded, bland,
demure type of book; but I am sure that when this book was new it was an
object of perfection.

It's kind of like how when we look at old pictures of "olden times" there is a
certain perception or assumption about things and way of life because you are
looking at images that are black and white and washed out and people have that
corpse look to them simply due to the nature of the technology. Reality was
quite different though, in reality that world that we think of as being black
and white and populated with corpse looking people was more or less just as
colorful as the world you and I live in.

I don't even know if it would be possible with this artifact, but I am sure
you could assemble some master book binders and maybe some metallurgists or
blacksmiths in order to painstakingly reconstruct the book using the same
techniques and materials, yet without the possible exponentially more
experienced skill level of the original master artisan.

The old masters or centuries ago, the men and women that created things by
hand and skill that had been passed down for generations and which have
largely been lost with industrialization have my utter most respect and
reverence.

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ChuckMcM
That is pretty cool, now I just need Meade or someone to make a six subject
notebook like this :-)

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AstroJetson
I'm in for two! Actually it would be good to see an instructable on how to
make one.

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vijayr
Reminds me of the ancient Indian poet whose poems gave one meaning left to
right and totally different meaning right to left

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shared4you
Indeed, Venkatadhvari's 17th century Sanskrit work _Raghava Yadaveeyam_
narrates the story of Ramayana (left-to-right) and Mahabharata (right-to-left)
simultaneously.

[http://www.sanskritebooks.org/2009/09/raghava-yadaviyam-
with...](http://www.sanskritebooks.org/2009/09/raghava-yadaviyam-with-english-
translation/)

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nsns
It's a whole genre actually.*

*[http://cup.columbia.edu/book/extreme-poetry/9780231151603](http://cup.columbia.edu/book/extreme-poetry/9780231151603)

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lotharbot
there have been a number of simple examples in modern times -- poems that
cycle through a pessimistic statement, a statement like "we will never see the
day when", and an optimistic statement, and end with the line "now read from
bottom to top" (which makes the middle line negate the pessimistic statement
instead of the optimistic one.)

For example, [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/weird-news/14yearold-
floor...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/weird-news/14yearold-floors-the-
world-with-deceptively-simple-poem-9158069.html)

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GuiA
I always found those super tacky. I wonder if it'll get posted on Hacker News
in the year 5015 as an example of brilliant 21st century poetry. I also wonder
if Venkatadhvari's contemporaries found him to be tacky.

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L_Rahman
From a different comment in this discussion:

> They were a whole genre of poems called "adhama kavyas." Literally, in
> Sanskrit, it means 'inferior poems'.

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morqon
This was basically built for Hopscotch
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Julio_Cortázar_nove...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_\(Julio_Cortázar_novel\))

