Concertina

Giovanni Ciotti

A concertina manuscript (also known as accordion, leporello, folding book, or (screen-)folded book) is made of a lengthy piece of writing surface that is alternately folded back and forth so as to create a concertina-like or zig-zag effect. Hence, this way of folding is sometimes referred to as zig-zag fold or z-fold. The writing surface can be made of a single folio or a number of folios (more rarely tablets) glued or sewed together one after another. Folds and folios’ junctures do not necessarily coincide.

A concertina-like folding was most probably used for triptychs and polyptychs made with tablets, in particular waxed tablets, used in the Ancient Near East (see Tablet). This seems to be supported by both the direct analyses of their remnants and by their artistic representations (Cammarosano et al. 2019, 146–153).

The concertina form was popular in East Asia (in particular in Chinese Buddhist contexts), Central Asia (down to Nepal) (e.g. Pal 1978, 95) and in both Mainland and Maritime Southeast Asia (Chester Beatty Library 2019). Paper was the predominant material used for the production of concertinas, one exception being the island of Sumatra, where concertinas were produced using long sheets of Agarwood tree bark in the Batak context (van der Putten and Zollo 2020). To a lesser extent, concertinas are also found in Ethiopia, where they can be made of parchment or paper and sport illuminated panels rather than texts (Balicka-Witakowska 2010). In the northwestern Roman provinces, concertinas were made of rather thin folios (tilias) of wood that were mostly used for administration and accounting (Willi 2021, 45–49).

Furthermore, notwithstanding the extremely small corpus of extant items, it is possible to argue that concertina was the manuscript form par excellence in premodern Mesoamerica. The few surviving Maya manuscripts (at times misleadingly referred to as “Maya codices”) are made of long sheets produced by working the inner bark of the Amate tree (Snijders 2016; Mayan: Codices).

A rare form of manuscript that can be found in Western Europe is known as ‘bound accordion’. A sheet of parchment (more rarely, paper) is folded in the concertina style and one of its long edges is then bound, so that the manuscript opens like a codex (Shirota 2019) (cf. the structure of the binding in Chinese books from the fourteenth until the early twentieth century, s.v. Book).

References

Balicka-Witakowska, E. (2010), ‘Sǝnsul’, in S. Uhlig, A. Bausi et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vols 1–5, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 625–626.
Chester Beatty Library (2019), ‘Figuring out Folds: Conserving a Thai Buddhist manuscript’ <https://chesterbeatty.ie/conservation/figuring-out-folds/> (accessed 2 Aug. 2024).
Mayan: Codices. Medieval Manuscripts. (n.d.). <https://gilbertredman.com/medievalmanuscripts/codicology/mayan-codices/>.
Pal, Pratapaditya (1978), The Arts of Nepal, Part II: Painting, Leiden/Cologne: E. J. Brill.
van der Putten, J. and R. Zollo (eds) (2020), Die Macht der Schrift: Die Manuskriptkultur der Toba-Batak aus Nord-Sumatra / The Power of Writing: The Manuscript Culture of the Toba Batak from North Sumatra, manuscript cultures, 14.
Shirota, M. (2019), ‘Neither roll nor codex: Accordion genealogies of the kings of England from the fifteenth century’, in S. G. Holz, J. Peltzer and M. Shirota (eds), The Roll in England and France in the Late Middle Ages, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 263–287 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645125-010>.
Snijders, L. (2016), The Mesoamerican codex re-entangled: Production, use, and re-use of precolonial documents, PhD dissertation, Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Willi, A. (2021), Manual of Roman Everyday Writing, Vol. 2 Writing Equipment, Nottingham: LatinNow ePubs <https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5684621>.