In the summer of 1994, myself and some others helped a friend to pack up the contents of the house he was selling, and move all his ‘stuff’ to his new location. For this we hired a very large trailer that could haul something like one tonne of said stuff – this, ultimately, was a meaningless number, as we simply loaded everything that was in the house onto the trailer. One tonne, two… ten, who knows? The trailer was hitched to a Nissan Sani (poor man’s Land Rover) and off we went. The journey ahead, at normal speeds, was a seven hour drive; it took us 28 hours. Why? Because the weight of the trailer kept bursting the trailer tires. We had a jack but it wasn’t up to holding the entire trailer up by itself while we changed the wheel (about five times, with diversions to buy new wheels, if I recall – I emphasise that I was only a pawn in this game, and not one of its architects!), so we needed a way to prop up the trailer at at least two other points, while we operated the jack. Enter, The Codex, in the form of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (I’m not sure which edition, though). Those dense volumes succeeded where steel and springs failed. The encyclopaedia survived – the covers were a bit bent, but it was still usable and readable. They got us home.

Engineering and adventure aside, I am an admirer of more elevated examples of used and abused codexes – that is, altered books, or more generally, artists’ books. From Victorian books where the edges of the pages have been fixed on an extended position whilst a picture is painted, so that the image is invisible when the book is held normally, and only visible when you deform the spine… to books that have had gun shapes cut out of their insides, the altered book has a long tradition behind it. Nowadays, though, altered books are being created as art objects, as socio-political statements, and what have you. The pages are folded, cut or torn (Brian Dettmer's dictionary is a good example); the text is changed, painted over or erased; the binding is changed or remade: the book is altered and it becomes something new, but is also what it was… but changed. It’s a fascinating effect! The meaning of the book is changed.

Finally, the codex can be – and is -  pushed into a corner as ever more creative storage solutions are discovered. Also, book are used as a medium of interior decoration: as furniture, as wall or wall texture, and arranged by height or colour to create a visual effect in a room.

So, not only is the codex a neatly evolved format for making information portable, allowing random access, cross-referencing, and other tricks… it is also many many other things, not really related to reading. Used and abused. But well-loved too, and highly respected.

[James Long works at Pan Macmillan]