By Craig D Wescoe 
The earliest Scriptures lived on scrolls — unwieldy, single-sided, and read in sequence. Christians were among the first communities to embrace the codex, the leaf-book format, and by the fourth century nearly every Christian Bible was one.
This article will consider why the codex won: cost, portability, the ability to gather the four Gospels or Paul’s letters into one volume, and what the shift meant for how Scripture was cited and studied. (Placeholder article — full research to come.)