Indian scribes

How did Indian scribes write? I mean, what were their tools, method, sitting position? I read today a wonderful essay by Dain on the technique of (Western) medieval scribes. Very stimulating, to undertake similar research in the Indological field.

For instance, did Jayanta compose the whole Nyayamanjari from the first folio to the last, without looking back? Or did he take notes, wrote a first draft, corrected it and the wrote (or had someone writing it) anew? Did he write his notes and drafts on birch bark? Was there any other support, such as wax boards, in use for quick notes?

What about copists? How were they sitting, what was their modus operandi?

Among many other interesting things, Dain writes that a straining position (desks came to use much later) while writing meant frequent stops. Stopping and resuming writing meant in many cases some slight change in the graphy, which is misenterpreted by some philologists as a change of scribe. In scriptoria, the director of the scriptorium used to correct and emend the resulting manuscripts. So marginalia and interlinear emendation with a different hand may have been done right after completion, although in some cases cross checked with other sources (still contamination, thus). Paper was at one point disdained, in favour of pergamen, because of its scarce durability.

Besides the curiosity factor, the answer to some of these questions may prove of invaluable use in textual criticism and codicology.

More on typography and philology

A typographical difficulty of devanagari in movable type kind of press is the high number of ligatures. To have single glyphs for every consonant-consontant and consonant-vowel combination seems unlikely. Upon close observation, it seems that vowel signs were independent types. But, when these were descendents and ascendents, these must have required room above and below the main lines, perhaps to be filled by blanks wherever ascendent and descendents were not there. In the NM editio princeps the leading (space between lines) is quite large, and a possible explanation (I doubt that at that time, given the costs of paper, there were aesthetic or readability reasons to keep wide leading) is the presence of these extra lines of ascendent and descendent vowel signs.

Early typography in India

While dealing with the editio princeps of the Nyāyamañjarī, I keep wondering about the relation of pandits of that time (1895) with the printing technology available to them. This edition must have been done with movable characters, which means that every page is dismantled once printed in the given number of copies. Was it possible for Gangadhara Sastri to proofread the page?

It would be nice to gather more information about the printing technology available to these typographers, the fonts used by them, the existing fondries, the smiths (don't know if black- or gold-) who manifactured the punches, the provenience of the paper used for these book, the costs of the various aspects of production.