| *The [[handscroll]] (''kansubon'' 巻子本 or ''makimono'' 巻物) is perhaps the most traditional form of assembling sheets of paper (or silk) into a larger whole. Sheets or sections were arranged horizontally, pasted (or stitched, in the case of silk) to one another, end to end, and wrapped around a wooden dowel to form a scroll. Scrolls have the advantage over other forms of books (''sasshihon'' 冊子本) that they can be easily lengthened or shortened. One can cut nearly anywhere within a scroll, and insert or remove sections, while in a book, the nature of front and back (''recto'' and ''verso'') sides of a page, among other elements, makes this difficult. Scrolls have the disadvantage, however, of it being difficult to skim or skip forward to certain sections; whereas with a book one can simply flip the book open to a later section, a scroll has to be scrolled through from the beginning, a lengthy process. For this reason, along with the older history of the form (i.e. it being an older, more traditional form), and the association of scrolls as the format of imported Buddhist knowledge, scrolls came to often be the choice format for prestigious gifts, and treasures, to be kept and preserved, but not necessarily to be regularly opened or read. | | *The [[handscroll]] (''kansubon'' 巻子本 or ''makimono'' 巻物) is perhaps the most traditional form of assembling sheets of paper (or silk) into a larger whole. Sheets or sections were arranged horizontally, pasted (or stitched, in the case of silk) to one another, end to end, and wrapped around a wooden dowel to form a scroll. Scrolls have the advantage over other forms of books (''sasshihon'' 冊子本) that they can be easily lengthened or shortened. One can cut nearly anywhere within a scroll, and insert or remove sections, while in a book, the nature of front and back (''recto'' and ''verso'') sides of a page, among other elements, makes this difficult. Scrolls have the disadvantage, however, of it being difficult to skim or skip forward to certain sections; whereas with a book one can simply flip the book open to a later section, a scroll has to be scrolled through from the beginning, a lengthy process. For this reason, along with the older history of the form (i.e. it being an older, more traditional form), and the association of scrolls as the format of imported Buddhist knowledge, scrolls came to often be the choice format for prestigious gifts, and treasures, to be kept and preserved, but not necessarily to be regularly opened or read. |