Author Archives: Alexis Curtis

My Final Project: Ethiopian Healing Scrolls and Books as Accessories

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Through a media‑specific analysis of Ethiopian healing scrolls, books become most meaningful when they are worn, carried, and embodied. The scroll’s stitched construction, tailored length, and bold imagery position it within a long lineage of wearable books, demonstrating that portability and customization are not secondary features but central mechanisms through which texts produce identity, mobility, and spiritual efficacy.

Part 1: The Bibliography

At the San Diego State University Library’s Special Collections and University Archives, Ethiopian healing scrolls sit quietly in their boxes, but everything about them suggests movement. They are long, narrow composite objects made from parchment strips sewn end‑to‑end. Each strip is thick and stiffened, lighter on the flesh side and darker on the hair side. The joins are stitched with leather using simple overcast or paired‑hole sewing, forming a continuous roll that can stretch several feet while remaining only a few inches wide. Rolled inward, the inscribed surface is protected, as if the scroll curls around its own meaning.

The vellum is coarse and rigid with age. Edges cockle, some strips crease from repeated rolling, and occasional thinning appears near stitch sites. Despite surface wear, the substantial thickness of each strip keeps the structure sound. The scroll is thick and stiff, wanting to stay curled up due to being unused for years. Text runs vertically in single columns along the length of the scroll. Decorative ruling separates text from pictorial fields, and faint guidelines help maintain margins. The Ge’ez script is written in black ink, with a secondary pink pigment used sparingly to highlight names or details. The consistent hand and occasional corrections suggest a single scribe working directly on the parchment.

Horizontal decorative bands—zigzags, triangles, chevrons—divide sections and frame images. Illustrations appear between these bands and are typically schematic: haloed figures, crosses, protective talismans, or anthropomorphic spirits. Bold outlines and selective color accents emphasize heads, eyes, or symbolic attributes. Marginal talismanic signs and small diagrams inhabit the spaces between text and image.

The scroll’s narrow width and considerable length reflect its purpose as a portable ritual tool. Handling wear appears along the edges and outermost layers, while repeated creasing marks frequent unrolling. The reverse side sometimes contains practice strokes or ingredient lists, suggesting practical use by a healer. Alternating text blocks and pictorial vignettes create a ritual sequence, guiding the practitioner through incantations and protective images.

Ownership marks vary: small inscriptions, seals, or later annotations. Repairs—patched holes, re‑stitched joins, added cloth or leather—demonstrate long-term use and value. As material objects, these scrolls sit at the intersection of manuscript, talisman, and ritual implements. Their stitched construction, combined inks, and clear signs of handling identify them as portable healing tools maintained by practitioners rather than books intended for passive reading.

Part 2: The Analysis

Ethiopian healing scrolls are religious objects designed to move: long, narrow rolls of parchment whose images, texts, and physical form work together as portable technologies for purging illness and restoring mobility. As Amaranth Borsuk notes, a book’s meaning emerges through how it is handled, and the scroll’s form is inseparable from the ritual actions it enables. Tailored to individual wearers, the scroll alternates Ge’ez text with pictorial plates exposed sequentially during rites meant to expel harmful forces.

The scroll’s construction emphasizes durability and portability. Thick parchment strips sewn end‑to‑end allow the roll to be tightly wound for transport and repeatedly unrolled for ritual display. Its narrow width minimizes bulk, while the long linear format provides a staged sequence: the healer unrolls to the next image, performs the invocation, then rerolls the scroll. Unlike a codex, which favors stationary reading, the scroll’s rolled format is optimized for motion—carrying, wearing, and field use. Jessica Pressman’s argument that new media revive older forms helps illuminate this contrast: the scroll’s mobility and image‑text hybridity anticipate contemporary portable media that merge functionality with embodied interaction.

Many healing scrolls are bespoke objects made to a client’s height so the unrolled sequence corresponds to body zones. The client’s name often appears, confirming the scroll’s directed purpose. This personalization allows the scroll to be wrapped around the body, converting it into a wearable talisman. Image placement follows a bodily logic: protections for the head appear near the top, those for the torso or abdomen appear mid‑scroll. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole emphasize that books acquire meaning through “the conditions of their use,” and the scroll’s customization demonstrates how its physical form is shaped by the needs of its wearer.

The pictorial program is central to the scroll’s function. Images are schematic and bold—emphasizing heads, eyes, haloes, or geometric talismans—so they read quickly during ritual exposure. High‑contrast outlines and selective color accents highlight operative features. Decorative bands frame each plate and act as tactile markers, enabling quick navigation. The imagery functions as both symbol and instruction, signaling which spiritual agent to invoke and which gesture to perform. Johanna Drucker’s work on artists’ books clarifies this dynamic: material structure shapes how readers navigate and interpret a book, and the scroll’s alternating bands of text and image direct ritual performance.

These scrolls are explicitly religious instruments whose therapeutic mechanism is spiritual. Christian iconography—crosses, haloed figures, archangels—combines with apotropaic geometries to anchor authority and repel harmful forces. The healer’s use of the image—exposure, touch, movement over the afflicted body—constitutes a ritual technology that enacts exorcism and restores mobility. Portability is integral: the scroll must travel to the afflicted, act upon their body, and accompany them back into social life.

Wear patterns and repairs document frequent handling. Darkened edges, creasing, and re‑stitched joins reveal repeated use. Leah Price notes that books often circulate as objects valued for their handling as much as their content, and the scroll’s accumulated wear makes visible its social life. Marginal additions and later hands mark episodes of adaptation for new clients. Mark Marino’s discussion of marginalia as evidence of a text’s evolving social life resonates here: added marks document the scroll’s movement through households and communities.

Mobility is also social and economic. Scrolls circulate as commissioned goods, gifts, or loaned items. Their production and repair involve craft resources and payments, creating ties among clients, healers, and suppliers. Ownership inscriptions and seals trace networks of care. Borges’s vision of an immobilized library contrasts sharply with the Ethiopian scroll, a book designed to circulate and act in the world.

Ultimately, the scroll’s purpose is to restore the patient’s capacity to move. In societies where mobility links to livelihood and social participation, a portable ritual technology that travels to the afflicted is especially significant. Wearing a scroll made and named for you aids reentry into everyday movement, signaling protection and documenting intervention. Viewed through mobility, Ethiopian scrolls appear as engineered objects whose structure, imagery, and repairs make them effective tools for itinerant spiritual care. Tracking scrolls as moving things recasts them not as static artifacts but as active participants in networks of healing, exchange, and movement that sustained religious life in Ethiopia for centuries.

Part 3: Books as Clothing, Books as Accessories: Embodied Reading and the Mobility of Text

Extending this analysis of mobility, Ethiopian healing scrolls also invite us to consider a broader and often overlooked dimension of book history: the ways books function as clothing, accessories, and wearable media. When a book is worn rather than held, its meaning shifts. It becomes not only a vessel for text but an object that participates in the shaping of identity, movement, and embodied experience. The Ethiopian healing scroll makes this dynamic unmistakable. Its form—long, narrow, stitched, and tailored to the wearer’s height—transforms it from a manuscript into a garment of protection, a piece of spiritual equipment designed to inhabit the body as much as accomExtending this analysis of mobility, Ethiopian healing scrolls also invite a broader reconsideration of what books are and how they inhabit the world. Their stitched parchment bodies, tailored lengths, and bold image‑text sequences reveal that books do not merely sit in hands or on shelves—they inhabit bodies. They wrap, touch, travel, and accompany. They are worn as much as they are read. When a book becomes something that can be carried on the body, wrapped around it, or displayed upon it, its meaning shifts. It becomes not only a vessel for text but an object that participates in shaping identity, movement, and embodied experience.

Amaranth Borsuk’s claim in The Book that books are “mutable interfaces” becomes especially resonant here. The Ethiopian scroll is not an interface between reader and text alone; it is an interface between body and world, mediating spiritual danger and physical vulnerability. Its portability is not incidental but essential: the scroll must move with the wearer because its power is activated through movement, wrapping, and bodily proximity. In this sense, the scroll is not simply read—it is embodied. Its meaning emerges through touch, motion, and the intimate contact between parchment and skin.

This embodied quality places Ethiopian scrolls within a much longer history of books as wearable objects. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole remind us that book history is shaped by “the conditions of [books’] use,” and those conditions have often included being worn, displayed, or carried on the body. Medieval girdle books hung from belts; miniature prayer books were tucked into pouches or suspended from rosaries; locket‑books held tiny devotional texts worn against the chest. In each case, the book’s portability shaped its function and its social meaning. A girdle book signaled piety and literacy; a locket‑book signaled devotion and intimacy. Ethiopian healing scrolls similarly signal protection, vulnerability, and spiritual identity. They are not merely texts but accessories of faith, designed to be seen, touched, and carried as part of the wearer’s daily life.

Understanding why people might want to wear books requires recognizing that books have always been more than repositories of information—they are objects that confer identity, intimacy, and agency. Wearing a book transforms it from a tool of reading into a tool of self‑fashioning. As Leah Price argues, books often circulate as objects whose value lies in their handling and display as much as in their textual content. While Ethiopian scrolls are not fashion accessories in the modern sense, they participate in a similar logic: wearing a scroll is a visible declaration of one’s spiritual needs and protections. It communicates vulnerability, faith, and the presence of ongoing ritual care. The scroll is not hidden away but worn, displayed, and recognized. Its presence on the body is itself a form of communication.

This is where individuality and customization become crucial. Ethiopian healing scrolls are bespoke objects: their length matches the client’s height; their inscriptions include the client’s name; their images are arranged to correspond to the wearer’s body. This degree of personalization is not decorative—it is essential to the scroll’s function. A scroll tailored to a specific body asserts that healing is not generic but individual, that protection must be fitted to the person who needs it. Levy and Mole’s emphasis on the “social lives of books” helps clarify this: the scroll’s life is inseparable from the life of its wearer. Customization becomes a form of recognition. The scroll acknowledges the wearer’s singularity, their embodied experience of illness, and their desire for protection that is literally made for them.

The scroll’s design reinforces this wearable, individualized function. Its narrow width, stitched joins, and rolled storage make it easy to carry on the body, slip into a case, or wrap around the torso. Its images—bold, schematic, high‑contrast—are optimized for quick recognition during ritual exposure. Its decorative bands act as visual and tactile markers, enabling navigation even in dim interiors or crowded marketplaces. These features are not ornamental; they are ergonomic. They allow the scroll to function as a wearable tool, a piece of spiritual equipment that moves with the healer and the patient. The scroll’s portability is therefore inseparable from its religious purpose: it must travel to the afflicted, act upon their body, and accompany them as they reenter the social world.

Johanna Drucker’s work on artists’ books helps articulate why this matters for understanding the scroll as a medium. Drucker argues that artists’ books challenge conventional assumptions about what a book is by foregrounding materiality, structure, and reader interaction. They make the reader aware of the book’s physical form and the ways that form shapes meaning. Ethiopian healing scrolls participate in this tradition long before the term “artists’ book” existed. Their form is their argument: the scroll’s healing power depends on its portability, its tactility, and its ability to be worn. Its material design is not an aesthetic choice but a theological one.

Mark Marino’s discussion of marginalia as evidence of a text’s evolving social life offers a final point of connection. The scrolls bear repairs, stains, creases, added talismans, and ownership notes. These marks are not accidents; they are evidence of movement. They show that the scroll traveled, was handled, was worn, was used. They are the physical equivalent of digital marginalia—traces of a book’s social life. Marino’s framework helps us see the scroll not as a static artifact but as a dynamic, evolving object shaped by the bodies that carry it.

Taken together, these perspectives reveal that Ethiopian healing scrolls are part of a broader history of books that move with the body, act upon the body, and become part of the body. They are wearable books whose portability is inseparable from their religious function. They are accessories that signal identity and vulnerability. They are garments that protect and heal. And they remind us that books have always been more than texts—they have been tools, companions, ornaments, and extensions of the self.

By reading the scroll through the lens of media‑specific analysis—and by engaging Borsuk, Levy & Mole, Price, Drucker, and Marino—we see that the scroll is not an anomaly but a reminder: books have always been bodies, and bodies have always been books.

Taken together, the Ethiopian healing scroll and the broader history of wearable books reveal that media are never neutral containers but active participants in the lives of the people who carry them. The scroll’s stitched construction, tailored length, bold imagery, and accumulated repairs show how a book can become a garment of protection, a tool of healing, and a record of movement across bodies, households, and generations. Its portability is inseparable from its purpose: to travel to the afflicted, to act upon the body, and to restore the very mobility that illness threatens. By reading the scroll through media‑specific analysis—and by situating it alongside traditions of girdle books, locket‑texts, and other wearable forms—we see that books have always been shaped by the conditions of their use, and that those conditions often involve touch, movement, and embodiment. The scroll ultimately reminds us that literature is not only something we read but something we inhabit: a medium that wraps around us, moves with us, and becomes part of how we navigate the world.

The Creation of a Personalized Healing Scroll

This handmade scroll functions as a wearable book—an individualized, portable, and spiritually charged media object that connects Baptist Christian heritage to the Ethiopian healing scrolls studied in class. Through stitched structure, symbolic imagery, and personalized inscriptions, the scroll enacts a media-specific theology of protection and identity, showing how books can be worn, embodied, and lived.

The scroll opens with an angel: afro‑textured hair, a halo, and a green eye on her dress. She stands at the top like a guardian, but also a witness. Beneath her, the inscription reads: “For her, Alexis Naomi, for whomst God gave his only begotten son.” The phrasing echoes John 3:16, in the King James Version, but shifts the tone toward intimacy and direction. Naming the recipient transforms the scroll into a personal object, much like Ethiopian healing scrolls that include the client’s name to anchor the work in a specific life.

The next section contains the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13), written in full. These familiar lines—often recited in church pews—take on a different presence when placed on a scroll meant to be worn. Surrounding the prayer are geometric patterns and symbolic drawings: a cross, a sun, a moon, and two open hands. These images form a visual grammar similar to the pictorial logic of Ethiopian scrolls, where symbols guide ritual action as much as text does. The hands suggest offering or surrender. The celestial symbols mark rhythm and divine order. The cross anchors the scroll in Christian iconography, while the surrounding elements expand its meaning beyond doctrine.

Further down, two closed eyes wearing makeup appear above the phrase “See no evil, child.” This line blends apotropaic logic with personal instruction. Ethiopian scrolls often use eyes, nets, and geometric traps to repel evil; here, the eyes are stylized and adorned, suggesting discernment rather than blindness. The phrase carries both protection and reassurance.

The final sections shift into prayer: “Please, protect this sinner as she is merely lost. But she will find herself at her destination, wherever that may be. Guide her safely, on the journey.” And then: “Remember your roots,” written above a tree. The tree grounds the scroll, connecting spiritual journey to ancestry, place, and growth. From angel to tree, the scroll moves vertically—heaven to earth, spirit to body.

The scroll is stitched with green thread, chosen for its personal significance. Black ink carries the words, with green highlights woven throughout. The material itself—lined notebook paper—reflects a practical truth shared across cultures: people make do with what they have. Ethiopian scrolls were made from parchment because that was available; this scroll uses notebook paper for the same reason. The choice underscores a continuity between past and present: sacred or meaningful books do not require rare materials, only intention and care.

The decision to make a scroll rather than a codex came from a desire to see whether personal beliefs could be expressed not only in words but in physical form. A scroll invites movement. It unrolls, wraps, and extends. It becomes something that can be worn, not just read. This aligns with Amaranth Borsuk’s description of books as “technologies that invite certain actions and discourage others.” The scroll is not meant to sit on a desk. It is meant to be carried, touched, and activated through motion. Ethiopian healing scrolls were tailored to the client’s height; this one is tailored to the torso, designed to be worn like a sash. Its meaning is inseparable from its physicality.

Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s emphasis on the “material conditions that shape how books are produced and used” also resonates here. The scroll’s use is devotional, but also archival. It documents spiritual history, aesthetic preference, and emotional state. It is a record of belief and doubt, stitched together with thread and memory. In this sense, it belongs to a tradition of wearable media—girdle books, locket‑texts, and the Ethiopian scrolls studied in Special Collections. Each of these objects gains meaning not only from what is written on them, but from how they are carried and by whom.

Leah Price’s observation that books often function as “objects that circulate socially, not just texts that are read” offers another layer. This scroll is not about status in the conventional sense, but it is a declaration. It says: faith matters. Protection matters. Personalization matters. It is a visible, material sign of spiritual care. Not hidden away, but displayed, worn, and recognized. The scroll becomes a way of carrying belief outward, making it part of daily movement rather than private contemplation.

The scroll also reflects the course’s emphasis on media-specific analysis. This class taught that books are not just texts—they are technologies, objects, artforms, and archives. The scroll embodies all of these roles. It moves, protects, remembers. It is a wearable archive of Baptist upbringing, aesthetic choices, and evolving relationship to faith. It demonstrates how form shapes meaning, how material choices matter, and how books continue to matter as physical objects in a digital age.

In the end, the scroll is not perfect, and it is not traditional. But it is deeply personal. It carries meaning in its words, its images, its stitches, and its paper. It shows that interpretation does not require expertise—only attention, curiosity, and a willingness to ask why. And it proves that belief can live not only in the mind, but in the hands, the body, and the objects we choose to make.

Works Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press, 2018.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New Directions, 1964, pp. 51–58.

Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.

Levy, Michelle, and Tom Mole. “Introduction.” The Broadview Introduction to Book History, Broadview Press, 2017, pp. 9–28.

Marino, Mark C. “Marginalia in the Library of Babel.” markcmarino.com, https://markcmarino.com/diigo/..

Pressman, Jessica. “Old/New Media.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 318–323.

Price, Leah. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading. Basic Books, 2019.

Windmuller-Luna, K. Ethiopian healing scrolls. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015 

What I’ve learned this semester.

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This semester has truly flown by. When this semester started, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this class. I knew it was about Books!!!, and I knew we’d be going to special collections, which I was excited about. But other than that, I saw the words “one time offering” and knew I had to enroll. And I’m glad I did. I have never taken such a theory class before. That isn’t to say we didn’t read books, as we did, but every Thursday class meeting had such a large discussion and I had never had a class like that. Not only did this class make me think, it taught me to think differently. And as I looked at different pieces in collections, the question that kept circling my head was, why? Everything had a reason, and so many things had reasons that I had never considered. So when I say “learn how to think,” I really mean I learned to question everything. And that everything is connected. I was able to gain a deeper understanding on many topics that I didn’t realize I only knew the surface level of.

Although I loved learning about books, I also found archiving to be an interesting topic. Way back on the first day of class, Professor Pressman had asked why we enrolled in the class. I had answered that I was interested in which books survive the passage of time and how books that are considered to be classics are chosen. Through the readings, lectures, and special collections visits, I’ve learned a lot about what gets saved and archived. And that as people, archivists have biases and prejudices that affect how and what is being saved. I’ve heard that publishers are gatekeepers, and I think that archivists are as well. I don’t say that to demonize them, and there are many, probably too many, books, and they can’t all fit in one archive. But, that doesn’t mean I can’t hope and work for more equality in archiving. I had even taken the time to visit the Rare Books room at San Diego Central Library as I had enjoyed my time so much, and was surprised to learn that many of the books in the collection were donated by one person, a person that made a choice to keep and share certain books.

As I leave this class, I will take with me my newfound primary research skills and use them in both my classes and life. Because everything has a “why”, I just need to figure it out.

What I’ve learned while working on my final project.

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With my final project, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to interpret an artifact. On my midterm, I wrote about the Ethiopian Magic Scrolls that we saw in special collections. I put a lot of time into my paper, but after reading Dr. Pressman’s feedback, I realized that my paper wasn’t specifically about one of the scrolls. As I’ve been working on my project, I’ve picked one specific scroll in special collections to focus on, instead of writing about all of them. But in doing so, I realized that it was up to me to figure out what to write. And its been a little awkward. There is no outside source for this specific scroll. I had to figure out what it was that I was looking at, and it makes me feel a bit like a fraud. Are my interpretations of the object valid? I want to say no, that I’m not an expert in the field, but I’m still a researcher in my own way. I feel like I’m making stuff up, even with my own observations. I really haven’t done anything like this before, and I’m glad to be doing it, but I definitely had to increase my confidence through this process.

For the creative aspect, I’m expanding on the concept as books as accessories, specifically individualized ones. For this part, I’ve begun doing outside research on books as fashion, but there aren’t many resources on Ethiopian, or even African, books as accessories. At least not in English. I’ll have to connect it to European and American history, which isn’t bad, but I was hoping to discover something more. Maybe I still will, and I just need to search more efficiently. Admittedly, I haven’t begun the physical creation of my scroll, but I do have it planned out and it shouldn’t take too long, assuming there are no hiccups in my schedule this week. I look forward to making it, but writing on a scroll my height will take some time. I might just make it long enough to wrap around my torso as a sash instead of matching my height. It is meant to be my accessory, after all. Overall, this project has me reevaluating how I conduct my own physical research, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you all!

Final Project Proposal

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This project argues that Ethiopian healing scrolls exemplify a media technology of both fashion and portability, where the scroll’s function of purging illness and demons is combined with its person specific tailored length, scripture and design embody both a religious and social importance.By analyzing the scroll’s portability as both a material and spiritual feature, this project will show how its design transforms the book into a wearable, embodied object whose form directly enacts its healing purpose.

For the creative-critical component, I will construct a scroll inspired by Ethiopian healing scrolls, using paper material, stitched joins, and alternating bands of text and imagery. This handmade scroll will serve as both an artwork and an analytical tool, allowing me to demonstrate how portability and wearability change the experience of “reading” compared to a codex. The scroll will be designed for myself, and what I believe could help heal me. The essay will close-read my scroll alongside historical examples, focusing on how images and material design function as operative features in ritual practice. The scroll’s portability will be analyzed not only as convenience or  but as a religious technology: it travels with the body, protects the wearer, and restores their ability to move freely in social and spiritual life.

The project expands on my midterm by situating Ethiopian healing scrolls within a broader history of books as clothing and accessories. Just as girdle books in medieval Europe were worn on belts, or miniature prayer books were carried in pouches and lockets, Ethiopian scrolls blur the line between text and garment. They are tailored to the wearer’s height, inscribed with their name, and wrapped around the body for head-to-toe protection. This comparative lens highlights how media form itself—whether scroll, codex, or wearable book—shapes meaning, access, and use. By foregrounding portability and embodiment, the project demonstrates how the technologies of book design are inseparable from their cultural and spiritual functions.

Bookishness and the Loss of Books

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As I opened this weeks reading, the introduction to Bookishness, the first thing that came to mind was the TV show Blackish. It was about an upper middle class Black family, that felt distanced from the Black culture that the parents had grown up in due to living in a higher income neighborhood. Similarly, the term “bookish” made me think about the distance that’s grown between reading and books. The -ish ending means ‘somewhat’, as if an e-reader is somewhat a book. And it is, I suppose. Dr. Pressman begins the introduction by talking about her “Mac BookBook”, which was a laptop case designed to look like a book. This case is more than just a fun, quirky design, but an ironic expression of how we’ve changed our approach to reading. Pressman writes, “My Mac BookBook displays the book to be a powerful form of residual media actively shaping digital culture.” Residual media– the leftovers from the media of the past– is still effecting the culture that started to leave it behind. But why? We’ve already established how many aspects of the internet were named after physical objects for familiarity, such as the window, desktop, and page. But this is about artistry and expression, not association or functionality.

Pressman puts is plainly: “Bookishness is about maintaining a nearness to books.” Despite using harsh words like “residual media” earlier, there would be no book themed art without people wanting book themed objects. It’s not like people completely stopped reading, although I’m sure there was a dip in overall interest in books with the rise of internet accessibility throughout the 2000s. E-books and audiobooks were not only cheaper than books, they didn’t need to be carried and they didn’t take up space. But e-books are not books. They are electronic books, and they are their own thing. The only similarity between the two is that they feature words to be read. They share the same primary function, yes, but they aren’t the same. So if bookishness is about maintaining a nearness to books, it’s also about mourning the loss of books. Bookishness emerged as a desire for a way to relieve the nostalgia for the book. The book may be obsolete, but that doesn’t not mean it has no value.

We don’t yet live in a world without physical books. I don’t think we ever will, if bookishness is any consolation. There will always be a desire for the physical object. When I see book art, such as sculptures or papercraft, I think of the second life that the object has been blessed with. I think of how much more you can do with the book, what unintended things you could create with it. People don’t want to lose that.

Archivists: The Gatekeepers of History and Literature

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Shadow Archives by Jean-Christophe Cloutier is a book about how African-American literature is treated not only by the public, but by archivists. As I read the introduction, I had to keep in mind what it is that archives are for and what archivists do. The archive is meant to preserve books, art, and information for future readers, and archivists are meant to curate what books, art, and information are preserved for future readers. But what books are they meant to curate? And with American archives, libraries, and the publishing industry itself being predominately white, what does that mean for African American literature? To be more specific, which books were picked to be saved? Cloutier writes, ” The paradox here–namely, that future presence is born out of past absence, that anything saved serves only to remind us of all that was lost–forms the archivescape of African American literature.” Not everything could be saved, but when I think about what books I know from pre-contemporary African-American authors, the vast majority of them touch on slavery in some sort of way.

This got me thinking about how non white authors tend to get shoehorned into writing about specific topics. For African American’s it’s slavery, segregation, or racism in general. For Latino authors, in tends to be immigration. For indigenous authors, colonialism. Nonwhite authors are stuck regurgitating the same stories of suffering due to the American audience being majority white. These are the stories that were picked to survive.

Of course, African American authors have written a plethora of stories across genres and types. And people do want these writings to last for the next generation. But, sometimes, writings don’t get processed timely, if at all. Archivists have their list of priorities on when they process their records, and in what order. For some of them, such as the Library at Yale, African-American authors aren’t the priority. Cloutier writes, “Record managers stand as gatekeeping celestial Lutherans on the threshold of life and death, imposing limits on the number of births and decreeing salvation or damnation for those who have come to the end of their days.” It is up to the archivists to go through the records, but archivists are people. People are flawed, and many of them are straight up bad. Without processing these records, without detailing what they’ve been given, no one will know that they’re there. Not only will people not know that the files are their, but the files are accessible. They might be “safe” in the archive, but archives are meant to be used. Yale, and I’m sure other institutions are guilty of this” treated these works as if they were nothing. It’s infuriating, and hopefully, things will change.

What Remains, and What Rusts

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Reading this excerpt of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier was very interesting, and had me thinking deeper about both the politics of archiving and the general public’s perception of archiving. Personally, I would define an archive as a collection of preserved items. While I do think this definition is pretty accurate, it says more about the archiver rather than the people who might use the archive. Cloutier writes “The archive is never an end in itself— otherwise we might as well call it a dumpster— but rather a speculative means to possible futures, including unknowable teleologies guided by unborn hands.” This sentence is extremely heavy, and the strong word choice here shows exactly what an archive is and isn’t.

With the first half of the quote, Clouteir is writing about the physical archive itself. Although ‘dumpster’ is being used negatively, it means that it doesn’t matter where an archive is or who runs it if nobody uses it. A pile of books sitting unused is akin to a dump. If somebody wanted it, it would be read. A preserved, polished piece of trash is still a piece of trash. The goal of writing and bookmaking shouldn’t just be to sit in an archive. The goal, for some, is that the book is important enough that the people reading the book today want people in the future to read it as well. It seems to be a shallow distinction, separating the archive from the archivers to the patrons. But without each cog in the machine, the archive becomes nothing more than a dump. Archivers are ‘speculating’ what these ‘unborn hands’ will want and need. This is where archiving becomes a necessary tool for everyone, yes, but also for marginalized communities. In terms of African American literature, it could be argued that the civil war would have gone slightly differently without the accounts of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, but the way slavery and the civil war is taught would be completely different if their writings weren’t archived. People had to decide that these stories would survive, because they thought that those of us in the future would need them.

And towards the end of the chapter I reflect on my time spent in Special Collections this semester. While the library is an archive, I have only ever used it to read books. Some of them were old books, some were old stories repackaged and republished for the next generation. Courtier has captured how I felt working with what felt more like artifacts than books; ”This is the pledge and promise of shadow archivisim, where the preservation of records anticipates a future where the dream may once again grow young, where the vicissitudes of blackness, the split and fragmented, the delayed and deferred, the incomplete and indecipherable nature of these archives become the message.” For the books that are written languages unreadable, the words stop becoming the message. They were the originally message, but time has passed. The frayed edges of the page tell their own story, and while the archivist has saved them so they could be seen, it’s the job of the people to read them.

The Importance of Portability in the Ethiopian Magic Scrolls

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Part 1: The Bibliography

Ethiopian magic scrolls are long, narrow composite objects made from multiple parchment strips joined end-to-end. Each strip is thick, stiffened, and bears a natural light-brown tone on the flesh side and a slightly darker underside. The strips are sewn together with leather through pairing holes or simple overcast stitching, producing a continuous scroll that can measure several feet in total length while remaining narrow in width, as small as a few inches. When rolled, the scroll curves with the inscribed surface facing inward, protecting the written and pictorial elements.

The support is vellum, prepared to a fairly coarse finish. The parchment’s rigidity increases with age; edges may cockle and some strips show folding creases where the scroll was repeatedly rolled. The flesh side retains more abrasion and darkening than the hair side, and occasional thinning or worming may be present at stitch sites. Surface abrasion and small losses are visible along fold lines and at the stitched joins, but overall the sheets remain structurally sound because of the substantial thickness of each strip.

Rather than a codex binding, the scroll is an assembled roll: individual parchment leaves are joined by sewing and sometimes reinforced with narrow leather or cloth patches at the joins. The leather ties that hold the seams together are visible along the reverse. There is no spine in the codicological sense; instead the object’s cohesion depends on the stitching sequence and the outer tie or wrap used to close it when not in use. The scroll may have had a primary outer fastening—cord, leather strap, or a protective cover—but in many preserved specimens this has been lost or survives only as fragments.

The text is written vertically along the length of the scroll and is usually arranged in either single narrow columns or paired columns read left to right along the unrolled surface. Columns are separated from pictorial fields and marginal notation by decorative ruling. Narrow vertical guide lines or ruled margins run near the outer edges of the strips and help constrain the writing. Lines of text are regularly spaced; scribal hand size varies but is generally compact to economize the limited width of the support.

The script is Ge’ez, written by hand in a black ink that remains the primary graphic element across the scroll. A secondary pigment of various colors, although the accent color is typically the same on each scroll, is used sparingly to highlight words, headings, invocations, or to add details to drawn figures. The ink thickness and stroke quality indicate that the writing style is consistent with no added emphasis such as larger text or bold for headings. It also implies that each scroll is written by a single person. Occasional corrections and overwrites show that the scribe worked directly on the parchment without extensive preparatory sketches.

The horizontal separators between text and images are decorative bands featuring geometric shapes and repeated motifs—zigzags, triangles, and dot or chevron patterns—executed in black and sometimes accented with color. These bands serve a dual purpose: organizing the scroll’s sections and visually distinguishing textual matter from pictorial. Vertical ruling lines, often drawn in faint ink, mark margins and provide alignment for columns. Illustrations are hand-drawn and integrated into the scroll at specific locations rather than being appended as loose plates. Figures typically occupy a full-width zone between bands of text and are often framed by the decorative horizontal lines. The imagery tends to be schematic and symbolic: supernatural human-like creatures, saints or holy figures, crosses, and anthropomorphic protective talismans. Figures are drawn primarily in black ink with selective colorful accents for haloes, garments, or weapon details. Compositionally, the head and torso are frequently emphasized and stylized while limbs and lower bodies are reduced or abstracted to fit the narrow format. Marginalia and small talismanic markings may appear beside the main figures. Small marginalia, cryptic signs, and talismanic diagrams often inhabit the spaces between text columns and pictorial panels. 

Width is consistently narrow compared with the overall length, designed for portability and sequential unrolling. The scroll’s edges may show darker handling wear, and the outermost sections—those rolled on the outside—are more abraded and discolored. Creasing and flattening along repeated fold or roll lines show frequent use. The reverse side occasionally contains practice strokes or inventories of ingredients, suggesting the scroll served as a working tool for a practitioner rather than as a display object. The entirety of the page is utilized. The scroll alternates blocks of text with pictorial vignettes, separated by decorative horizontal rules. This alternation suggests a ritual sequence where textual incantations, lists of names, or liturgical formulas accompany visual protective figures. The scroll lacks foliation in a modern sense; navigation would have been tactile and visual, using repetitious graphic markers to find specific spells or images.

Ownership marks on these scrolls are often non-standard: small inscriptions naming an owner or healer, added seals, or pasted strips with later annotations. Repairs are common at sewing joins and along edges; some repairs use later leather or cloth strips and modern threads. Repaired holes and patching indicate the scroll’s continuous practical use and value.

As a material object, the Ethiopian magic scroll sits at the intersection of manuscript, talisman, and ritual implement. Its narrow, stitched construction, combined inks and pictorial elements, and clear signs of handling identify it as a portable healing or protective tool assembled and maintained by a practitioner—often a church-associated or lay exorcist—rather than a book intended for passive reading in a library. Its physical wear, repairs, and layered marginalia document a continuous, practical life in the hands of practitioners and owners rather than an archival, library-centered existence.

Part 2: The Analysis

Ethiopian magic scrolls are religious objects designed to move: long, narrow rolls of sewn parchment whose images, texts, and physical form function together as portable technologies for purging illness and restoring a person’s capacity to circulate in daily life. They are tailored to the individual wearer, alternately banded with blocks of Ge’ez text and pictorial plates that are exposed sequentially during rites designed to expel evil spirits and demons. Reading the scroll through mobility—how it is carried, worn, unrolled, repaired, and exchanged—reveals how form follows function: portability shapes pictorial composition and ritual use, while the scroll’s preservation attests to its therapeutic value.

The scroll’s construction emphasizes durability and compactness. Multiple thick parchment strips are sewn end-to-end and often reinforced with leather stitching and outer ties so the roll can be tightly wound for transport and repeatedly unrolled for ritual display. The narrow width minimizes bulk and weight while a long linear sequence provides staged content: the healer unrolls to the next pictorial plate, exposes it to the patient or congregation, performs the corresponding invocation, then rerolls the scroll for transport. Unlike a codex, whose spine and sewn gatherings favor stationary consultation and page-turning, the scroll’s rolled format is optimized for motion—carrying in a case, slipping under a cloak, or wearing on and around the body—so that sacred images and texts travel with both practitioner and client.

Many healing scrolls are bespoke objects made to a client’s height so the unrolled sequence corresponds to body zones from head to foot; the client’s name is often added to confirm the scroll’s directed purpose. This personalization allows the scroll to be wrapped around a person for head-to-toe protection, converting the object into a wearable talisman rather than a passive book. Image placement therefore follows a bodily logic: plates addressing head ailments appear near the beginning of the unrolled length, chest or abdominal protections appear mid-scroll, and so on. The entirety of the scroll is custom made for the client. They weren’t mass produced for sales or profit, and they weren’t completely standardized. 

The pictorial program is central to the scroll’s portable functionality. Images are schematic and bold—emphasizing heads, eyes, haloes, weapons, nets, and geometric talismans—so they read quickly during ritual exposure. Large, high-contrast outlines in black ink provide immediate legibility; selective accenting in red, pink, blue, or brown highlights operative features and acts like a visual rubric for the practitioner. Decorative horizontal bands frame pictorial plates and act as visual separators, enabling quick navigation: a healer can feel or see the next band, unroll to the next plate, and enact the corresponding rite without laborious textual search. The imagery therefore functions as both symbol and instruction: it signals which spiritual agent to invoke, which body part to treat, and which physical gesture or handling the healer must perform to activate the talismanic power.

These scrolls are explicitly religious instruments whose primary therapeutic mechanism is spiritual: they eliminate illness by expelling demons and evil spirits through a ritual sequence of images and prayers. The pictorial plates often combine Christian iconography—crosses, haloed figures, archangels—and apotropaic geometries; this combination anchors the scroll’s authority in recognizable sacred figures while deploying talismanic signs that trap or bind harmful forces. The healer’s use of the image—exposure, touch, motion over the afflicted body, and recited Ge’ez formulas—constitutes a ritual technology that enacts exorcism and thereby seeks to restore bodily and social mobility. The scroll’s portability is thus integral to its religious aim: to move to the afflicted, to act on their mobility, and to return them to the social circuits of work, worship, and family life once cured.

Wear patterns and repairs document that the scrolls were frequently touched and wrapped in different positions. Outer rolls often show darkened edges and abrasion consistent with exposure to hands, dust, and sweat; localized creasing at frequent fold points indicates repeated unrolling in varied settings. Repairs—re-stitched joints, leather or cloth patches, and later thread types—reveal conscious decisions to maintain a working object rather than retire it. Marginal additions and smaller later hands that write extra talismans or ownership notes mark episodes when the scroll passed between owners or was adapted for new clients. These material interventions form a palimpsest of movement: every patch, re-sewn seam, and added mark is evidence of the scroll’s circulation through households, marketplaces, and the fact that they were repaired means that the owner wanted them to last.

Mobility is not only physical but also social and economic. Portable scrolls enter markets of exchange as commissioned goods, gifts, or loaned items; their production and repair involve craft resources and payments, creating material ties among clients, healers, and suppliers. A bespoke scroll is a costly, tradable asset: commissioning one signals social investment in a person’s health and mobility, while repairing and reusing a scroll demonstrates communal trust in its efficacy. Ownership inscriptions, pasted strips, and added seals or marginal notes trace the social routes of exchange and binding relationships across families and communities. Following the scroll as it moves reconstructs networks of care and the flows of protective knowledge otherwise invisible in institutional archives.

The scroll’s ultimate purpose is to restore the patient’s independent capacity to circulate. In agrarian and market-based societies where mobility links directly to livelihood and social participation, a ritual technology that physically travels to the patient and acts to remove spiritual impediments to movement is especially salient. Wearing a scroll made and named for you is a literal aid to reentering everyday movement: it protects while traveling, it signals healed status to others, and it materially documents a therapeutic intervention. Thus portability mediates the relationship between health and social being, enabling individuals to reclaim the spatial freedom necessary for economic, religious, and familial life.

Viewed through mobility, Ethiopian magic scrolls appear as engineered objects whose sewn structure, bespoke sizing, bold imagery, and patterns of repair make them effective devices for itinerant spiritual care. The differences from codex books—rolled format optimized for handling and wearing, image sequencing aligned to bodily use, and tactile navigation suited for fieldwork—underscore how form is adapted to social function. Future study pairing close material analysis (wear-pattern mapping, thread and pigment assays) with ethnographic accounts of contemporary practice would deepen understanding of how mobility signatures vary across regions and communities. Tracking scrolls as moving things recasts them not as static artifacts but as active participants in networks of healing, exchange, and movement that sustained religious life in Ethiopia for centuries.

Works Cited

Windmuller-Luna, K. (2015, April 1). Ethiopian healing scrolls. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/ethiopian-healing-scrolls 

Connections and Connotations

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Chapter 4 of The Book is titled “The Book as an Interface”, which is something I had never thought of before. Which, is a common feeling that I’ve hand while reading this book. When I think of the word interface, the first thought that comes to mind is user interface and user experience design. I have always associated the word with computers and software. A quick search tells me that interface is defined simply as “to interact”, which helps me understand the chapter better. Borsuk spends a good amount of time showing how different types of electronic devices and computers were based on and built off of the book. A notable section reads, “To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading … but to profoundly transform the metaphoric relation of word to world.” This combined with the discussion in last weeks lecture, led me to the realization that words do have meanings. E-readers were modeled after books for no other reason than a desire to be familiar to users. I have said the word “page” in terms of websites and webpages and I have never once made the connection between a page of paper and a website. It seems so obvious looking back, as to the reader, it isn’t the page that’s important rather what’s on the page. They are both ways of displaying information, and describing it to people unfamiliar to the web by saying “Think of it like a page” makes a ton of sense.

These intentionally made connotations have been forgotten to time. Desktop, window, tab. I may not be a linguist, but I’m a little disappointed in myself for not making the connections sooner. It’s another instance of not viewing the computer and internet as objects themselves. I spent so long looking through the screen that I never really looked at it and thought about what I was using, and how software was limiting what I could do.

I also wanted to touch on the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, as they are things that I personally use. I have read many books, mostly for class but not always, on the Internet Archive, and I’ve used the Wayback Machine to find old websites. I didn’t know very much about the history of the website, and I found it interesting to learn about how they acquired their materials. Borsuk writes, “Not only did the Archive prioritize not destroying the books they scanned, the process of handling so many, coupled with the constraints of copyright, led it to take the surprising step in 2011 of starting a physical archive for them.” At first, this seemed a bit counter productive. But, after reflecting, I’ve realized that the internet doesn’t last forever. Well, I’ve always known that. I’ve used various different archives on the internet, such as the Harry Potter fanfiction archive, which saves stories that were deleted by their original authors. But anything can happen to a website. Having the physical books, and not destroying them in the scanning process, means they can reupload or reprint them as necessary.

The Types of Typefaces, and the Feelings of Fonts

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While reading chapters 13, 15, and 16 of History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs, there was a section in chapter 16 that stood out to me. The section was titled Jan Tschihcold and the New Typography, and it followed the namesake Tschihcold and his life as a typographer. Typography as I new it was the study and creation of fonts. As someone that’s taken a few graphic design classes, I’ve spent a bit of time learning about typography. Not very much, but I know enough to adjust things like the kerning or spacing of an already existing typeface. I’ve never created my own font, and whenever I saw old drafts of existing fonts, I would realize that typographers took details into account that I had never considered.

Returning to Tschihcold, the chapter explains how influential he had been in the mass adoption of various typefaces for publishers. He had created something called the “new typography”, which was asymmetrical and challenged the current status quo. In 1933, Tschihcold was arrested in Munich by Nazi’s. Meggs writes, “Accused of being a “cultural Bolshevik” and creating “un-German” typography, he was denied a teaching position in Munich. After six weeks of “protective custody” Tschichold was released,” and at first, I was confused. Un-German typography? What does that even mean? But I quickly realized that it was because words have power, people trust writings and books. Even in modern times, certain fonts have certain uses and stereotypes surrounding them. I wouldn’t turn in an academic essay in comic sans, nor would I use a cursive font for a presentation. I don’t associate those activities with those fonts. I might not know why I think that way at first glance, but with some thought, we can come to understand how these perceptions form. Typography is not only about the text that is being written, it is an artform. And art can emotionally connect with people. If this font Tschihcold created felt un-German, and people began to associate this positive thing with other cultures or non-Nazi practices, then I can understand why it worried the Nazis. I’ve already established that typographers think about small details that the general populace don’t notice. It sounded paranoid at first, but if you desire power, that last thing you want is for the public to be able to read anything and everything.

After this incident, Tschihcold moved to Switzerland and work for a publisher. While doing so, he moved on from the new typography and began creating other projects. He still believed in new typography, but it was created as a response to the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, and he didn’t feel there was more he needed to add to it. For him, typography was about expression; “He continued to feel that the new typography was suitable for publicizing industrial products and communication about contemporary painting and architecture, but also believed it was folly to use it for a book of baroque poetry, for example, and he called reading long pages of sans serif “genuine torture.” And this is something that I agree with. I am currently typing in a sans serif font, and I definitely prefer serif fonts!

Overall, fonts are important. They are how a word is written, and they effect how a word is read and perceived. This is something I’ve always loved about writing. For example, I have a story in my community college’s literary journal in which the real story is in the marginalia, and each character is assigned a different font, as if it was there handwriting. I chose each font for a reason, and it was important to me because how the characters were writing was just as if not more so important than what they were writing. In the modern day, we take advantage of how many fonts are available to us online, and we tend to forget that all of those fonts were first an idea, than made by hand.