Bound Manuscripts

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Bound Manuscripts gathers three witnesses the atlas catalogues under this node because each is a single physical volume whose survival, rather than any printed edition, is what its scripture's wording ultimately rests on.

The Shinpukuji Kojiki is the oldest surviving manuscript of Japan's oldest book, copied by a Buddhist monk in Nagoya in 1371 and 1372, six hundred and fifty nine years after the text was first presented to the court; nothing earlier survives, and the six intervening centuries are represented only by a colophon noting one lost exemplar. The Printer's Manuscript of the Book of Mormon is the working copy from which the first edition was typeset at Palmyra in 1830, written out mostly by Oliver Cowdery so the original dictation would not have to be handed to a printer, a precaution that mattered later when the sealed original lost most of its own pages to water damage. The Kartarpur Bir, held by the Sodhi family, is claimed by Sikh tradition to be the very volume Bhai Gurdas wrote down for Guru Arjan in 1604, though scholars have argued for over a century, on the evidence of erasures and a disputed index, over whether that identification actually holds.

What binds the three is physical singularity: each is the one bound object a whole textual tradition's wording is checked against, and in each case that dependence is itself contested or costly in a different way.