Dwarkesh Patel

You can see that one has a hole through it.

And they wrote around the hole because too valuable to not use that sheet, right?

These are paper thin.

And you can barely tell, if you look carefully, which side was the outside of the animal and which was the inside, because one side has pores, tiny little speckles of pores.

And what is this from?

Book of Hours.

This is probably a French Book of Hours.

So Book of Hours is a personal prayer book.

Bible quotes, objects of meditation.

So the book would be fat and small.

This was the most common manuscript in the Middle Ages.

And you would carry it around in your pocket.

You'd pull it out different times of day for personal prayer.

But it also has big margins so that you can take notes in it, write down addresses, friends write notes in it.

You use it almost like a day planner.

It's sort of the smartphone of the period in which you make all your notes and information to write down people's names.

You might have celebrities you meet sign your book of hours.

So all sorts of neat things go into the margins as you use this as a way of organizing the day.

Yeah.

But just think about, again, think of a leather jacket, but how much more industrial effort went into making leather, literally paper thin like this.