The history of the book studies how a text's material carrier, papyrus scroll, parchment or paper codex, movable type printing, shaped who could produce, own, read and alter it, treating the shift between formats as a historical event with real consequences rather than a neutral change of container. The discipline took its modern form with Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'Apparition du livre, published in 1958, which studied the spread of printing in Europe after Gutenberg as a social and economic transformation, tracing how the printed book changed literacy, standardized texts that manuscript copying had let drift, and reorganized who controlled the production of religious and scholarly writing.
Every scripture the atlas describes has a material history of its own, oral transmission giving way to manuscript, manuscript to print, print eventually to digital text, and each transition changed who could produce an authoritative copy and how uniform that copy was. The history of the book supplies the dates and mechanisms of those transitions for a given tradition's scripture, letting the atlas distinguish a genuinely ancient textual variant from one introduced by a documented later printing history.