Two Fragments, Catalogued Apart

The manuscript reached Europe in pieces and was not recognised as one book. Two separate fragments surfaced in Spain in the nineteenth century, were published and named independently, and were catalogued as distinct Maya manuscripts before a scholar noticed that they joined. The composite names still used for the parts preserve that history, and page numbering in the older literature can refer to either the fragments or the reconstructed whole, which is a standing source of confusion in citations. The physical object is a screenfold of bark paper coated with lime plaster, painted on both sides and folded like a concertina, which is the standard Mesoamerican book form.

Only a handful of Maya books survived the systematic burning of them after the conquest, and this is the longest of them. Its scribes were not equal. The hands differ noticeably in skill and habit across the manuscript, and the number of them has been argued at length, with proposals ranging from a small team to a much larger group working in sequence or side by side. That variation is one of the very few direct windows onto how such books were produced, since no workshop, no tools and no unfinished example survive to show the process from any other angle, and the painted pages have to answer the question on their own.