Fable
The scripture copying institute no longer moved the entire wall of tables indoors
The academy had a group of scribes who specialized in comparing long scrolls against each other. Each person held one page and needed to know its relationship to the other pages. The old method was to spread all pages out in pairs across the hall, and whoever needed to compare would walk over to look. For short scrolls it was fine, and everyone could still remember where they had looked.
When the long scroll arrived, the hall was flooded by a sea of paper. The clerk moved pages back and forth, the candles burned out, and the time actually spent reading characters became less. The director first expanded the hall, but it soon became insufficient again; he hired more paper carriers, but the aisles became even more crowded.
A record keeper changed the method: instead of spreading out the whole volume at once, he divided the pages into small sections and brought them to the near desk section by section. The scribe completed one round of comparison at the near desk, recorded the necessary results, and then switched to the next section. The extra paper in between did not fall to the ground, and there was less carrying and copying.
At first everyone worried that spreading fewer sheets would miss relationships. The first version did make mistakes: some small cells didn't carry the cumulative results when the table changed, and previously reviewed relationships seemed blown away by the wind. The scroll keeper required the running ledger to be updated every round and every cell to be completed in strict order.
After several trials, the resulting relationships were the same as spreading paper across the whole hall—just with far less hauling. The clerk didn't read any less of what needed reading; he simply changed the order of reading, recording, and moving, shrinking the temporary paper mountain in the hall into flowing cells on a nearby desk.
The academy could finally handle longer scrolls. What had been stuck before was not eyesight, but the habit of spreading out all the intermediate sheets of paper. The scroll keeper said that the clever part was to spend effort on comparison itself, and waste less on spreading paper all over the ground.
Later, whenever a new long scroll came, the clerk first arranged the grid and the pocket ledger, then began writing the comparison. The hall was empty, but the long scroll was read even faster.
Later, the scroll keeper taught the new method to the neighboring academy. At first the neighboring academy only learned to divide into sections but forgot the portable ledger, and as a result lost track of relationships. The scroll keeper reminded them that saving paper is not the goal; moving less intermediate paper without losing results is the crux of this craft. Later, the scribes discovered that the cleaner the desk, the more they could focus on the true relationships between pages. The longer the scroll, the more critical this saving becomes.