Taking Inventory: Book and Quill

To craft one, you’ll need three things. Two of them are obvious – a book and a quill (better known as a feather). The third is ink – most easily obtained from a squid. After all, if there’s no ink in your quill, you won’t be able to write much.

Ah yes, writing. Hit the use key while holding a book and quill in your hands, and you’ll bring up the writing screen. You can type in whatever you like, with a few constraints that depend on the version of the game you’re playing. In Java Edition, books can be up to 100 pages long, with up to 1023 characters per page. In Bedrock Edition, books can be 50 pages long, with 256 characters per page.

Pour out your heart. Tell your stories. Confess your past loves, mourn your losses, and celebrate your greatest triumphs. Just make sure that after you’ve done so, you hit the “Done” button so it can be saved. You can go back later and edit further if you want to, but eventually you’ll be finished. When you are, hit the “Sign” button in the interface to give it a title and make it final.

One more hot tip – there are also a few lil codes for making your masterwork even more special – §l creates bold text, §o creates italic text, §0 – f (hexadecimal) creates colored text, and §k creates randomly changing characters. §r resets any of the previous styles so text after it appears normally.

The history of writing goes back a long way – all the way to the Sumerians in 3000BCE pressing a stylus into soft clay tablets that were then baked. Pens may have been invented by the ancient Egyptians not too long afterwards – they used reeds, which were sliced off at an angle and dipped into ink.

Quills became more popular somewhere around 700CE, because feathers were able to produce a finer letter than reeds. As well as written text, they were sometimes used for decorations and images – but most illuminators preferred to use a paintbrush for this kind of work. They went into decline once the metal pen began being mass-manufactured in Birmingham in the UK, around 1822, but quills were still the primary pen of choice in Europe for more than a thousand years.

People still use quills to write today, though mostly as a hobby. Some have been fitted with metal nibs, or even a ballpoint pen mechanism, so you don’t have to dip them in an inkpot all the time. Luckily, in Minecraft, you’ll never run out of ink so this isn’t a problem – you’re free to write and write to your heart’s content, and share that writing with your friends. Can there ever be a greater gift than a good book? Well, a chestful of diamonds sounds pretty good...