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Comment by TT-392 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it was originally visible, but written with a kind of ink that has weathered away over the years, and only the creases the pen left behind are still visible? Or something similar, maybe a kind of ink that was easy to erase on purpose, like pencil, and after erasing, only these creases were left?

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Or maybe they put another paper on top of this one and wrote on it with a quill, leaving an impression on the sheet below.

More likely yeah..

Or pencil given the apparent use of a "stylus".

Pencils are a very recent invention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil

Thanks for the surprisingly interesting read.

I have one of those alloy pencils which seem to predate graphite pencils. Maybe that's what they used

They didn’t have paper. They’d scribble in a wax tablet using a stylus. Evidently sometimes they’d use the stylus to scribble in the margins on parchment or vellum.

> Pretty much like in modern time, evidence of paper by the end of the fourteenth century could be found everywhere: in correspondence, medical recipes, household uses, book production, charms. It was used for the quotidian and the extraordinary

http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/10/paper-in-medieval-engla...

That was 700 years ago, not 1300.

The book is from 1300 years ago; we don't know when the drawings were done. Even if they were done around the time of the creation of the book, clearly the existence of the book itself demonstrates the existence of paper in that part of the world at that time.

The book is a codex written on parchment, not paper. TFA references a stylus.

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