Most books become too fragile to handle when they re barely a hundred years old.
I myself have some books published in the early 19th century which I rarely take out because even the process of turning a page tends to fragment the paper. Well, this particular notebook of Archimedes must have pages of some indestructible material which they can no longer make, because not only are they still in the sort of state of preservation that they can be read, but it seems that, because some of them were cleaned up and reused by some one else, restoration experts are busy trying to erase the over-written pages to make the original text decipherable. Perhaps nowadays we could call him a nerd. He lived in a small city-state called Syracuse on the eastern shore of Sicily. He was an advisor to the king as a sort of military engineer, whose job was to erect fortifications around the city which would withstand the missiles of pregunpowder wars.