For the uninitiated, the Hall of Knowledge was created by the elves and later kept intact by the previous king, Queen Miriel’s (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) father, Tar Palantir. He admired the elves and their contribution to Númenor, ensuring that the scrolls they left behind were safe from those who despised the race. However, if you look closely at the Hall of Knowledge, you can see bound books lying around, separate from the stacks of scrolls organized in the room. This means that the binding was not a gift from the elves, but was created by the humans who inhabit Númenor.
/Vanessa Armstrong in the movie interview with production designer Ramsey Averywhich showed how deliberate and detailed his work was from the beginning:
“One of the solutions I sold to the showrunners early on is that the elves didn’t have bound books—they didn’t invent bookbinding. We know Elrond has Third Age books, but that doesn’t mean they had Second Age books. So I wanted to tell the story of the Númenorians inventing bookbinding and that it was the storage of old information, everything had to be scrolls. I looked at a bunch of Tibetan scroll storage and thought, “Wow, that’s really cool because now we can have all this space filled with scrolls.”“
The creative detail shows how the kingdom of Númenor continued to thrive despite its isolation from Middle-earth. Moreover, “Rings of power” confirms that despite the immense intelligence that elves have to offer, they are still not very advanced in this regard.
