For the uninitiated, the Hall of Lore 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 contributions to Númenor, ensuring the scrolls they left behind were safe from those who despised the race. However, if you look closely at the Hall of Lore, you can see bound books lying around, separate from the bevy of scrolls organized in the room. It implies that bookbinding was not a gift by the elves, and instead a creation by the humans who inhabit Númenor.
/Film’s Vanessa Armstrong interviewed production designer Ramsey Avery, who revealed just how intentional and detailed his work was from the start:
“One of the decisions that I sold the showrunners on early is that elves didn’t have bound books — they didn’t invent book binding. We know that Elrond has books in the Third Age, but that doesn’t mean that they had books in the Second Age. So, I wanted to tell the story that Númenorians invented book binding, and that this storage of older information, everything would have to be scrolls. I looked at a bunch of Tibetan storage, because of the scrolls, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really cool because now we can have this whole space that’s filled with scrolls.’“
The creative detail exemplifies how the kingdom of Númenor continued to advance despite its isolation from Middle-earth. Moreover, “The Rings of Power” confirms that despite the vast intelligence the elves have to offer, they still have not evolved very much in that regard.