Background on Talmud
When Moses received Torah on Sinai, he received the words on the page and the understanding of what all those words mean. The words became Sefer Torah and Tanach. The understanding of the Torah became the Oral Torah that was passed from generation to generation and then became codified in Mishna and commented on by all the great rabbis. [Please follow this link for Rabbi Winer's comments to this perspective.]
There are two English editions of the Babylonian Talmud and the one that is most widely accepted is the Schottenstein edition published by Artscroll. It is photo-offset from the last typeset edition of Talmud, the Vilna edition, and the plates of the Vilna edition were destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. Given the complexity of the page layouts and the fact that the English edition of Talmud fills seventy-three volumes, these pages will probably never be typeset ever again.
The illustration on tihs page is a sample spread from the Schottenstein Talmud. (Click on it for a larger view.) By the way, it's called the Schottenstein Talmud because Jay Schottenstein and his family endowed its publication. You can see from this image that the layout of the pages are very complex and there are illustrations on many pages. Hubris leads today's civilization to believe we created breakthroughs like "hypertext" but Talmud precedes the web by many centuries.
The page on the left is the English translation of the page on the right. The page on the right is laid out like an onion with the oldest commentary in the middle and subsequent commentary nesting around it with the most modern commentary, commentary coming in around 500ce.
Beth Emek's Religious Committee requested funding in next year's budget to purchase Talmud for our library and the request was declined. So we're going to raise the money to buy Talmud for Beth Emek. We are acting on the primary mitzvot that we have repeated since we were children, "And the study of Torah is equal to them all, because it leads to them all."
Here's a view of a page that helps explain how the Hebrew / Aramaic pages are laid out:
From here...
Freshen up the Congregation Beth Emek Library
The Beth Emek Talmud Project: Table of Contents and Overview