# There were indeed bookstores in antiquity! <cite>by u/tinyblondeduckling</cite> ## Metadata - Author: tinyblondeduckling - Via:: [[rAskHistorians]] - Full Title: Are There Any Records of Dedicated Bookstores Existing (And Succeeding) Prior to the Invention of the Printing Press? At What Point in History Would Book Production Costs Been Low Enough and Literacy Rates High Enough to Make a Bookstore a Viable Business? - Link: https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ppz392/are_there_any_records_of_dedicated_bookstores - [i] Outline - [[Rome had dedicated booksellers]] - [[Roman authors hand-copied books to give to friends]] - [[bookmaking in antiquity mostly used papyrus]] - [[book acquisition in ancient Rome relied on personal connections]] ## Highlights ### q1 Rome had dedicated booksellers > In Rome, most prominently in the imperial period, we find references to the buying and selling of books from dedicated booksellers. > > While costs weren’t so low that a book market entirely replaced traditional circulation methods for new works, they also weren’t so prohibitive as to keep bookselling from being potentially profitable. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fgy1v9ntmrv7jgknc184vb0p) ### q2 Roman authors hand-copied books to give to friends > Martial could copy out his books at his own expense and give them to a bad friend, or Quintus can go buy them himself from a store like people Martial doesn’t know personally. This last point gives an indication that there may have still been, among elite readers active in literary circles, a social value to receiving a copy from the author themself. While Martial is not alone in mentioning literary sales - and this is hardly the only reference to the activity in Martial’s poetry - in this poem we can get a good sense of the increasingly important role played by commercial sales of books alongside the continued existence of traditional personal circulation of a work by its author. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fgy1whckma2e8djj8nwe0xw8) ### q3 bookmaking in antiquity mostly used papyrus > For most of antiquity the majority of book production, whether in bookroll form (as was most common for Classical literature up to the end of the 3rd century CE) or as a codex (as was most common for Christian literature of all periods, Classical literature after the 3rd century CE), used papyrus. Although an older assumption still sometimes circulates about the expense of using papyrus, that’s been quite thoroughly debunked at this point, and we have no reason to think that papyrus as a material was prohibitively expensive for book production. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fgy1wy3bejt8yfr3mnjzzsmh) ### q4 book acquisition in ancient Rome relied on personal connections > I should also note though that while there were booksellers, there wasn’t anything that looked like modern publishing. A book’s initial circulation was informal and happened by the individual dissemination of a text by the author’s circle. Additionally, booksellers made their own copies, which means that, like getting a book to copy from a friend, patrons were limited to what their bookseller could access. And there was no sort of central publishing house, and there was no sort of large-scale printing that could then be distributed > > lack of a printing press didn’t prevent the development of a robust literary culture, one whose demands were capable of supporting the sale rather than solely the private distribution of books, but it looked quite different from what we see later. This is potentially useful for developing the culture of bookselling around [[Tal]] - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fgy1xqr8m8j54bgqn68cybz7)