Loco Vendere Liber: ("place to sell the book")

In class we have discussed institutions of knowledge like the library, the monastery, and the university, which pertained to written knowledge, but what about the bookstore?

We might just assume that the Roman book trade has little pertinence or relevance to today’s own complicated market, but there are actually many similarities. Granted, there was no Internet and even no printing press; however, as literacy reached the masses, the bookstore became an ever-increasing important institution of knowledge.

example of an ancient scroll

To understand the institution of the bookstore and its relation to the book trade in general, we must understand what constituted a book. In the essay "Scrolling Down the Ages", Mary Beard remarks on the construction and evolution of books. She states that until the second century, texts were written on sheets of papyrus, which were fastened to two wooden rods creating a scroll. (Just imagine how hard it would be to "thumb" through a scroll) It was a very labor-intensive task to copy scrolls because they all had to be done by hand. This lent itself to the creation of  transcribing and selling as one entity, making the tradesman both publishers and distributors. Hence, the creation of the bookstore.

[Sidenote: Beard also makes a witty note about the poor state of authors at the time. Paraphrasing Horace, the ancient poet, she says “booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes” (2). ]

Until the 1^st century, bookstores were not commonplace in Roman society because the circulation of texts was done primarily through private and personal connections. If you were a friend of the author, then the author’s slave would conjure up a copy, but otherwise, there was no way to obtain texts. When the bookstore became a more acceptable way to buy literature, then the diversity and proliferation of books and ideas began to expand. In the periodical The Classic Quarterly, Raymond J. Starr discusses the reasons for the growing prominence of the bookstore as an entity in ancient Rome in his article entitled “The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World”.

Pliny the Elder, author and philsopher

 

First, Starr says that authors during the time of the Roman author Pliny in the 1^st century AD may have wanted to reach beyond the narrow circles of their own friends and their friends' friends. This is not due to an increase in ambition of authors at that time, but rather an interest in obtaining a wider audience. The broader distribution that occurred doesn’t imply an enormous increase in the number and diversity of the reading public, since the potential audience remained the intellectual aristocracy; however, the change was profound because it implied the breakthrough of literature from the exclusive bonds of friendship.

Second, Starr attributes a larger role for bookshops to the emergence of a relatively new type of Roman writer. Before bookshops, writing was a strictly social event between friends, so older Roman writers found writing to be more of a hobby in their aristocratic lifestyle. They had other things like politics, marriage alliances, and family traditions to affect their social relationships, so although writing was important, it was not central to old Roman writers. However, for the newer writers (such as Martial in the 1^st century BC) writing was a way of making contact with the elite. They relied on the patronage of the aristocratic elite to promote their works and so writing became not just a pleasurable hobby, but it played a functional purpose.

Martial, a symbol of the "new" writer

Lastly, Starr mentions that because the bookstore did not have a status above that of a luxury store, the “very commonality of commercial status may hint that literature was becoming something that could be bought and sold like perfume or expensive fabric” (12). Since literature was a symbol of social status, its reduction to a marketable commodity indicated a weakening of the traditionally elite aristocracy. In this later period, bookstores then made it possible for the masses to gain access to literature even before those in more refined and exclusive circles.

In closing, Starr remarks that “for all these suggestions, Roman literature remained the preserve of the aristocracy except in oratorical events and public performances. If bookshops helped literature move out of the strict control of aristocratic groups of friends, they actually did so only to help outsiders gain access to those elite circles” (12).  

Reading about the ancient Roman bookstores made me ponder on the bookstores of our day. The institution has evolved over time so now bookstores are a way that the masses can gain access to writings of the elite (even the ancient classics like Livy, Horace, and Virgil), abolishing the need for connections with any kind of aristocracy. Has this devalued books? Or has this just diversified the subject matter and perspective of literature? It makes me think how the ancient Roman authors and poets would view the institution of the bookstore in our day. I wonder--would they be intrigued? Appalled? Amazed?