ROMAN WAXED TABLET
The present method of binding flat books might have originated with these old tablets
The “Acts of the Senate” grew into a diary of general news, known as the “Acts of the City,” and it is likely that the educated slaves in the families of public men were called into service to duplicate copies for circulation.
Altho the Emperor Augustus, who reigned in Rome at the beginning of the Christian era, discontinued publishing the Acts of the Senate, he encouraged the writing and copying of books to such extent that the period is a memorable one in literature. The classic authors, Virgil and Horace, wrote at that time, and many other important manuscripts were produced.
Slave labor was utilized for copying, and large editions of manuscript rolls were produced with an ease that rivaled the later method of the printing press. In such instances it was the custom for a reader to read aloud, to, say, one hundred trained writers. The possibilities of this process may be imagined. Horace allowed his slaves rations which were so meager that the entire cost of production, including papyrus and binding, of a small book was equivalent to about twelve cents in United States coin.
Thus it will be seen that in the days of the Roman Empire books were plentiful and cheap because of slave labor, just as they are cheap in modern times because of machinery.
For most of their books the Romans, as had the Egyptians and Greeks before them, used rolls of papyrus wound about rods.
Ordinarily these rods were made of wood, but for highly-prized manuscripts, rods made of ivory with gold balls at the ends were used, and the writing in such cases was on purple-colored parchment, elaborately decorated with gold or red ink.
The present style of flat sheet books might have originated with the use by the Romans of tablets of wood or metal, wax-coated, on which memoranda were scratched with the stylus. Several tablets were hinged together and the wax surface was protected by raised edges in the manner of the modern school slates (see illustration). This led to the use of several leaves of vellum fastened together and enclosed by richly carved ivory covers, a form that came into use about 300 A.D., shortly before Constantine removed the Roman capital to Constantinople. Constantinople naturally became the center of civilization, and the work of transcribing manuscripts was taken up in that city. In the eighth century the reigning emperor, in order to punish the transcribers for insubordination, caused the library at Constantinople to be “surrounded by vast piles of fagots, which being fired at a given signal, the whole building was totally destroyed, along with its twelve scribes and chief librarian and more than thirty thousand volumes of precious manuscripts.” It seems to have been a favorite method of punishment during the Middle Ages for those in authority to destroy valuable manuscripts.