After the invention of the alphabet and of paper (papyrus) books multiplied as never before. "Of making many books there is no end," exclaimed Solomon a thousand years before the Christian era. Greece in her early day was slow to make books, but after she learned from the Phœnicians (800 B.C.) how to use an alphabet she made up for lost time. In 600 B.C. there was a public library at Athens, and 200 years later the Greeks had written more good books than all the other countries in the world combined.
But the most productive of ancient book-makers were the Romans. In Rome publishing houses were flourishing in the time of Cicero (50 B.C.). Atticus, one of Cicero's best friends, was a publisher. Let us see how a book was made in his establishment. Of course, there were no type-setters or printing-presses. Every book was a manuscript; every word of every copy had to be written with a pen. The writing was sometimes done by slaves trained to write neatly and rapidly. We may imagine 50 or 100 slaves sitting at desks in a room writing to the dictation of the reader. Now if Atticus had ten readers each of whom dictated to 100 slaves it took only two or three days for the publication of 1,000 copies of one of his friend Cicero's books. Of course every copy would not be perfect. The slave would sometimes make blunders and write what the reader did not dictate. But books in our own time are not free of errors. An English poet recently wrote:
"Like dew-drops upon fresh blown roses."
In print the first letter of the last word in the line appeared as n instead of r. This mistake disfigured thousands of copies. In the Roman publishing house such a blunder marred only one copy.
You can readily see that by methods just described books could be made in great numbers. And so they were. Slaves were cheap and numerous and the cost of publication was small. It is estimated that a good sized volume in Nero's time (50 A.D.) would sell for a shilling. Books were cheaper in those days than they had ever been before and almost as cheap as they are to-day, perhaps. The Roman world became satiated with reading matter. The poet Martial exclaimed, "Every one has me in his pocket, every one has me in his hand." Books became a drug on the market and could be sold only to grocers for "wrapping up pastry and spices."
But a time was to come when books would not be so plentiful and cheap. With the overthrow of Rome (476 A.D.) culture received a blow from which it did not recover for a thousand years. The barbarian invaders of Southern Europe destroyed all the books they could find and caused the writers of books to flee within the walls of the churches. Throughout the Middle Ages nearly all the writing in Europe was done in the religious houses of monks (Fig. 8), and nearly all the books written were of a religious nature. The monks worked with the greatest patience and care upon their manuscripts. They often wrote on vellum (calf-skin parchment) and illuminated the page with beautiful colors and adorned it with artistic figures.
The manuscript volumes of the dark ages were beautiful and magnificent, but their cost was so great that only the most wealthy could buy. A Bible would sometimes cost thousands of dollars. Along in the 14th and 15th centuries Europe began to thirst for knowledge and there arose a demand for cheap books. How could the demand be met? There were now no hordes of intelligent slaves who could be put to work with their pens, and without slave labor the cost of the written book could not be greatly reduced. Invention, as always, came to the rescue and gave the world what it wanted.
In the first place, writing material was made cheaper by the invention of paper-making. The wasp in making its nest had given a hint for paper-making, but man was extremely slow to take the hint. The Chinese had done something in the way of making paper from the bark of trees as early as the first century, but it was not until the middle of the 13th century that paper began to be manufactured in Europe from hemp, rags, linen, and cotton.