One fact implicit in these arrangements is that books had a distinct
commercial identity. They were not lumped with other commodities
available for purchase (say, furniture or artwork or writing materials),
but sold separately. Their distinctive status emerges in other ways as well.
Books were bundled together for import or export, they were sometimes
disposed of separately in the division of estates, and, not coincidentally,
they engaged the efforts of lawyers to define them in terms of format
and content.^10 The product category denoted by the wordliberthus
acquired a sharper identity than the worker category described by the
termlibrarius.
The difficulty of distinguishing booksellers from otherlibrariimay shed
light on the evolution of the trade in books at Rome, however. The
location of many bookshops off the Forum, in combination with the
variety of book types available for purchase, suggests that, as Phillips
surmised, clerks ‘‘who otherwise made a living transcribing public or
private documents had begun to take on the job of copying and selling
literary works when a market developed.’’
11
There is an instructive com-
parandum for this hypothesis. Centuries later, when a commercial book
trade revived in Paris after the Dark Ages, it was concentrated in a small
area of the Ile de la Cite ́and an adjacent area of the Left Bank. Not only
did this location put booksellers in close proximity to the court, church,
and university circles who made up their clientele, it was also an area in
which tradesmen involved in the production of individually commis-
sioned books—parchment and paper dealers, scribes, illuminators, and
binders—were already established. The Paris book trade coalesced
aslibrariiassumed an entrepreneurial role in the coordination of book-
making services.^12
To focus again on the trade in Rome, however, a further implication of
an organized market is that there must have been a regular demand for
books from some part of the buying public. Who these book buyers
were can be indirectly plotted by a sampling of what they bought: scien-
type in the same area, see Morel 1987, 136 and, for a comparatist perspective, Sjoberg 1960,
101, 189, and 201 (a reference I owe to George Houston).
- The parcels of old Greek books which Gellius found in the port of Brundisium (NA
9.4.1 5) were surely being imported to Rome, and Horace implies atEpist. 1.20.13 that his
own book will eventually be packed with others for export to North Africa or Spain. Book
collections are the subject of bequests at Cic.Att. 1.20.7, 2.1.12,vita Persip. 38.36 41
Clausen, andHA Gord. 18.2 3. Ulpian’s analysis of books is atDig. 32.52. For book auctions,
see Kleberg 1973. - Phillips 1981, 24.
- Rouse and Rouse 2000, vol. 1, pp. 11 49 I am greatly indebted to Paul Gehl of the
Newberry Library for guiding me to this work. Several elements of the situation described by
the Rouses invite comparison with ancient Rome: the clustering of bookshops near the
haunts of the elite, the initial lack of a clear cut term for ‘‘bookseller,’’ the production of
books for sale to the public in tandem with private orders, and a disdain for booksellers on
the part of the educated as crass and uncultured.
272 Institutions and Communities