Roman reading

Open Culture starts its story Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books decisively: “Nobody reads books anymore” — a judgement which we hope is a little premature; but are we, all unawares, just waiting for the demise of the book world? Open Culture‘s video by Garrett Ryan, carrying that same title (though it doesn’t really provide an answer to the why), describes the book business in Rome, and declares that the Roman “book trade declined with the educated élite that had supported it. The copying of secular texts slowed, and finally ceased. The books in Roman libraries, public and private, crumbled on their shelves. Only a small contingent of survivors found their way into monasteries.”

If you don’t see a video here, please click of the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

Are we meant to conclude that books are the modern canary in the coal mine, and that when we stop supporting our publishing industry we’ll be half way to our decline and fall? Save civilization! Buy a book!

As far as we can tell things are not yet at a crisis point. Books continue to sell well and the fact that so many people keep trying to ban books from their local libraries just suggests the importance with which most people endow these knowledge centers. Despite recent reports of the parlous condition of many of our libraries, they are still doing strong business — none of them is, we trust, quite as tumbledown as this Roman library at Ephesus.

The Library of Census, Ephesus. Photo © Travel my way.

Aeon tells us that Rome’s libraries were shrines to knowledge: but this is of course just headline-speak, so we have to overlook the hyperbole. “The institution of the public library goes further back than imperial Rome, of course. During the earlier Roman Republic (509-27 BCE), libraries were a private affair”. Libraries tended to be personal collections, or attached to a religious institution. The first public library in Rome was founded by “a soldier and politician named Gaius Asinius Pollio, who, by 28 BCE – just a year before Octavian became the Emperor Augustus – used his war plunder to fund Rome’s very first ‘public’ library in the Atrium Libertatis”

Professor E. J. Kenney tells us in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature that books tended to be read aloud. (See Recitatio.) No shushing librarians in Rome presumably; though maybe you had to take your scroll home before you started reading it.

Libraries were sufficiently common in Rome that Vitruvius (c. 90 – c. 23 BCE) included instructions on their construction in his On Architecture. He recommended they be built facing east in order to maximize light and minimize dampness. Ignoring the dampness issue, there were apparently libraries attached to public baths; the World History Encyclopedia informs us that “the baths of Trajan (r. 98-117 CE), Caracalla (r. 211-217 CE), and Diocletian (r. 284-305 CE) in Rome all have rooms identified by at least some scholars as libraries, although presumably, if they were, one was not permitted to take a scroll into the steam room.”

Folger Library conservation work

The Folger Shakespeare Library has constantly to take care of its eighty-two copies of the Shakespeare First Folio (out of a total of 233 surviving), as well as all of the other old books in its holdings. The Conservation Department, in the Werner Gundersheimer Conservation Lab, works to repair and stabilize materials in their collection — books, art, and manuscripts, in order to delay deterioration and ensure that the items are as safe as possible to handle. They also monitor the library’s storage environments, and prepare items for exhibitions in the library.

Here’s a blog post by three interns discussing a Folger workshop on manuscript and book conservation. The final year of most graduate art conservation programs in the United States is spent interning at an offsite institution. The Folger Shakespeare Library hosted one book conservation student in 2024-2025. Their intern worked alongside interns from the Library of Congress.

The Folger Shakespeare Library, an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC (201 East Capitol Street, SE), was established by bibliophile oil executive Henry Clay Folger and his wife, Emily Jordan Folger, and opened in 1932, two years after his death. The library is privately endowed and administered by the Trustees of Amherst College, of which Mr Folger was a graduate. It has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare.

The Folger stages Shakespearean and other plays in its Elizabethan Theatre. Originally not intended for theatrical performances, it was first used just for concerts and academic lectures. The theater, which seats around 250, was modeled on the Fortune Playhouse, and the Globe Theatre, but includes features from several other theaters to give visitors a general impression of a theater during the Elizabethan era.

See also an earlier post on the Library’s renovations.

Bibble–babble

Pity the world, but especially its trees. By 2033, Christian missionaries have decided, the Bible will have been translated into every language. To hell with climate control targets; let’s keep our eyes on the important stuff. According to The Economist (paywalled) the Bible is already available in more than seven hundred and fifty of the world’s languages, but these missionaries aim to power on till they’ve gotten it out in all 7,100+ of the languages we believe we have.

Inspiringly, as we are told in an earlier article, Bibles are also available “in regional dialects (a Glaswegian one opens with ‘In the Beginnin’). There are even scriptures in fictitious tongues such as Klingon, from ‘Star Trek’, or Quenya, invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.” Also of course many of the luckier languages have multiple different translations in their tongue.

Translating a Bible takes time — the Authorized (KJV) Bible took seven years and forty-seven scholars. “AI can speed things up significantly. According to some estimates, it would take two years to produce a polished translation of the New Testament with the help of a large language model (LLM), and six years to do the same with the Old Testament. Missions organisations now aim to have at least a portion of the Bible translated into every language by 2033.”

Of course the fact that your smartphone can supply an instant translation is fine and dandy — if you are a speaker of a “popular” language, but not much good to the aspirant Iznasen-speaker in search of salvation. LLMs need training. Some languages have no material available for such training — The Economist tells us that in the business they refer to such languages as “low-resource”! Maybe with these (many) languages our missionaries intend to do things the old-fashioned way — however, “In 1999 Wycliffe, a missions organisation, estimated it would take 150 years to start a translation project in every remaining language. Their model required missionaries to move overseas, learn a language and translate the Bible into it — a process that took decades. Christian groups then started employing local linguists to do the work, but translating the whole Bible still took around 15 years.”

Pinching Pushkin

Via LitHub we are sent a Guardian tale of extensive thefts of historically important Russian books from European libraries.

My May 2024 post Russian alternative realities tells the same story, but the emphasis there on the replacement of some of the stolen books by facsimiles is now downplayed: the replacement books turn out to be pretty obvious fakes.

“Of the approximately 170 books that have gone missing, none of the originals have been recovered. ‘I don’t have any hope we will get them back in the near future’, said [Bartosz] Jandy, the Polish prosecutor. ‘That would need cooperation with Russia, and while we’re almost at war that’s impossible’.”

Several people have been prosecuted, but, it is assumed, by no means all the participants. I guess when a Russian oligarch wants something it doesn’t do to enquirer too closely into provenance. (Funny how the word oligarch seems nowadays almost always to be accompanied by the qualifying adjective Russian!)

Gender differences in reading

Corot: Interrupted Reading

It is a truth universally acknowledged that women read more books than men do, just as girls read more than boys, and most books are said to be bought by women. Going back to nineteenth century times the picture we conjure up in our minds is of an elegant woman, dressed in a long silken dress, sitting by a window reading a small, neat volume. We can easily imagine that middle-class ladies would have had more available reading time than did men, and of course many novelists whose work has survived from that time were women. We seem to have taken on board rather energetically the idea that novels are by and for women: recently Time Magazine listed Evelyn Waugh in their round-up of 100 most-read female authors in college classes in 2015. As The Observer commented “If only he’d called the book ‘Groomshead Revisited'”.

A few years back a report of Jellybooks‘ research into this vital subject (this can be found here, at the Internet Archive; thanks to Jeff Helgesen for the pointer) suggested that men tend to complete reading a book at about the same rate as women, though men seem readier to throw in the towel early on. Not clear however that this means they embarked on their reading journeys at the same rate. This paper from the American Psychological Association suggests that there is greater variability in male reading achievement scores, and does find an overall edge in favor of women. Boys mature later than girls, and it’s impossible to disentangle the effects of early discouragement and shared group cultural assumptions, but our view of reading as a rather womanly activity does not seem to be totally imaginary whatever its causes.

Of course, I do think there’s an effect of just what it is we define as reading. I suspect that going through an instruction manual, reading a comic, consulting Wikipedia, reviewing a legal brief, checking the chemical composition of a compound, or looking up facts in a directory would not be defined by many survey respondents as “reading”. Reading tends to be thought of as starting a book (almost certainly a novel) at page 1 and reading through it to the end: reading an entire book, in a physical attitude which we can all describe as “reading”. Picking up a magazine and reading most of a story tends not to count.

Whether such activities have or have not any gender component is in the end neither here nor there. We know of lots of men who read books. We know of lots of women who don’t read books. And vice versa. The reading of a book does not automatically make you a better person, just as never reading one does not make you despicable. Lots of books continue to get sold, and we’ll take the money from anyone, male or female.

Tumbledown libraries

Book Riot notes on December 23rd that America’s libraries are falling apart. Their story —

A groundbreaking new report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) is sounding the alarm about the physical state of America’s 17,000 public libraries. 

• Roughly 40% of libraries in the U.S disclosed that one of their building systems is in poor condition.
• 61% have at least one building system or feature that poses a potential health or safety concern.
• 7,000 libraries have some kind of physical barrier preventing access for disabled people.

Why are so many of America’s libraries broken? They can’t afford the repairs. 

• 71% of libraries noted that labor and materials exceed the budgets available for repairs
• 70% of public libraries (11,200) report a backlog of deferred maintenance and repairs. 
• 3 years: the length of time libraries expect to defer these repairs 
• 39% of those libraries report that their backlogs exceed $100,000 

📋 Read the whole report. – KJ

____________________

New York City seems to be bucking the trend, at least viewed from this end of town.

The nearby library in Inwood is a spanking new building on Broadway, incorporating on one side a bit of the next-door school, and on the other a 174-unit affordable housing development.

And in Washington Heights our Fort Washington branch library was recently reopened after being gutted and redone from top to bottom. Lost in the changes is the caretaker’s apartment on the top floor, now the teens section.

Rearranging deckchairs?

In describing Waterstone’s and Barnes & Noble’s plans to open more bookstores The New Publishing Standard headlines their article Rearranging the Deckchairs. They just know that book trade people, a notoriously pie-in-sky lot by their lights, are fooling themselves about the numbers. Barnes & Noble plan to open 60 new stores in 2026 — TNPS tells us they are crazy, obviously unable to add up the numbers. As TNPS sees it, all the perceived prosperity of the book business is just an artifact of inflation. We like to think we are going forward, but really we’re slipping gently backwards. If US book sales were up 4.1% to $32.5 billion in 2024, TNPS thinks this doesn’t mean anything because money’s worth less than it used to be, which must mean that we’re selling fewer books than ever.

Why would B&N and Waterstones open new stores? TNPS answers: “The explanation offered is simple to the point of being mindlessly simplistic: BookTok has created a new generation of readers, younger demographics are flocking to bookshops, and physical retail offers an experience that online shopping cannot match. It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also largely a fantasy.” Every bit of good news, for TNPS, hides its awful warning: BookTok sells books — young people don’t read as much as they used to; audiobook sales are increasing — but they don’t sell at B&N; books are enjoying record sales — but that’s an illusion because we don’t sell paperbacks for $1.95 any longer. Obviously if you sell a $1.95 book for $19.95 you’ll make more money — but somehow for TNPS this is just an illusion. They fail to spend a moment considering whether B&N, standing in their stores watching traffic, might know more about demand planning than they do with their impressionistic mathematical rationalizations.

Now of course what B&N are doing is not rearranging deckchairs, they are actually providing more deckchairs. Maybe there are already enough deckchairs, but I’d trust the deckchair attendants to now more about this than I did. Surveys showing falling rates of teenage reading, or of book reading itself, stumble against the fact that there are always more and more people in the world, and that in any case the industry does not rise or fall on a specific number of books sold.

What TNPS appears not to be grasping is that publishers do their accounting in money. If we make $32.5 billion by selling a hundred books or by selling millions of books, our sales are still $32.5 billion. True if it were only a hundred books our profit margin would be even healthier, but we don’t report results in terms of copies sold, just in dollars received. Some years we have lots of bestsellers which sell lots of copies each; some years we don’t. A really banner year would involve many expensive books selling lots and lots of copies. But it doesn’t really matter which kind of year we have to deal with, as long as we cover our costs and make enough money to keep shareholders satisfied. In 2025 books are really selling, and just because a BookTokker meets a volume online, does not mean they’ll buy it online too. Believe it or not: many people enjoy going into a bookstore! Now B&N may of course be making a misjudgment, and perhaps a few of their new bookstores may turn out to be duds, but I’d surely trust their judgement on the topic more than that of an outsider observer.

AIGA NY

When I first arrived in New York in 1974 my predecessor, who was being repatriated, slipped me a little bit of paper saying “Oh I entered this AIGA raffle. Here’s the ticket.” When I ended up winning a painting by Charles Coiner, he refused to allow me to ship it over to him, maintaining that as I’d been the holder of the ticket when the drawing was made, I should possess the prize.

AIGA New York’s new logo.

So I still have the painting — I think that, rather appropriately, given where it hangs, it matches the view from our window of the Hudson River and the Palisades. Last Saturday morning early we even had a huge pale wolf moon, just like this one, falling into New Jersey as the sun rose over Manhattan.

The Palisades get their name from the stockade-like columnar structure of their igneous rock — made up of roughly equal amounts of dark pyroxene and lighter plagioclase feldspar. To this day bits of a column will succumb to ice wedging and tumble down to block the road which runs along the length of the cliffs. However, this is to a significant extent a man-made landscape — vast quantities of rock were quarried from the cliffs of the Palisades, and we even have a local set-back of the sort shown in the painting formed by the blasting referred to in this American Museum of Natural History piece. The setback scarcely shows in the view below — it’s at the extreme end between St Peter’s University and the dock area at the right. The formation of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission in 1900 brought the quarrying to an end by the simple expedient of buying up the land. The Palisades are now a tree-covered National Natural Landmark.

Occasionally the thought floats through my mind that as Hamish no doubt expensed the cost of the ticket, the painting probably ought to belong to the University Press. It is unfortunately too late to check the facts of this concern!

AIGA stands for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. PRINT Magazine brings us a story about the introduction of their new logo. Go there and you’ll find a short video setting forth their new strategy, “championing the future of design for all”. Their concerns necessarily involve the output media employed for their designs. Back in the day this of course meant print, and their interest may be observed in their annual 50 Books/50 Covers show described this earlier post headed “book”.

Wound man

Sebastian Jäger, “Wound Man” (c. 1580)

This poor guy seems to be taking his punishment with incredible equanimity. However such diagrams were not a call for sympathy: they were used as a sort of graphic table of contents, or index in early medical texts. This may be seen more clearly in the example below, from the Fasiculo de Medicina (Venice, 1495). Your patient presents with a battle axe wound to the forehead? Follow the little line to the copy around the edge which will tell you how to cope.

The fuss is occasioned by the publication of Jack Hartnell’s new book, Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton University Press, 2025). Hyperallergic provides a review. The Wound Man’s dramatic injuries, Hartnell writes, “may have conjured those of heroes in popular epic poems, such as Vivianz in Willehalm, Alderot in Der Sticker’s Karl Der Gross, and Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied (who are often getting stabbed, speared, and split in two). The tales of those gallant characters may have provided a notional backstory for the Wound Man, what Hartnell calls ‘the beginnings of a chivalric personhood’.” Clearly, getting a sword stuck in you would be an ever present risk for the knight errant. A book telling your page what to do might be a wise investment.

This hand-colored woodcut, the title page from Hieronymus Brunschwig’s 1534 Buch der Chirurgia (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), presents a patient showing some understandable signs of distress, but curiously unconcerned physicians looking complacently on:

Wound Man images evolved into bloodletting guides; for example:

Hybrid bloodletting-zodiac figure from Johann Prüss’ Kalender (c.1483), woodcut (Universitätsbibliothek Gießen).

Book fairs

In so far as we ever think about it, I suspect we visualize medieval book buyers visiting a printer’s office and buying a set of unbound pages of the latest bestseller. More common probably was a visit to one of the book fairs which occurred regularly, or at least the purchase of a volume your local bookseller had brought back from some such fair.

Manuscripts were already being traded at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the 1380s, and we have evidence of booksellers from Basle attending the Frankfurter Buchmesse in 1478. In the seventeenth century Frankfurt was overtaken as the center of the European book trade by Leipzig. The modern Frankfurt Book Fair has only been going on since 1949, after a two-hundred-year hiatus, and like most book trade fairs has now become more about buying and selling rights rather than individual copies of books.

The Oxford Companion to the Book (ed. Michael E. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, OUP 2010) confides that in “2007-8 alone there were sizable book fairs in

• Amsterdam
• Barcelona
• Basle
• Belgrade
• Brussels
• Bucharest (‘Bookarest’)
• Budapest
• Coimbra
• Copenhagen
• Geneva
• Gothenburg
• Helsinki
• Istanbul
• Linz
• Lisbon
• London
• Madrid
• Moscow
• Paris
• Porto
• Prague
• Riga
• St Petersburg
• Sofia
• Tallinn
• Thesaloniki
• Turin
• Vilnius
• Warsaw
• Zagreb.”

They go on to list another 28 outside Europe. Life being what it is there are probably lots more of these book fairs in 2025.