Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages: A Study of the Conditions of the Production and Distribution of Literature from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Complete‪)‬

In a previous volume I undertook to describe, or rather to indicate, the methods of the production and distribution of the earlier literature of the world and to sketch out the relations which existed between the author and his public during the ages known, rather vaguely, as classic, that is, in the periods of literary activity in Greece and ancient Rome. The materials for such a record were at best but fragmentary, and it was doubtless the case that, in a first attempt of the kind, I failed to get before me not a few of the references which are scattered through the works of classic writers, and which in any fairly complete presentation of the subject ought to have been utilised.

Imperfect as my study was, I felt, however, that I was justified in basing upon it certain general conclusions. It seems evident that in Greece, even during the period of the highest literary development, there did not exist anything that could be described as a system for the production and distribution of books. The number of copies of any work of Greek literature available for the use of the general public must at any time have been exceedingly limited, and it would probably be safe to say that, before the development of Alexandria as a centre of book-production, no such thing as a reading public existed. The few manuscripts that had been produced, and that possessed any measure of authenticity, were contained in royal archives or in such a State collection as that of Athens, or in the studies of the small group of scholarly teachers whose fame was sometimes in part due to the fact that they were owners of books.

The contemporary writers, including the authors of works treasured as masterpieces through all later ages, were not only content to do their work without any thought of material compensation, but appear to have been strangely oblivious of what would seem to us to be the ordinary practical measures for the preservation and circulation of their productions. The only reward for which they could look was fame with their own generation, and even for this it would seem that some effective distribution of their compositions was essential. The thought of preserving their work for the appreciation of future generations seems to have weighed with them but little. The ambition or ideal of the author appears to have been satisfied when his composition received in his own immediate community the honour of dramatic presentation or of public recitation. If his fellow citizens had accorded the approbation of the laurel crown, the approval of the outer world or of future generations was a matter of trifling importance. The fact that, notwithstanding this lack of ambition or incentive on the part of the authors, the non-existence of a reading public, and the consequent absence of any adequate machinery for the production and distribution of books, the knowledge of the “laurel-crowned” works, both of the earlier poets and of contemporary writers, should have been so widely diffused throughout the Greek community, is evidence that the public interest in dramatic performances and in the recitations of public reciters (“rhapsodists”) made, for an active-minded people like the Greeks, a very effective substitute for the literary enlightenment given to later generations by means of the written or the printed word.