George Houston was a professor of mine and can be described by the Latin adjective probus, which means good, worthy, excellent, upright, and honest. Congratulations to him on the book and to you for discovering it and making use of it.
As a pre Internet theologian who was married to a pre Internet librarian we together had probably 5-7k books which before COVID we easily downsized via donations to about 4k. Now I'm dealing with at least 1000 and after a year and change have jettisoned about 200 more. And in the last of the boxes I found books that contained copies of articles compiled for classes 4 decades ago.
Even after the invention of print, books were still relatively rare and expensive, and their weight made it difficult to transport for those going on long journeys. I knew an elderly man who left most of his library behind in the UK when he moved to Canada, among them a complete set of hardcover Dickens. Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her novelized story of her childhood, talks about the few books her family had on their travels: the Bible, a book about wild animals, school readers, and a single novel which Ma read so often to Pa that Laura, reluctant to go to school, had the opening lines memorized and tried to convince Ma she could read by quoting them. In my teens, before the invention of the ereader, I used to try to decide which books I absolutely must have if I was going to travel the world.
This is a delightful and thought provoking read. I will be sharing it with a couple of friends who, like me, have a fascination with, and love of, libraries of all kinds.
Have you read “The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World” by Selena Wilson? I just started it. It’s wonderful. And of course, now I will add Houston’s book, and yours, to my reading list.
Given all that you mention in this informative essay, what was a book in Greco-Roman antiquity? We ourselves invest a book with a great deal of authority. Someone has a copyright. The copyrighted version is authoritative: a quotation is either correct or incorrect, once it’s compared to the original.
How much did anyone care if Cicero, relying on his memory instead of laboriously hunting down a copy and unrolling it to find the exact passage, misquoted his source? As a sort of close-enough paraphrase?
There’s the physical book, I guess I’m asking, and then there’s the idea of a book, and I’m curious whether our concept of the book is of comparatively recent vintage.
“…sometimes dealers (and authors) passed off bogus work.”
Let’s assume a work or two of this kind slipped through the cracks and was not caught as bogus at the time. A few thousand years later, some archeologist unearths it and … how would we know it was a fake text made for the sole purpose slop is produced today - to make some cash?
The comparison between modern book abundance and Roman scarcity is really striking. The part about Cicero struggling to locate a decent copy despite his wealth and connections puts our Amazon one-clicks in perspective. I never thought about how every ancient library boks represented someone's physical labor to copy it by hand. Makes me wonder if we've lost something in the shift from scarcity to ubundance like maybe the intentionality of curating a collection when each book required real effort to acquire.
George Houston was a professor of mine and can be described by the Latin adjective probus, which means good, worthy, excellent, upright, and honest. Congratulations to him on the book and to you for discovering it and making use of it.
Mine, too, and you’re exactly right about him.
As a pre Internet theologian who was married to a pre Internet librarian we together had probably 5-7k books which before COVID we easily downsized via donations to about 4k. Now I'm dealing with at least 1000 and after a year and change have jettisoned about 200 more. And in the last of the boxes I found books that contained copies of articles compiled for classes 4 decades ago.
All this to say I get it
Even after the invention of print, books were still relatively rare and expensive, and their weight made it difficult to transport for those going on long journeys. I knew an elderly man who left most of his library behind in the UK when he moved to Canada, among them a complete set of hardcover Dickens. Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her novelized story of her childhood, talks about the few books her family had on their travels: the Bible, a book about wild animals, school readers, and a single novel which Ma read so often to Pa that Laura, reluctant to go to school, had the opening lines memorized and tried to convince Ma she could read by quoting them. In my teens, before the invention of the ereader, I used to try to decide which books I absolutely must have if I was going to travel the world.
This is a delightful and thought provoking read. I will be sharing it with a couple of friends who, like me, have a fascination with, and love of, libraries of all kinds.
Have you read “The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World” by Selena Wilson? I just started it. It’s wonderful. And of course, now I will add Houston’s book, and yours, to my reading list.
Given all that you mention in this informative essay, what was a book in Greco-Roman antiquity? We ourselves invest a book with a great deal of authority. Someone has a copyright. The copyrighted version is authoritative: a quotation is either correct or incorrect, once it’s compared to the original.
How much did anyone care if Cicero, relying on his memory instead of laboriously hunting down a copy and unrolling it to find the exact passage, misquoted his source? As a sort of close-enough paraphrase?
There’s the physical book, I guess I’m asking, and then there’s the idea of a book, and I’m curious whether our concept of the book is of comparatively recent vintage.
Very interesting, thank you, Joel
Scribe is still a profession; I met several. It is a hard art to master.
“…sometimes dealers (and authors) passed off bogus work.”
Let’s assume a work or two of this kind slipped through the cracks and was not caught as bogus at the time. A few thousand years later, some archeologist unearths it and … how would we know it was a fake text made for the sole purpose slop is produced today - to make some cash?
The comparison between modern book abundance and Roman scarcity is really striking. The part about Cicero struggling to locate a decent copy despite his wealth and connections puts our Amazon one-clicks in perspective. I never thought about how every ancient library boks represented someone's physical labor to copy it by hand. Makes me wonder if we've lost something in the shift from scarcity to ubundance like maybe the intentionality of curating a collection when each book required real effort to acquire.