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41 meters.72 In contrast, we all know how easy it is, with the simple use of a bookmark, to find a place in a codex with over 1000 pages.
Assuming an average papyrus roll held a text of moderate length, such as a book of Homer or Vergil, the complete poems would have required several rolls and carrying them would have been awkward. A much lon- ger encyclopedic text, Pliny’s Historia naturalis, occupied 160 rolls. Another factor that made papyrus rolls less efficient carriers of information is that they contained writing on only one side of the roll. Rolling and unrolling the papyrus tended to cause writing on the outside surface of the papyrus to wear off because of rubbing, discouraging the placement of writing on both sides of the roll. When a number of rolls had to be carried they were put in a box (scrinium or capsa) cylindrical in shape not unlike a modern hat box. A bundle of 18 rolls found at Herculaneum had been kept in a similar container. Carrying a large scrinium, or several of them, would not have been a problem for a member of the Roman senatorial class who undoubtedly travelled with slaves, but for ordinary people who might not have owned slaves, should they have had the occasion to own books, it might have been quite inconvenient. In addition, papyrus, which for the most part, had to be imported from factories in Egypt where it grew on the banks of the Nile, was subject to interruption of supplies from wars or other issues, though probably not in Egypt itself, the location in which most of the surviving papyri were found. It is difficult for us to determine the cost of papyrus rela- tive to other components in ancient book production, but since the reading and writing of books was generally limited to the educated elite and their slaves during the Roman Empire, we may assume that books were far more expensive than they are today. Whether papyrus was considered expensive or not, its use was relatively inefficient since writing was mainly done on only one side of the roll.
72 See Skeat, “The Length of the Standard Papyrus Roll and the Cost-Advantage of the Codex,” in Elliot (ed.), Collected Writings of T. C. Skeat (2004), p. 65.
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