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as Cicero’s friend Atticus using trained slaves (also initially called librarii) to copy out manuscripts for distribution.
We hear nothing of a book trade at Rome before the time of Cicero. Then the booksellers and copyists (librarii) carried on an active trade, but do not seem to have met the high standards of a discriminating author, for Cicero complains of the poor quality of their work (Q.f. 3-.4.5, 5.6). Most readers depended upon borrowing books from friends and having their own copies made from them, but this too demanded skilled copyists. It was perhaps for such reasons that Atticus, who had lived for a long time in Greece and had some experience there of a well-estab- lished book trade, put his staff of trained librarii at the service of his friends. It is not easy to see whether Atticus is at any given moment obliging Cicero as a friend or in a more professional ca- pacity, but it is clear that Cicero could depend on him to provide all the services of a high-class publisher. Atticus would carefully revise a work for him, criticize points of style or content, discuss the advisability of publication or the suitability of a title, hold private readings of the new book, send out complimentary cop- ies, organize its distribution. His standards of excecution were of the highest and his name a guarantee of quality (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd. ed. [1991], pp. 23-24).
After the fall of Rome, when book production gradually moved almost exclusively to the church, monasteries produced manuscripts substantially for use within their local monastic community; however, from provenance and paleographic evidence it is evident that roughly half of surviving early medieval production from monasteries in the two main producing coun- tries, Italy and France, found its way to libraries in other countries. Whether this was through barter or sale may be little known.27 Later, in the early thir- teenth century, after book production had moved mostly out of monasteries
27 Statistics compiled from Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, covering the period 350 CE to 799 CE. See reference below.
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