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single region like papyrus, and was therefore more readily available, its pro- duction was labor intensive, making it costly. As a result of these factors, the ancient Roman medium of wax tablets remained in use for note-taking and other purposes throughout the Middle Ages, and later:
During the middle ages wax tablets were in general use. Daily life cannot be imagined without them: students were supposed to carry a diptych at their belt for easy use, while writers used them for rough notes. They were also employed in private cor- respondence. Above all, medieval accounts were kept to a large extent on wax tablets, and most of the surviving examples served this purpose; even books of wax tablets were formed. In some places the use of wax tablets for accounting continued up to the nineteenth century (Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography. Antiquity & the Middle Ages [1990], p. 14).
The first paper mills were built in Europe as early as the twelfth century, but initial demand for paper was small, and paper did not truly become “affordable” and widely available for note-taking until production increased as a result of printing in the second half of the fifteenth century. As a wider variety of texts became more generally available after the introduction of printing, there was a shift from an intense focus on reading a few texts to reading a wider range of texts, a shift characterized by Robert Darnton in 1986 as a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading. Though the switch may have begun as a result of the proliferation of books after printing, it only gradually spread over portions of society. Even today many people have access to relatively few physical books, though it could be said that with the availability of the Internet anyone with a connection now has access to the “universal virtual library.” For centuries many people had “only a few books—the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two—and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their conscious-
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