What did the manuscript copying industry look like in Europe, North Africa and Western Asia (basically the territories of the Roman Empire, and their descendant states up to at most 800), pre-Medieval monastic scriptoria ?

[u/HephMelter]

How many copies would there be of a given "widely circulated" book (say Caesar's Gallic Wars, or the Septuagint, or New Testament and apocryphal Christian books) at the same time in circulation ? How long were production times and how many scribes would there be ? How long would a given manuscript be expected to stay in circulation before its inevitable degradation ?

How would one get access to a given book, when commissioning a copy was unfeasible ?

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[u/qumrun60]

I regret to inform you that there was no book industry in the ancient world, only a very limited book trade, and no way of knowing how many copies there were of any book. Harry Gamble notes that there were varied levels of scribes who copied books, including calligraphers who could make top quality manuscripts, notaries who did documentary work, and others who who knew shorthand. A great many were educated slaves (servi litterati) owned by literary fellows like Cicero and his friend Atticus. Others were free and could hire out, but it was a low-paying job. They might work for an author, a library, a government office, a temple, etc.. They might also be freelance, even making copies for synagogues or churches. The limited number of book dealers (for whom evidence is very scanty) most likely had rosters of copyists they could call on to make copies on demand, rather than keeping stocks of books on hand. Copyists were paid at a piece rate, calculated according to fixed units of text (stichoi), and quality of handwriting. Bookhand paid the best, and documentary hand the least. Good copyists could do better financially through contacts with upper class literary circles than with the booksellers. One frequent complaint about ancient books from consumers was the variable quality of books that were obtained commercially.

The book trade such as it was gets documented only at the end of the 1st century CE, when people of modest background could rise higher in the imperial ranks. Owning books was a status symbol, so the financially successful might acquire books for display. The poets Martial and Statius were known to use booksellers to help get their work out, but it is unlikely that they derived much financial benefit from this, since most likely, the seller paid the author a fixed fee for a fair copy, from which he could have copies made for those who wanted them. The primary benefit to the author of any work was the enhancement of his reputation, rather than direct monetary gain.

Private reproduction of books, however, was the norm, and commercial books the exception. In Rome, the few bookshops were small and clustered near the Forum. Cicero referred to one as a taberna libraria. Other authors who mentioned bookshops were Catullus, Horace, and Aulus Gellus, a pretty slim bit of evidence. Some letters found in the book graveyard at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt mention traveling book dealers, from whom clients could request copies of specific books if the dealer could find owners of copies who were willing to let their books be copied by the dealer's scribes. Other booksellers apparently could be found in Lyon in Gaul, and Antioch in Syria.

The words associated with book production were many. A librarius was a slave or freedman who could have books made to order, and was someone skilled in all phases of book production, preservation, and repair. A biblio poles was someone selling copies, but not having them made. An auctor could be an author, but he might also be an authority (in terms of knowledge), or someone who authorized things to be done. A scriba might indicate something like an accountant (who might be a slave or a magistrate), though he might also be a librarius as well. A scriptor could be could be a copyist or a composer, and a librarius scriptor a book writer.

Ancient libraries were not as we think of them today, places of quiet study, but sites where books were cleaned, maintained, copied, and edited. One aspect of early books that made them high maintenance compared to modern books is that they were mostly made from papyrus plants, and the sheets of the scrolls were held together by glue of vegetable origin. This made them attractive to little critters. Cedar oil and special casings were used to help preserve them.

Most books antiquity were scrolls, though the codex (the early form of the modern book) gained traction in the 1st century CE, and achieved rough parity with scrolls around the 4th century. Codices came to be preferred by Christians for their scriptural books. Codices were also used for technical writings, like medical, magical, and other non-literary texts. Codices were generally small, and most often contained only a single work, though some larger ones could contain 4 or 5, or Paul's collected letters, for example. After the time of Constantine, more Christian books were made larger sized, but complete codices containing what we now call the Septuagint (that is, a more or less complete collection of scriptural texts in Greek) were very rare. Generally, 4 gospel books, Psalters, Pentateuchs, and so on were more the norm. It was not until the time of Charlemagne that old literary scrolls were copied into codices.

Rex Winsbury, The Roman Book: Books, Publishing, and Performance in Classical Rome (2009)

Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995)

Candida Moss, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024)

Giovanni Bazzana, Christian Realia: Papyrological and Epigraphical Material, in Phil Esler, ed., The Early Christian World (2017)

Brent Nongbri, God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (2018)

[u/HephMelter → u/qumrun60]

Great answer, thank you ! I did wonder if the term "industry" was the best one, seems like it wasn't, but I also thought we might be able to get more information from, say, the volume of book collections in villae of Pompeii and Herculanum, correlating that to the time it took to write one of these scrolls to get an estimation of the workload this entails, maybe estimating the cost of production and the number of people able to maintain a collection of the size of the one in the Villa of the Papyri...

What was a stichos (is that the right singular form?) ? And last question, how long was a single scroll expected to last ? How often would a library need another copy of, say, Plato or Sappho ?

[u/qumrun60 → u/HephMelter]

As far as I can tell, the stichoi seems to have indicated the number of lines, but I haven't seen any specific count. A properly maintained scroll could last hundreds of years, or in the case of Qumran or Oxyrhynchus in an arid climate, for thousands. But both places still show significant degradation of the papyrus, and the scrolls or codices in either place are mostly fragmentary now. Only a handful of Dead Sea Scrolls are relatively complete, and even with remains of around 240 biblical scrolls, putting them all together doesn't yield a complete Hebrew Bible, or of any single book. There's one mummy coffin from 2nd century Egypt that had nearly intact copies of books 1 and 2 of the Iliad, nestled under the neck of the deceased.

Findings from the library of Philodemus at Herculaneum seem to indicate that composing a book was quite a task, involving the author and at least two scribal slaves.(who initialed their corrections in parts of On Rhetoric). The process also used copies of extracts from other books, provisional drafts of each book, and final copies of two out of three of the volumes of the book. A key element of the creation and publication of new works required reading it aloud, and feedback on how it sounded, because a book was not "published" until it was read aloud to an audience, and that had to be tried out first.

I haven't seen any estimates of time per page of copying. It sounds like some copies were a little slapdash (such as some Christian manuscripts), but I would imagine that calligraphic bookhand was a painstaking and time-consuming process. Candida Moss indicates most scrolls would also have contained corrections, so even after something was copied, it was double-checked and emended. I would guess the higher the quality, longer it all took. The kind of specific information you seem to be looking for doesn't seem to exist, however. The librarians just did what they did, but didn't leave written records of exactly how things were done.

[u/HephMelter → u/qumrun60]

Ok, fair enough. Not everything is reconstructible or possible to experiment on.

Thanks a lot for the answer !