Total Book Production of Antiquity

[Eleatic Guest]

Any idea what the total book production of antiquity is? In terms of separate titles, copies and total number of authors? Aunt Wiki says in a fairly reliable article 3,000 authors are known by name (but only a fraction of their work has survived, most in fragments). That makes obviously a lower logical limit of 3,000 separate titles which then needs to be stepped up by inductive reasoning. But how high seems to be everyone's guess, any takers?

Just to outline the ball park, some catalogues of recorded & extant printed books covering the first centuries after Gutenberg:
15th century movable type printing in Europe (ISTC): 28,000 separate titles
16th century printed works in Germany (VD 16): 110,000 separate titles
17th century printed works in Germany (VD 17): 270,000 separate titles
Published works in Britain and British Colonies 1473-1800 (ESTC): 460,000 separate titles

[Medicus matt]

Ammianus Marcellinus mentions the destruction of 70,000 volumes at the Serapeum library in Alexandria.
Of course, we have no way of knowing how many complete works that represented.

[Epictetus]

Fascinating question, but it may be very hard to answer. It may have been very different in different eras in different cities. With production limited to hand copies, the work of a single author may be widely known in Rome, for example, but unheard-of in Spain.

Also, what would be a "title"? Alan Cameron's The Last Pagans of Rome discusses book production to help illustrate some of his ideas, and I was surprised to discover that many works in circulation were abridged Frankenstein versions of books. For example, a single volume might be something we would consider as "The Best Quotes of Latin Literature" and include well-known passages from Virgil, Seneca and Pliny. Would this be three titles, or none, since they were not complete? Evidently these Frankenstein books were very common, based upon how a particular uniquely-phrased passage known from such a book could be traced in quotes throughout numerous letters, poems or other works.

[Eleatic Guest]

Re the WP article, they estimate the total of Greek and Roman titles to be one million each. This would be a tremendous order of magnitude, comparable to the total German book output from Gutenberg to 1800.

For the body of Greek literature, they arrive at this number the following way:
1. In 47 BC, the stock of the Library of Alexandria is known to have been 700,000 scrolls.
2. One roll corresponds roughly to one title (they explain this calculation in detail here)
3. Thus annual title production would be 1,100 and in 350 AD the total one million titles.

Obviously, two objections can be raised:
A. 2. is something of a guesswork, titles comprising up to 10 rolls and more are known.
B. It is unrealistic to assume that the library contained only one copy each. Even today, with far better conditions of preservation, libraries have multiple copies of many works.

My take - again guesswork based on finding plausible averages - would be this:
X. the library held three copies for each title
Y. one title corresponds to 4 rolls
-> 700,000/3/4 = 60,000 titles

To this may be added another 60,000 titles which the library did not harbour. Makes a total book output of 120,000 titles to which can be reasonably added a similarly sized Latin corpus.

[Sean Manning]

I wouldn't assume that all or most literature ended up in the big libraries ... under the empire we know that most of the Roman aristocracy dabbled in poetry and speeches, and that most of these dabblers struggled to find an audience. Similarly, in periods with static or antiquarian tastes new works found it very hard to win a place in the canon and get copied.

The general view seems to be that the corpus of Greek literature was always larger than the Latin corpus. The 2:1 ratio of Loeb volumes might not be a bad guess, and it may be an underestimate since Loeb doesn't print a lot of technical works in Greek.

I would be interested if anyone has a source on that 30,000 authors figure. It seems like a list of lost authors and works would be handy to give a view of what ancient literature as a whole, not just the 1% which happens to survive, looked like.

[Eleatic Guest]

According to WP, there are 3,000 known authors, 1,000 of which only became known since the papyrus finds after 1900.

[Sean Manning]

I actually wondered what Wikipedia’s source was! This is a very good question, although the difference between handwritten rolls and printed codices might make it hard to compare apples to apples.

[Eleatic Guest]

Not entirely related to ancient book production, but the earliest fairly reliable data on book production are doubtlessly those on incunabula.

[D B Campbell]

B. It is unrealistic to assume that the library contained only one copy each. Even today, with far better conditions of preservation, libraries have multiple copies of many works.

I had unthinkingly assumed the opposite -- that only one copy of a given work would exist in any particular library. I wonder if there is any evidence to suggest one way or the other?

[Epictetus]

I know of one little ancedote that might be relevant.

...I passed nearly two hours on my couch, reading Cato's speech On the property of Pulchra, and another in which he impeached a tribune. "Ho," you cry to your boy, "go and fetch me those speeches from the libraries of Apollo!" It is no use, for those volumes, among others, have followed me here. So you must get round the librarian at Tiberius' library...
Marcus Aurelius to Fronto, Loeb Fronto I page 179

[Eleatic Guest]

B. It is unrealistic to assume that the library contained only one copy each. Even today, with far better conditions of preservation, libraries have multiple copies of many works.

I had unthinkingly assumed the opposite -- that only one copy of a given work would exist in any particular library. I wonder if there is any evidence to suggest one way or the other?

Well, the above only represents an assumption of mine. I haven't made much progress on ancient book production, but found a recent and highly interesting estimation of total European output from 500-1800 in Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries.

According to the authors, European book (=manuscript) production reached, perhaps unsurprisingly, its all-time low in the 6th-7th centuries with a mere 120 books per year produced. In the 15th century this output had risen to 5,000,000 manuscripts per century, after which it sky-rocketed in the printing revolution to 12 million (15th c.), 200 m. (16th c.) and 900 m. (18th c.).

[Eleatic Guest]

Slightly OT, but this table shows the number of existing, catalogized titles for different early modern countries and languages. These numbers logically constitute the absolute minimum of total print output, given time-related losses the actual number was obviously (much) higher (click on the small black arrows to sort the very right column by number).