Roman Books

Roman Books were written on different materials such as Papyrus, wooden blocks, Wax Tablets and Parchment.
Books were stored as a Scroll or Codex in Roman Libraries, which had one section for works in Greek and another for works in Latin.

The Scroll was hand written on a long sheet of Papyrus, and then rolled into a cylinder. Instead of turning the pages of a book, the reader unrolled the cylinder as he progressed.
Special inks were developed to prevent the ink flaking off when the scroll was unrolled and rerolled. Nonetheless, letters often fell off the Scroll.
By the 300 CE scrolls were being replaced by the Codex. After the sixth century CE, Scrolls were no longer being produced.
Scrolls were transported in protective tubular containers called ‘capsae’.

Codex means ‘trunk of a tree’ in Latin, ie, a block of wood.
Pages of Papyrus or Parchment were bound together to form a book. Sometimes one long piece of Papyrus was folded into a concertina, without being cut into pages.
Introduced by the Romans and first mentioned by Martial in the first century CE, the Codex had replaced the Scroll by the sixth century CE.
The Codex was adopted at an early stage by Christianity as its format for the Bible.
The Nag Hammadi Library written in c.330 CE consists entirely of Codices.

The Wax Tablet was two pieces of flat wood hinged together with wax on each inner surface. A letter could be written on the wax, the tablet sealed with a lead seal and be posted to a Statio in another part of the Roman Empire via the Roman Road system.
After reading the tablet, the wax was smoothed over, and new writing could be written onto the wax. They were for personal use. The Codex was derived from these wooden writing tablets covered in wax.
The Vindolanda Tablets
These are wax tablets inscribed in ink. Thousands were found in the fort of Vindolanda, Britannia, dating around 100 CE, and are now in the British Museum. The wax tablet could be reused, but an inked wooden tablet had to be thrown way. They were for personal use.

Palimpsest meant ‘scraped’, which was the practice of scraping or washing the writing off the parchment and using it again.

The Scribes copied new and ancient Works to supply the demands of Private and Public Libraries under the Roman Empire, and sold them in small bookshops.
Roman Booksellers or ‘Taberna Librarii’ were located in the Argelitum and the Vicus Sandalarius in Rome.
Books for sale were listed on the door of the shop according to Martial.
The prices of Books varied around 5 Denarii.

The news was published in Acta.
Every day the news of the latest developments was published in Rome. The news was etched on stone tablets or thin metal sheets and placed in the Forum Romanum. They were also distributed to the Provinces.