In the last couple of years I have become more and more interested in ancient Rome and I recently came across this little gem of a book published by Walker & Company.
Vicki Leon is the author of the Uppity Women series of books and has changed pace for this one. According to the bibliography she has been collecting information about jobs in the Greek and Roman workplace for years. The book consists of a series of small articles, each covering a different profession. We see such things as: beekeeper, scribe, wine maker, slinger, tour guide, litter carrier, seller of purple, armpit plucker, gladiatrix, tattooer, tax farmer, funeral clown, orgy planner and many others. For the TeleRead crowd here is a little excerpt on Publisher-Bookseller:
“Publishing in those days meant copying by hand. The system was more like “print on demand,” with a roomful of scribes copying the same manuscript onto rolls of papyrus as it was read aloud. … By the time Augustus became Rome’s first emperor, the city had a community of publisher-booksellers, mostly freedmen …. Most of them published by category – poetry, history, salacious memoirs and so forth. Or concentrated on a few brand-name authors they were pushing.Outside their bookstores, advertisements touted best-sellers and remainder bins invited browsing. Scrolls took getting used to. This book-in-a-paper-towel-roll format had no paragraphs, no chapter divisions and took both hands to scroll through. … To protect manuscripts from moths, scrolls were treated with oil of cedar, and deluxe editions often carried scent. … As literacy rose, books were duplicated in quantity by slave copyists. With their reed pens and cuttlefish ink, a hundred scribes could crank out one thousand copies in a ten-hour day.”
There is more fascinating info in this article. The book runs about 300 pages, with illustrations, and my main complaint with it is that Leon often uses a “cutesy” style that just drives me nuts. However, I haven’t seen this information anyplace else, so I would still heartily recommend it. Unfortunately it is not available as an e-book.
I could not find it on Amazon, until I realized that the author is Vicki Leon (not Viki).
Sorry, correction made.
“Most of them published by category – poetry, history, salacious memoirs and so forth. Or concentrated on a few brand-name authors they were pushing. Outside their bookstores, advertisements touted best-sellers and remainder bins invited browsing.”
There’s nothing new under the sun!