On “Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome” by Clarence Eugene Boyd ***

This short volume covers more-recent material that I've read elsewhere. Even so, there was some information here that I hadn't previously run across.

Boyd starts with Julius Caesar's order to found such “public” libraries, which Boyd really does call “public,” even though other sources make clear that the way we think of public libraries is not the same as Romans thought of them. Nevertheless, it's interesting that Caesar really got the ball rolling on this and that emperors followed suit. There were at least nine such libraries that have been identified.

Other facts I learned: Most such libraries were placed near a palace or temple (though he also notes those that were part of baths). Most faced east, because that direction was best at keeping materials from getting damp and thus being eaten by worms and the like. Most included artwork and served also as places of meeting.

Unlike what I'd read elsewhere, Boyd makes much of people checking materials out of libraries. Indeed, the primary documents support this as a possibility, though such people did seem to be well connected in some way, so I take others' point of view, that materials largely stayed in the library, as being the more usual custom.

Another section discusses bookshops, of which there were a surprisingly number in Rome. Without printing, books were produced by dictation to a number of scribes at one. And as I'd read elsehwere, there were even newspapers of a sort, with information about deaths, marriages, and happenings, updated daily.

All that said, Boyd's book is definitely aimed at early twentieth-century scholars. He quotes frequently from primary documents sans translation. Classicists would know how to read these, and many a schoolboy of the period also probably, but not so much readers of today.