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No, this isn’t true. It was only for a period of a thousand years (500-1500) in Europe between the loss of the papyrus paper making industry, and the advent of
by thechao 6y ago
No, this isn’t true. It was only for a period of a thousand years (500-1500) in Europe between the loss of the papyrus paper making industry, and the advent of the pulp-linen paper making industry. This latter period happened to coincide with movable type.
For instance, reading, writing and access to scrolls was fairly widespread in the Roman Empire — it was one of the well-known ways for a slave to self-emancipate. (They could earn pay as a scribe.)
- User23 6y agoI was referring to the time labor cost. The actual copying was done by hand and doing so without error is harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to have your forum shopping list written down and quite another entirely to copy out the Aeneid, regardless of whether you’re writing on papyrus, paper, or parchment.
- aksss 6y agoGreat PBS doc on this recently, describing paper as info tech. The manufacturing process was so cheap in China they literally had blank notebooks for sale to the general public. The Persians or Arabs (don’t remember which) coaxed the manufacturing process out of some captured folks, which eventually made its way to Europe as well. Movable type was the next huge advancement.
- thechao 6y agoNova on PBS; I think the second episode of the series? It led me down quite the rabbit hole about literacy during the Roman era; very surprising!