Whining about publishing since 139 AD

It’s impossible to know who was the ‘first publisher’ (though it was certainly not Gutenberg ,which is the strange and wrong answer many internet sites provide), but it won’t harm us (as it never does) to look to Rome. There we can find a thriving industry, a street crammed with booksellers, and authors bemoaning how little they earned from sales. 1

Let’s start with Atticus, Titus Pomponius Atticus. He was friends with Cicero, who was at the time a celebrated orator, public figure, and writer. Atticus was rich, and he decided to create copies of his friend’s essays. He created a production facility and put his slaves to work: in one room, they transformed papyrus into sheets; in another, they glued the edges of the sheets together. And in a third, larger one, dozens of slaves, who had good penmanship, sat at desk writing down the words that reader spoke to them, creating the copies to be sold

The success of this venture led Atticus to create a business —literacy rates were increasing,…