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It drives me nuts when 'what if the library of Alexandria survived' debates skip over how hard it would be to share books back then.
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palmer.nancy6mo ago
You're right about how hard it would be to share books back then. Without copy machines or digital scans, every loan meant someone else couldn't read that scroll for months. I guess the people running the library had it tougher than we think.
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simon_young466mo ago
But even if it survived, how does one book help the whole world? You had maybe one copy of a work, and only people who could travel to Alexandria could even try to read it. Sending a scroll to another city was a huge risk with no promise it would ever come back. So the real bottleneck wasn't just losing the books, it was never being able to copy and spread them fast enough in the first place. That knowledge was basically locked in one building.
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bennett.harper6mo ago
Something else I never see mentioned, those scrolls would wear out from just being opened and read. Even if you could copy them, the original might fall apart after a few dozen people handled it. So they were fighting decay just from normal use, let alone trying to send it anywhere. Makes you wonder how many works crumbled into dust in the reading room.
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