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Updated: June 28, 2025
There were long rows of rooms containing above a hundred thousand rolls of books, the famous library of the Serapeum, with separate apartments for readers and copyists; there were store-rooms, refectories and assembly-rooms for the high-priests of the temple, for teachers and disciples; while acrid odors came up from the laboratories, and the fragrance of cooking from the kitchen and bake- houses.
Yes, I know all this; but if everyone were to become a fine writer, who would there be left to act as copyists? . . . Whatsoever questions I may put to you in my letters, dearest, I pray you to answer them. I am sure that you need me, that I can be of use to you; and, since that is so, I must not allow myself to be distracted by any trifle.
In the days of manuscripts men spelt pretty much as they pleased, making very free even with their own names; and uncritical copyists, caring only to reproduce the word, and not troubling about the exact orthography of their original, did nothing to check the ever-growing variety. Such licence was agreeable for the imaginative, but it made despairing work for the compilers of dictionaries.
When some genius brings out a machine over the plans of which he has spent half an anxious lifetime, a dozen copyists will in a year have out a dozen "improved machines," each of them better than the first one, and therefore each helping to ruin the inventor. He had all the labour and all the knowledge.
But alas, after one trial of the completed work, which ended in confusion owing to the countless mistakes the boys had made in copying the score, he rewrote the whole composition. Fearing another fiasco from amateur copyists, the young composer wrote out all the parts himself. This took three months.
The business of scribes copyists of manuscripts engaged a vast number of persons. His speeches and his epistles, especially those to his friend, Atticus, lift the veil, as it were, and afford us most interesting glimpses of the civil and social life of the Romans of that day. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus.
"It is not mine, Sire." "And whose, then?" "Your Majesty's." "How so, you little rogue; do you mean to insult me?" The Emperor took the manuscript, tried a long while to read it, and at last threw it down, saying, "He is right; I cannot tell myself what is written." He has often sent the copyists to Las Cases to read what he had himself been unable to decipher.
It is all done for us; we are copyists. The world is getting old how glorious to have lived when it was young! But nowadays the very children are blase." "And you are not you blase to talk like that, with your genius and all the world before you?" I asked laughingly, slipping my arm through hers. "Come, confess!" Zara looked at me gravely.
The copyists get all sorts of expression, gay, as well as grievous; some copies have a coquettish air, a half-backward glance, thrown alluring at the spectator, but nobody ever did catch, or ever will, the vanishing charm of that sorrow.
Their type is called Gothic, and it is still widely used in German books. The Italian printers made their letters more round and simple in shape, imitating the handwriting of the best Italian copyists. This is the Roman type, in which many European peoples, as also the English and the Americans, print their books.
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