Numbers Of Copies Of Books

It feels like I've always been interested in numbers of books: how many copies there are of a certain title, how many books exist in this language or that, how many copies of a book there used to be which are now missing or have been destroyed.

I can't remember not being interested in such things, but the interest had to begin some time. Perhaps it was in junior high, when I got a Dell paperback copy of Catch-22 with "OVER 8 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT!" on the front or back cover. Not long after that I saw a copy of Catch-22 from a later printing. The cover design was mostly similar, but it was red where the cover of the earlier book had been blue; and along with a few other minor changes it now said "OVER 8 MILLION COPIES SOLD!" I took this to mean that when the earlier copy was printed, 1973 perhaps? that printing took the total to over 8 million, and that a year or two later enough of the earlier printing had been sold to honestly say "SOLD!" on the cover instead of "IN PRINT!" Did the cover designers at Dell really keep track that closely of the numbers of copies in print and sold? Am I giving Dell way too much credit for making sure the covers were accurate? I have no idea. For a while I definitely tried to keep track of Catch-22's sales, and I seem to remember seeing conflicting numbers from various sources, but in retrospect, that's explained at least as easily by journalistic sloppiness as by inaccuracy of reporting of sales figures by Dell.



I began to notice that publishers made great fanfare about sales figures, or the number of copies in a first printing, in some cases, and that in other cases they kept the information confidential.

This confidentiality was very frustrating to me -- don't ask for a rational reason why I needed to be informed about the sales figures for Gore Vidal' or Saul Bellow's books. This post doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with rationality -- so imagine how I felt when I became an undergraduate German major in the late 1980's, and discovered that many German publishers provided precise information about the numbers of copies of any particular edition, in the most convenient place imaginable -- right on the copyright page! What a country!

I'll give you 2 examples: On the copyright page of the 1979 Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag edition of Franz Kafka's Prozeß (The Trial), right above where it sez that this is an unabridged edition, stands: "1032. -- 1051. Tausend: Dezember 1989." This means: before this printing, in December 1989, there were 1,031,000 copies of this edition in print, and now there are 1,051,000. The December, 1989 printing was a run of 20,000 copies. Keep in mind, these are the figures for this 1979 paperback edition only. Who knows how many more paperback and hardcover copies of the Prozeß there are, before you even get to huge commercial considerations such as translations into other languages. If Franz Kafka had still been alive in December 1989, it would've been pretty sweet to be Franz Kafka, even if he was 106 years old.

2nd example: volume 3 of the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (commonly referred to as DTV) edition of Heinrich von Kleist's complete works, Dramen, Dritter Teil (Plays, Part Three. The first two lines on the copyright page are "1. Auflage März 1964" and "2. Auflage Februar 1969: 21. bis 30. Tausend." In other words, "1st printing March 1964" and "2nd printing February 1969: 20,001 to 30,000 copies."

Not every single German publisher did this, but it seemed like most of them. I was a kid in a candy store. That's right, I said "did" and "was." Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag and DTV and almost all German publishers stopped putting such information within easy public reach, within a half-dozen years of my discovering those once-wonderful German copyright pages. Now they resemble American copyright pages: sometimes they give the date of the first printing and the most recent printing of that edition, sometimes just the date of the first printing. Apparently American publishers circulated a memo to German publishers: "URGENT! Your practice of giving detailed information about the size of printings has been giving joy to an American citizen, Steven Bollinger. PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST AT ONCE." Or, in the ultra-paranoid version, "[...]giving joy to an autistic American citizen, Steven Bollinger[...]" because American publishers knew I was autistic 15 to 20 years before I found out.

In the rational and non-paranoid version, this had nothing to do with me, and I still don't know why German publishers used to put that info on the copyright pages, and why they stopped. All I know is that if someone writes a book giving an overview of the numbers of books made all over the world, from ancient times to the present -- and that someone might have to be me. I'm not sure that anyone else particularly cares -- the chapter on Germany between 1920 and 1990 will be much, much easier to write than some other chapters.

There may once have been someone with similar interests: Theodor Birt, born 1852 in Hamburg, died 1933 in Marburg, author of Das Antike Buchwesen in Seinem Verhältniss Zur Litteratur,



an investigation of how ancient Greek and Latin books were made and sold.

The numbers of manuscripts of ancient Greek and Latin texts which we have today is a different thing than the numbers of copies of those texts which were in circulation when they were new. Most of the manuscripts we have now were made in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And their numbers don't even give us complete and precise information about the relative popularity of ancient authors in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, because chance plays a big role in those manuscripts having survived. Nevertheless, if we have hundreds of manuscripts of a particular ancient text, it's not too much of a stretch to think that that text was popular in the Middle Ages.

The thing is, as far as I can tell, the exact numbers of all such manuscripts are not neatly organized and gathered together in any one place of which I know, as you would expect them to be if a lot of Classical scholars were autistic. There is a catalog (with photos) of all known Latin literary manuscripts from before AD 800, the Codices Latini Antiquiores, 14 volumes plus an index, with 18,884 manuscripts of more than 2000 works, according to Wikipedia. [PS, 27 Mar 2018: Don't ever, ever listen to Wikipedia. And when it comes to Classical Studies, listen much, much less than you generally would. There are not 18,884 manuscripts in the Codices Latini Antiquiores, but 1884. Which means they certainly don't cover 2000 works. 200 maybe? I'm just guessing.] The thing is, there are many more manuscripts surviving today which were made after 800, than before. Many times more, I would think. How many times? I couldn't guess. And I can't find any catalog for manuscripts from all eras which is comparable to the Codices Latini Antiquiores. (Also known as the CLA.)



There are thousands of Biblical manuscripts. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of manuscripts of Vergil ran into 4 figures. I am quite surprised at how difficult it has been for me to find so much as an educated guess about how many manuscripts of Vergil there are. Here and there I run across a figure: There are over 650 manuscripts of Terence. More than 400 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1989, Reeve said that Mommsen, Luchs and Dorey had listed 117 manuscripts of the third decade (that is, books 21-30) of Livy. Reeve doesn't say when they made that list, but in 1987 he added 33 more, and then 4 more in 1989, for a total of 154.



Reeve doesn't say how many manuscripts of the other books of Livy there are.

113 known manuscripts of the third decade -- sometime. Probably some time in the 19th century. Then in the late 20th century that number suddenly grew by over 30%.

I wonder whether anyone has even any rough idea of the ratio of the number of manuscripts of the Latin Classics which we have today, to the total number which were ever made. But before I even start to wonder about that, I have to wonder whether anyone even has a rough idea of the total number of manuscripts of the Latin Classics which we have.

I wonder whether I have a better idea of that number than anyone else, simply because none of the much-better-educated people even cares.

No, surely some of them care at least a little bit.

I need to make up an orderly list of such questions and start going around to Classical scholars and asking them. Who knows, the combination of my obsessions and neurological atypicality may actually yield something of interest or even of practical use to someone someday.

And wouldn't that blow everybody's minds.

The 8th Floor

I recently blogged about the Codices latini antiquiores, a series of 12 volumes containing descriptions of all known manuscripts written in Latin before AD 800. I wrote the blog entry after finally seeing a copy of vol 1, which I got through inter-library loan. Well, yesterday -- I don't know why it took me so long. I live in Ann Arbor, after all -- I finally went to the Papyrology Department on the 8th floor of the University of Michigan Graduate Library, where they have 11 of the 12 volumes. That was some interesting browsing. I was looking at volume 11, concerning manuscripts currently held in Hungary, Luxembourg, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Yugoslavia. Each of the volumes is roughly the same size, describing 100 to 200 manuscripts or so, but Italy, France and Germany take up the first 9 volumes. Those three countries are where the significant Latin manuscripts mostly are. It was interesting, paging through vol 11, to see what treasures are tucked away in unexpected, exotic -- from the point of view of this academic discipline -- locations. The Pierpoint Library in New York City, it turns out, has a huge number of these pre-Carolingian Latin manuscripts. And then -- again, I don't know why it took so long for it to occur to me -- I looked up the University of Michigan, and sure enough, three items were listed as being housed there. Perhaps, for all, I knew, right on the other side of that locked steel door beside which I was sitting.

I could've asked someone about about that, asked to see the actual manuscripts, but there was already more than enough to entertain me in that small room on the 8th floor where a half-dozen people were excitedly huddled over microfilm viewers and computer screens and darting back and forth from their seats to the shelves and discussing things in several different languages including Latin and, I believe, ancient Greek and Egyptian, plenty to occupy my mind and justify future visits. Besides the CLA there were also many volumes of the Oxford Oxyrhychus papyrii series, and a series, which I didn't get around to inspecting at all yesterday, with a title very similar to Codices latini antiquiores, Codices latini[...] something else, which the courteous library employee at first thought I was looking for -- I mumble sometimes -- and many other things, many reasons for further visits to the 8th floor. There was a book printed in the 19th century entitled Das Antike Buchwesen in Seinem Verhaltniss zur Litteratur."Buchwesen," I don't even know for sure what exactly that means, but I'm pretty sure that it's one of those wonderful German words which would be very difficult to translate into English, perhaps impossible to translate even half-well without using a lot of English words. Shelved near that book was another with a title something like Das Buchwesen im Mittelalter, Buchwesen in the Middle Ages. I'm hoping that "Buchwesen" includes statistics or at least estimates of the numbers of books in circulation in the Roman Empire and medieval Europe, because that's something about which I've been very curious, but unable to find much information at all. Perhaps German scholarship has been all over such questions for over a century. Those wacky Germans, you gotta love 'em.

Besides the items pertaining to Latin, there were lots of things having to do with ancient Greek in that little room on the 8th floor, probably lots more than to do with Latin. (This would make sense, because this it the Papyrology Department after all, and as far as I know, many times more ancient papyrii written in Greek have been preserved and discovered than those written in Latin.) I saw a lot of things pertaining to ancient Egyptian writing. I saw a few volumes of documents in Coptic edited by E. A. Wallis Budge. I saw things pertaining to many other languages. There is so much gloriously fascinating stuff in this world, and I've just discovered a place where quite a lot of it which interests me personally is concentrated.

Codices latini antiquiores --

-- also known as CLA, edited by E A Lowe, is a description of Latin literary manuscripts made before the ninth century. It excludes "-- with certain exceptions -- all business or official acts and documents, graffiti or other casual scribblings." (vol. 1, vii.)

I'd been eagerly searching high and low for reasonably-priced copies of the CLA. Finally, yesterday, I got Vol I: The Vatican Cityvia inter-library loan.

It's not what I expected. I had gathered from library catalogue descriptions and such that the volumes were 45 centimeters tall. Somehow I had managed to overlook in the same descriptions the number of pages per volume. I was expecting huge heavy tombstones full of fine print, probably all in Latin, of tens of thousands of manuscripts per volume.

But no, there are xii+44 pages in this first volume, plus 35 pages of illustrations, and the other volumes seem to be of a comparable size, and several pages of these 44 are taken up by bibliographies, and the print isn't particularly fine, and it's mostly in English. A total of 34 pages of this first volume are devoted to the sort of description I had imagined. Facing each of these 34 pages are full-sized photographic reproductions of parts of the manuscripts being described. 4 reproductions to a big page, sometimes more than one reproduction of the same manuscript. 117 in all in the first volume. Counting palimspests as 2, the primary and the secondary. There are a lot of palimspsests in this volume.

Of the 117 manuscripts described and photographed here, I counted 24 from pagan authors: Terrence, Cicero, Sallust, Vergil, Livy, Probus Seneca, Lucan, Juvenal, Gellius, Fronto, Symmachus. These manuscripts account for 20 and one-half percent of the total. Besides these 24, I'm not sure how to categorize a few others. Irony being what it is, I would not be at all surprised if the percentage of pagan authors described by the CLA in collections outside the Vatican were much lower. I would not be surprised, because, in the period before AD 800, there was an especially fervent effort in Western Europe to spread the learning of the Bible and of Christian authors, and an especially widespread -- although by no means universal -- condemnation of pagan Classical antiquity, including all of the writing of all of the individual authors I listed above. Books were burned. (Others were written over and then later rediscovered in palimpsest form.) It has been asserted, although it is controversial and remains unproven, that Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 to 604, ordered all copies of Livy, listed above, which could be found to be destroyed. It's unproven, but it seems to me that if someone, Gregory or not, had been busily engaged in such destruction, it would help to explain why only 35 books, plus a few fragments, of such a popular author as Livy survive today, when as late as AD 401 the pagan patrician Symmachus, listed above, was busily engaged in making an edition of all 142 books. Symmachus appears in CLA, vol 1, in palimpsest form, as does a long palimpsest fragment of Livy's book 91 which had been gone from view for a long, long, long, long time. Whether or not it was the active destruction of Gregory the Great, and/or some other churchmen, which accounts for the disappearance of almost 107 books of Livy, which seems likely to me, there is no doubt that many Classical texts have been restored to the world through the effort of churchmen like the great 19th-century paleograher and specialist in palimpsest, Cardinal Angelo Mai, who worked under the instructions of and with the direct blessing of the Vatican, and that many Popes, and countless among their followers, have been great friends to and supporters of Classical scholarship. The Church giveth in this regard, it doth not only take away. Its ways are mysterious sometimes.

As I said, I was surprised to get a general idea of how many Latin literary manuscripts from before AD 800 survive, that is to say: I'm surprised by how few there are. I was also surprised when I found out that only 31 classical Greek tragedies survive, by only three authors. In that case also I had assumed that the number was much higher. It is naturally disappointing in each case to find that the numbers are lower than one had thought, but there is an ironic upside, as well: it emphasizes the significance of each new find. And new finds are made occasionally, papyrii in the Middle Eastern desert, palimpsests in existing texts.

Foolishly, I dream of finding the missing books of Livy in some place like a garage sale. Yes, these are the kinds of daydreams I have. Many experts snicker good-naturedly at dreams of finding any more significant amounts of Classical texts anywhere -- say, an entire lost book or 10 of Livy, or an entire lost play by Sophocles. (It is said that Sophocles wrote over 100 plays. We have 7 today, plus fragments of others.) They're the experts, I'm not one of them. Still, to my inexpert mind it seems irrational to dismiss the possibility of some really huge find, someday, somewhere: in a papyrus in Egypt or Israel, in a palimpsest in a library, among the possessions of an eccentric recluse. As recently as the 1980's they found a previously-unknown fragment of Livy's book 11, dating from the 5th century, while excavating the site of the monastery of Naqlun in Egypt. Yeah, so the fragment was only 40 words long, that doesn't mean that the next find won't be 40,000 words long.

So, yeah, the experts, some of them, think I'm daft. Other experts are as daft as I am when it comes to hoping for new discoveries. Maybe we are quite mad, who's to say.

I cannot emphasize enough how inexpert I am in such things. I've never been near an archaeological dig. I probably never will be, as I intensely dislike dirt and strong sunlight. I also have never had any inclination to study old manuscripts after someone else has gone to the trouble of finding them, cleaning them up, restoring a palimpsest if they contain one, etc. I have always been content to wait until they are transcribed into editions with contemporary typefaces and punctuation and so forth. And I had seen pictures of manuscripts similar to the one reproduced in this volume of CLA -- in some cases, pictures of the same manuscripts. For some, reason, when I saw the pictures of manuscripts in the CLA, I became interested in them in a way I had not been before. They're illegible to me at the moment. Look at this:



Can YOU read that? I can't. It's not one of the Vatican manuscripts, but it's similar. It's in the collection of the Library of Congress, which describes it as a page from a manuscript of Vergil's Georgics and Bucolics, written in the 5th or 6th century. Sorry, I was looking for a linkable image of one of the manuscripts from the book I'm talking about, but it was slim pickings and I didn't feel like looking all day. My reaction to this sort of manuscript before yesterday was, It's purty, but I'll stick to my Oxford Classical Texts editionwith its modern typefaces and punctuation, thanks just the same. (Punctuation as we know it evolved slowly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.) Now, when I'm old enough to need glasses to read lots of things, now suddenly these strange, exotic old things catch my interest.