Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World

by Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle (Translator)

Overview

A rich exploration of the importance of books and libraries in the ancient world that highlights how humanity’s obsession with the printed word has echoed throughout the ages • “Accessible and entertaining.” —The Wall Street Journal

Long before books were mass-produced, scrolls hand copied on reeds pulled from the Nile were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and Pharaohs were so determined to possess them that they dispatched emissaries to the edges of earth to bring them back. When Mark Antony wanted to impress Cleopatra, he knew that gold and priceless jewels would mean nothing to her. So, what did her give her? Books for her library—two hundred thousand, in fact. The long and eventful history of the written word shows that books have always been and will always be a precious—and precarious—vehicle for civilization.

Papyrus is the story of the book’s journey from oral tradition to scrolls to codices, and how that transition laid the very foundation of Western culture. Award-winning author Irene Vallejo evokes the great mosaic of literature in the ancient world from Greece’s itinerant bards to Rome’s multimillionaire philosophers, from opportunistic forgers to cruel teachers, erudite librarians to defiant women, all the while illuminating how ancient ideas about education, censorship, authority, and identity still resonate today. Crucially, Vallejo also draws connections to our own time, from the library in war-torn Sarajevo to Oxford’s underground labyrinth, underscoring how words have persisted as our most valuable creations.

Through nimble interpretations of the classics, playful and moving anecdotes about her own encounters with the written word, and fascinating stories from history, Vallejo weaves a marvelous tapestry of Western culture’s foundations and identifies the humanist values that helped make us who we are today. At its heart a spirited love letter to language itself, Papyrus takes readers on a journey across the centuries to discover how a simple reed grown along the banks of the Nile would give birth to a rich and cherished culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593318898
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	75,823
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

IRENE VALLEJO earned her doctorate from the Universities of Zaragoza and Florence. Papyrus was awarded the National Essay Prize and the Critical Eye Prize for Narrative in Spain, and it will be published in over thirty countries. Vallejo is a regular columnist for El País and Milenio, and she is the author of two novels, four collections of essays, articles, and short fiction, and two children’s books. Translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle.

Read an Excerpt

The city of pleasures and books
1

The young and bored merchant’s wife sleeps alone. It’s been ten months since her husband set sail for Egypt from the Mediterranean island of Cos, and not a single letter has arrived from the country of the Nile since then. She is seventeen years old, hasn’t yet given birth, and can’t bear the monotony of her cloistered life in the gynaeceum, waiting for something to happen, staying inside to avoid wagging tongues. There isn’t much to do. It seemed amusing at first to tyrannize the slaves, but this isn’t enough to fill her days, so it makes her happy to receive visits from other women. It doesn’t matter who comes to the door, she desperately needs distraction to lighten the leaden hours as they drag on.

A slave announces the arrival of the elderly Gyllis. The merchant’s wife is guaranteed to be entertained for a while: her old wet nurse Gyllis is a foulmouthed woman who curses with flair.

“Mother Gyllis! It’s months since you’ve been to my house.”

“You know how far away I live, my child, and these days I am weaker than a fly.”

“Come now,” says the merchant’s wife. “You’re still strong enough for the occasional frolic.”

“Go ahead and mock me,” Gyllis answers. “I leave that to the youngsters.”

With a wicked smile and a crafty prelude, the old woman eventually reveals what she has come to say. A strong and handsome young man, who has twice won the Olympic wrestling prize, has set his sights on the merchant’s wife, is aflame with desire, and wishes to be her lover.
“Now do not be angry, and hear what he has to say. The thorn of passion has dug deep into his flesh. Allow yourself to find joy with him. Or are you going to stay here, keeping that chair warm?” Gyllis asks, tempting the young woman. “You will be withered before you know it, all your youth and beauty snuffed out by ashes.”

“Hush, hush . . .”

“And what is your husband up to in Egypt? He writes you no letters, he has forgotten you. He must have wet his lips on another cup by now.”

To conquer the girl’s last shred of resistance, Gyllis describes with her silver tongue all that Egypt, and especially Alexandria, has to offer a distant, ungrateful husband: fabulous riches, the delights of a constantly warm and sensual climate, gymnasiums, spectacles, troupes of philosophers, books, gold, wine, youths, and as many alluring women as there are stars in the sky.

I have loosely translated the opening of a short Greek play, written in the third century BC, that conveys a strong flavor of the daily life of the period. No doubt minor works such as this were not performed, except perhaps at some kind of dramatic reading. Humorous and sometimes picaresque, they open windows onto a forbidden world of mistreated slaves and cruel masters, procuresses, mothers driven to their wits’ end by their teenage children, and sex-­starved women. Gyllis is one of the earliest celestinas in literary history, a professional go-­between who knows the secrets of her trade and takes aim at her victims’ weakest defenses: the universal fear of growing old. Yet despite her cruel talent, this time Gyllis fails. The conversation ends with the girl calling Gyllis affectionate names. The merchant’s wife remains faithful to her absent husband, or perhaps would prefer not to run the terrible risk of adultery. Have you gone soft in the head? she asks Gyllis, while also consoling her with a sip of wine.

Along with its humor and fresh style, the play conveys an illuminating picture of how ordinary people viewed Alexandria in its heyday: the city of pleasures and books; the capital of sex and language.

2

The legend of Alexandria grew and grew. Two centuries after the play about Gyllis and the young woman she tempts was written, Alexandria was the scene of one of the greatest erotic myths of all time: the love story of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

By that time, Rome had become the center of the greatest Mediterranean empire, but when Mark Antony set foot in Alexandria for the first time, the city he left behind was still a labyrinth of dark, winding, and muddy streets. He found himself transported to an intoxicating place whose palaces, temples, wide avenues, and monuments radiated grandeur. The Romans felt sure of their military power and were convinced that the future was theirs, but they couldn’t possibly compete with the seduction of such a golden past and such decadent luxury. Through a combination of excitement, pride, and tactical calculations, this powerful general and the last queen of Egypt formed a political and sexual alliance that scandalized traditional Romans. To their even greater displeasure, it was said that Mark Antony was going to transfer the capital of the empire to Alexandria. Had the couple won the battle for control of the Roman Empire, perhaps today’s tourists would flock to Egypt to have their picture taken in the Eternal City, with its coliseum and its forums.

Much like her city, Cleopatra embodies that unique fusion of culture and sensuality. Plutarch writes that Cleopatra was in fact no great beauty. People didn’t stop in their tracks to stare at her in the street. What she had in abundance was magnetism and intelligence and a silver tongue. The timbre of her voice had such sweetness that it transfixed everyone who heard it. And her speech, he continues, could adapt to any language she chose, like a many-­stringed instrument.
She could converse with Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians without the aid of an interpreter. Astute and well-­informed, she won several rounds in the struggle for power both within and beyond her country, though in the end she lost the decisive battle. Her problem is that she has been spoken of only from the point of view of her enemies.

Books play an important role in this tempestuous story, too. When Mark Antony believed he was on the cusp of ruling the world, he wanted to dazzle Cleopatra with an extraordinary gift. He was well aware that gold, jewels, and banquets would fail to light the spark of amazement in his lover’s eyes, since she was accustomed to squandering them daily. On one occasion, in the haze of an alcoholic dawn, she performed the provocative and ostentatious gesture of dissolving a fabulously oversized pearl in vinegar and drinking it. So Mark Antony chose a gift that Cleopatra could not possibly scorn with a bored expression: he laid two hundred thousand volumes for the Great Library at her feet. In Alexandria, books served as fuel for passion.

Two authors who died in the twentieth century have become our guides to the city’s hidden corners, adding layers of patina to the myth of Alexandria. Constantine Cavafy was a bureaucrat of Greek origin who toiled without promotion in an obscure position at the Irrigation Service of the British-­run Ministry of Public Works. By night he dove into a universe of pleasure, full of cosmopolitan characters and international iniquity. He knew the labyrinth of Alexandria’s brothels like the back of his hand. They provided the only refuge for his homosexuality, “forbidden and strictly condemned by all,” as he himself wrote. Cavafy was a passionate reader of the classics and a poet who kept his work almost secret.

In what today are his best-­known poems, real and fictitious characters from Ithaca, Troy, Athens, and Byzantium are brought back to life. Other, apparently more personal, poems delve, sometimes with irony, sometimes with sorrow, into the poet’s own experience of maturity: nostalgia for his youth, his initiation into pleasure, and anguish at the passage of time. Yet categorizing them by subject matter is a superficial exercise. Cavafy was as thrilled by the past he read and imagined as he was by his own memories. As he slunk around Alexandria, he saw the pulse of the absent city beating beneath the real one that had replaced it. Although the Great Library had disappeared, its echoes, whispers, and murmurs kept trembling in the atmosphere. For Cavafy, this great fellowship of ghosts made the cold streets, where the lonely and tormented living would wander, easier to inhabit.

The characters in The Alexandria Quartet—Justine, Darley, and especially Balthazar, who claims to have met him—often remember Cavafy as “the old poet of the city.” These four novels by Lawrence Durrell, an Englishman suffocated by his country’s austerity and climate, also broaden the erotic and literary resonances of the Alexandrian myth. Durrell got to know the city during the turbulent years of the Second World War, when Egypt was occupied by British troops and was a hotbed of espionage, conspiracies, and, as always, pleasures. No one has described more accurately the colors and physical sensations that Alexandria awakened. The oppressive silence and the vast summer sky. The scorching days. The dazzling blue of the sea, the breakwaters, the yellow shoreline. Inland, Lake Mariout, sometimes as hazy as a mirage. Between the waters of the port and those of the lake are endless streets teeming with beggars and flies circling in clouds of dust. Palm trees, luxury hotels, hashish, and dissipation. The parched air charged with electricity. Lemon and violet sunsets. Five languages, five races, a dozen religions, five fleets reflected in the oily water. In Alexandria, writes Durrell, the flesh awakens, pressing upon prison bars.

The Second World War devastated the city. In the final novel of the Quartet, Clea describes a landscape of melancholy. Tanks run aground on the beaches like dinosaur skeletons, great cannons like fallen trees from a petrified forest, stray Bedouins wandering among the land mines. The city, which was always perverse, now has the air of a huge public urinal, she concludes. After 1952, Lawrence Durrell never returned to Alexandria. The age-­old Jewish and Greek communities fled in the wake of the Suez Crisis, the end of an era in the Middle East. Returning travelers tell me the cosmopolitan, sensual city has migrated into the memory of books.

Table of Contents

Prologue xiii

Part 1 Greece Imagines the Future

The City of Pleasures and Books 3

Alexander: The World Is Never Enough 7

The Macedonian Friend 12

Balancing at the Edge of the Abyss: The Library and the Musaeum of Alexandria 19

A Story of Fire and Passageways 43

Books and Skin 55

A Detective's Task 66

Homer: Enigma and Twilight 68

The Lost World of Orality: A Tapestry of Echoes 73

The Alphabet: A Peaceful Revolution 92

Voices from the Mist, Uncertain Times 101

Learning to Read the Shadows 110

The Triumph of Unruly Words 115

The First Book 117

Traveling Bookstores 121

The Religion of Culture 126

A Man with a Prodigious Memory and a Group of Avant-Garde Girls 129

Women, Weavers of Stories 144

The Other Tells Me My Story 158

The Drama of Laughter: Our Debt to Rubbish Dumps 172

A Passionate Affair with Words 181

Poison and Fragility 195

The Three Destructions of the Library of Alexandria 201

Lifeboats and Black Butterflies 216

How We Began to Be Strange 228

Part 2 The Roads to Rome

A City with a Bad Reputation 235

The Literature of Defeat 241

The Invisible Threshold of Slavery 252

In the Beginning Were the Trees 258

Poor Writers, Rich Readers 260

A Young Family 272

Bookselling: A Risky Business 280

The Birth and Triumph of Books with Pages 297

Public Libraries in Palaces of Water 311

Two Men from Hispania: The First Fan and the Aging Writer 319

Herculaneum: Preservation Amid Destruction 324

Ovid Clashes with Censorship 328

Sweet Inertia 332

Journey to the Center of Books and How to Name Them 335

What Is a Classic? 342

Canon: The History of a Reed 351

Shards of Women's Voices 362

What Was Believed Eternal Turned Out to Be Fleeting 367

Dare to Remember 376

Epilogue: Forgotten Men, Anonymous Women 381

Acknowledgments 387

Notes 389

Bibliography 411

Index 421

Editorial Reviews

06/20/2022

Novelist and essayist Vallejo makes her English-language debut with this rewarding exploration of how books and libraries developed in the ancient Hellenistic and Roman eras. Detailing the influence of oral traditions on written narratives, changes in format from papyrus scrolls to tablets and codices, and the interplay between these early books and social, political, and cultural shifts, Vallejo contends that the history of books is closely intertwined with the development of Western civilization. She spotlights the creation, influence, and eventual decline of the Library of Alexandria; the subsequent burgeoning of libraries and booksellers in the Roman world; and the research methods and rhetorical techniques of Homer, Aristotle, Herodotus, and other Greek and Roman writers and philosophers. Throughout, Vallejo eloquently expresses her enthusiasm for literature and libraries, describing how the isolation and confusion she felt during a research fellowship at Oxford were alleviated by trips to the Sackler and Bodleian libraries and lamenting the social forces that imperil freedom of expression and maintenance of cultural memory. Written in a lush and immersive style and shot through with sparkling turns of phrase, this is catnip for bibliophiles and ancient history buffs. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A Times (UK) Book of the Year • An Economist Best Book on Culture and Ideas • Winner of the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize
 
“Irene Vallejo has a writer's passion for books and a classicist's fascination with the way they came to be. She is also imaginative, lively and contemporary. In her hands written texts are not only a sensual pleasure, but living and frequently disruptive. . . . Ms Vallejo has a notable talent for evoking ancient scenes. Her description, for example, of the poet Martial returning to Spain from Rome, near the end of the book, is masterly.” ―Economist
 
“A generous, sprawling work. . . . As much as a history of books, Papyrus is also a history of reading. . . . Include[s] harrowing accounts of how survivors in the gulag and the concentration camps learned to write whole books in their heads, priming themselves for the moment when they would have access to writing materials to tell their stories. . . . Exquisite. . . . Beautifully translated into English by Charlotte Whittle, who is able to convey both Vallejo’s passionate narrative presence and her synthesising intelligence.” —The Guardian
 
“Evocative. . . . On one level, Papyrus is the story of the invention of books . . . but on another, it is a memoir, a love song, a confessional and a manifesto. Vallejo fuses these strands seamlessly and polishes the surface until it shines. . . . Papyrus has been a surprise bestseller. It’s easy to see why: Vallejo is a novelist and she has a storyteller’s ability to animate her subjects. . . . Impressively rip-roaring. . . . She draws a six-thousand-year line from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia to the e-reader tablets of today and leaves her readers inspired, invigorated and sincerely grateful for the invention of the book.” —Telegraph (UK)
 
“Packed with fascinating insights. . . . Vallejo herself is a diligent scholar, yet blessed with the ability to make the ancient world come alive for us. . . . She excels . . . with her wide-ranging accounts of the human experience of books in the ancient world. She has a fine eye for telling detail.” —MSN.com

“Accessible and entertaining. . . . [Papyrus] centers on the Library of Alexandria but has a much broader scope. [It] is as much about the people who inhabit books and libraries as it is about the books themselves. . . . While Socrates feared the written word, Ms. Vallejo sees it as something much more precious and delicate, something that is worth protecting.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Vallejo . . . elegantly explores how scrolls and codices laid the cultural foundation of the West.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Anyone who’s ever felt inadequate in the company of great minds will marvel at [Irene] Vallejo’s own humility in the presence of those authors she so insightfully cites. . . . Thanks to [Charlotte] Whittle's lively, propulsive translation, English speaking book lovers and intellectual historians will all profit from this magnificent history of books, authors, and the often-anonymous librarians to whom civilization owes an unrepayable debt.” —Booklist [starred review]

“Written in a lush and immersive style and shot through with sparkling turns of phrase, this is catnip for bibliophiles and ancient history buffs.” —Publishers Weekly

“A sprawling, learned, lively personal history tour of books.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“[A] masterpiece . . . I am absolutely certain that it will continue to be read when its readers today are already in the afterlife.” —Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

"Irene Vallejo's Papyrus is a remarkable work that defies easy categorisation: part cultural history, part memoir, part journey of the imagination. In telling the story of books in the ancient world, Vallejo makes a powerful case for their enduring importance." —Toby Wilkinson, New York Times best-selling author of The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

"Vallejo deftly guides us through the world of ancient books in this exquisite, erudite account. History at its absolute best: learned, vibrant, captivating." —Violet Moller, author of The Map of Knowledge

“Irene Vallejo has a level of authority that reminds me of Elena Ferrante. This is a marvelous book. I am beside myself with envy of the life and mind that produced it. There are very few things—Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, metaphysical poetry—I read in bed until I swoon into sensuous bafflement at the power of words. Papyrus is now on that short list.” —Sarah Ruden, author of The Face of Water

“Vallejo’s very personal extended essay is a hymn, a paean, to the written word, to alphabetic script, to literacy and, not least, libraries. . . . A stunningly varied work.” —Paul Cartledge, author of The Spartans
  
 “A literary phenomenon . . . Elegant and richly digressive . . . A passionate vindication of the act of reading.” —The Times Literary Supplement (United Kingdom)
 
“With a consummate sense of storytelling, and a real delight in writing, [Papyrus] transforms these historical facts into a picaresque journey. . . . This hefty, erudite and lyrical volume, passionate and precise, should be read like a great love song to books, to their diversity, their innumerable benefits, their simple modesty.” —Le Monde (France)

“With a first-rate writer’s mesmerizing gift for storytelling . . . Vallejo unravels the beleaguered and often fortuitous history of the book.” —Corriere Della Sera (Italy)
 
 “One can be a masterful philologist and at the same time write like the angels . . . A true literary feast.” —ABC (Spain)

From the Publisher

2022-06-22
Imagination and historical research converge in this memoir-ish book about books and a whole lot more.

Spanish author Vallejo, here “consumed by the book I’m writing,” beckons readers to join her on a sprawling, learned, lively personal history tour of books—“a silent dialogue between you and me.” The narrative quickly morphs into a comprehensive, fact-laden, occasionally rambling intellectual history of ancient Greece and Rome. The author opens with a fablelike story about a king sending out hunters to find books, papyrus scrolls in many languages, “light, beautiful, and portable,” for a great library in Alexandria. When Mark Antony arrived, he tried to woo Cleopatra with a special gift: 200,000 books for the city’s library. “In Alexandria,” writes Vallejo, “books served as fuel for passion,” and that institution became the world’s first public library. After Alexander died young, King Ptolemy worked to maintain the vast library, enlisting the help of a variety of scholars. Vallejo’s narrative jumps around: illuminating tales from ancient history, descriptions of her research in Oxford’s libraries, how to read a scroll, the education of a scribe, our fascination with The Iliad and The Odyssey. Throughout, the author draws on other writers (Borges, Christopher Morley, Umberto Eco) and films (Memento, It’s a Wonderful Life) to help make her points, and she is clearly filled with wonder about myriad topics, almost all literary. For example, how many books were in ancient Greece? How many people could read then? Before turning her gaze to Rome, she discusses libraries in Nazi concentration camps. When the Romans led their military expeditions into Greece, they turned its books “into the spoils of war.” In the “story of books in Rome, slaves are the protagonists.” Vallejo frequently diverges from her primary path, covering education, religious persecution, the rise of reading, bookselling, and countless other topics.

Unquestionably erudite, but the vast amount of information in this digressive work may limit the appeal.

Kirkus Reviews

This audiobook’s subtitle—“The Invention of Books in the Ancient World”— describes this work better than its title. This history of books moves from the oral tradition to scrolls to codices and recounts how those lay the foundation for Western culture. The author’s anecdotal style and short chapters translate well to audio. Sophie Robert offers an able and pleasing narration. Her pace is easy to follow, and her almost lilting intonation makes listening a pleasure. Robert renders episodes such as Alexander the Great’s love of Homer’s ILIAD more like conversation and less like pure history. She adds bits of emotion where appropriate and breaks up the author’s sometimes complex sentences into easier-to-comprehend pieces. Robert makes the author’s almost extreme degree of detail palatable. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

This audiobook’s subtitle—“The Invention of Books in the Ancient World”— describes this work better than its title. This history of books moves from the oral tradition to scrolls to codices and recounts how those lay the foundation for Western culture. The author’s anecdotal style and short chapters translate well to audio. Sophie Robert offers an able and pleasing narration. Her pace is easy to follow, and her almost lilting intonation makes listening a pleasure. Robert renders episodes such as Alexander the Great’s love of Homer’s ILIAD more like conversation and less like pure history. She adds bits of emotion where appropriate and breaks up the author’s sometimes complex sentences into easier-to-comprehend pieces. Robert makes the author’s almost extreme degree of detail palatable. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile