3/10/2026 – This post contains the transcript from here of a video of Ada Palmer explaining why so many books from the Library of Alexandria were lost.
01:23:02 – The Library of Alexandria isn’t where most ancient books were lost
Dwarkesh Patel
One thing I wanted to ask you, back to the printing press. Not only does printing get cheaper, but around this time, paper itself also gets cheaper. So not just reading, but writing gets cheaper. Do you as historians see a marked change in this period in the amount of records that are taken and, as a result, our understanding?
Ada Palmer
A huge amount rests on whether you have a cheap writing surface. Rather than looking first at the Renaissance, let’s look at what we think of as the fall of Rome. One of the biggest things that happens there is that Western and Northern Europe lose access to papyrus. Papyrus is the cheap writing surface of antiquity. It is an easy plant-based writing surface.
You take this tall, thin water reed that is fibrous like asparagus. You slice it into ribbons. You set them out in the sun, a bunch of them parallel to each other sitting on a stone like noodles. You put a second row of noodles perpendicular to that on top, and then they dry in the sun, and they are naturally sticky. They stick to each other. They produce a sheet. Practically no labor has gone into this. You’ve sliced, you’ve laid out, boom.
Papyrus is a very inexpensive writing surface, and this is what enables Rome to have a bureaucracy and to have libraries in any mid-sized city. People can send letters back and forth. There can be enormous tax records. Sometimes when Egypt and Rome are at war, Egypt will be like, “No, we are angry. We’ll stop exporting papyrus.” No papyrus to Rome, and then Rome’s infrastructure will fall apart overnight because you can’t do anything if you can’t write stuff down.
Papyrus is a warm weather plant. It is killed by frost. You cannot grow it north of the frost line. So France, Spain, even most of Italy, you can only grow papyrus down in the very tip down in Sicily.
Without papyrus, what you’re writing on is a dead sheep. If you think of the price of a head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you’re understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus and writing on a dead sheep. Every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. A handwritten medieval book handwritten on parchment costs as much as a house, so that a small pocket copy of a book costs as much as a studio condo. A big illuminated fancy Bible, you’re spending on that what you would spend on a villa in the countryside.
This is an enormous expense. To have a library is to be not just rich, but mega-rich. Only the wealthiest cities contain anybody who has a library. The great library of the University of Paris—the library from Europe’s perspective—has six hundred books. There’s definitely more than six hundred books in this room. Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than six hundred books. This is nothing.
At the same time as that, in the Middle East, sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or five thousand books. There are libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books. There are libraries in China with thousands of books because they have cheap paper, rice paper. The Middle East has papyrus. Europe, and only Europe, is writing on a leather jacket.
Dwarkesh Patel
What changes around this time? How is Europe able to get paper?
Ada Palmer
Still zooming in on the fall of Rome. Rome had lots and lots of books on papyrus. They start falling apart because papyrus is brittle. Most of our knowledge from antiquity is not lost at the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It’s lost between 400 and 600 A.D. when the papyri are falling apart.
Here you are with a library of a thousand books, and you can only afford to make a hundred new books. You have to choose which hundred of these thousand to save because there literally is not enough industry on your continent to make enough leather to copy down all this text. You have to pick. The majority of what we lost from antiquity, we lost then.
We lost it when the papyri were falling apart. This also distorted what survived because most of the copying out was done by monks. When you have a thousand books and you can only save a hundred of them and you’re a monk, you’re like, “What will I save? I know, Saint Augustine. I love Saint Augustine.” This is why we have more surviving work by Saint Augustine than the entirety of all pagan classical Latin. The subjective tastes of the people in power at the moment the papyri were falling apart ended up being an unintentional moment of censorship that biased what survives from antiquity.
Paper technology hits Europe in 800 A.D., so we’re talking about a four-hundred-year famine of a cheap writing surface. Paper is nowhere near as cheap as papyrus because you need to gather rags from used clothing. You immerse them in water, and you beat them violently using a mill for a very long time until they become a pulp. You then scoop that pulp up on a screen, and the fibers lock together. It’s sort of a slurry that looks like grits. You lift up the slurry, and it locks together into a sheet of paper.
It’s not as cheap as just growing papyrus, and it’s much more labor. You have to build a paper mill. If parchment is a leather jacket and papyrus is buying a head of lettuce, this is somewhere in between.
Paper comes in, and people are very wary of it. Paper is clearly not as strong as parchment. Parchment is really tough stuff. People start using paper for rough drafts, letters, sketchbooks. When you’re doing the sketch before doing a painting, you might do that on paper. But Europe has paper for four hundred years before the earliest state document is ever written on paper, to give you a sense of how people are wary of it.
It disseminates slowly. It’s still expensive. It requires industry and production, but it is a tenth as expensive as leather. Paper disseminates slowly through Europe. Again, this is one of these things where there was always technological change, and all technological changes are gradual.
Paper comes in in 800. It’s being trusted by 1200. When printing begins, they’re printing on paper, but they even print on vellum. If you’re a really rich person, you would be like, “Please print two copies on vellum for me.” Dukes like the Dukes d’Este, Isabella d’Este—the sister of the duke who walked around buck naked to show off that he could—specially ordered all of her books to be printed on vellum even when the rest of the print run was on paper. These are the very books being produced in Venice by the apprentices of Gutenberg who ran away.
At that moment in the 1490s, if you’re really rich, you might be invested in these newfangled printed books, but you’re still not trusting paper, even though paper has been there for six hundred years at that point. So again, gradual adoption of technologies and gradual trust in paper. They’re still using parchment for things, gradually less and less, but substantially over the course of the 1600s. You can even find things written on parchment in the 1700s and 1800s. British Parliament still did its records on parchment up until ten years ago, and the Vatican still does its official records on parchment now.
Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago). Wrote Inventing the Renaissance.
The Clip is below.
The full video is below.
