The storage of books in ancient Rome

A Roman taking down a roll from its place in a library.

Now that Tyrannio has arranged my books, a new spirit has been infused into my house. In this matter the help of your men Dionysius and Menophilus has been invaluable. Nothing could look neater than those shelves of yours (illa tua pegmata), since they smartened up my books with their titles

Book-box or capsa

No other words than those I have been discussing are, so far as I know, applied by the best writers to the storage of books; and, after a careful study of the passages in which they occur, I conclude that, so long as rolls only had to be accommodated, private libraries in Rome were fitted with rows of shelves standing against the walls (plutei), or fixed to them (pegmata). The space between these horizontal shelves was subdivided by vertical divisions into pigeon-holes (nidi, foruli, loculamenta), and it may be conjectured that the width of these pigeon-holes would vary in accordance with the number of rolls included in a single work. That such receptacles were the common furniture of a library is proved, I think, by such evidence as the epigram of Martial quoted above, in which he tells his friend that if he will accept his poems, he may "put them even in the lowest pigeon-hole (nido vel imo)," as we should say, "on the bottom shelf"; and by the language of Seneca when he sneers at the "pigeon-holes (loculamenta) carried up to the ceiling."

The height of the woodwork varied, of course, with individual taste. In the library on the Esquiline the height was only three feet six inches; at Herculaneum about six feet.

I can find no hint of any doors, or curtains, in front of the pigeon-holes. That the ends of the rolls (frontes) were visible, is, I think, quite clear from what Cicero says of his own library after the construction of his shelves (pegmata); and the various devices for making rolls attractive seem to me to prove that they were intended to be seen.

A Roman reading a roll in front of a press (armarium). From a photograph of a sarcophagus in the garden of the Villa Balestra. Rome.

A representation of rolls arranged on the system which I have attempted to describe, occurs on a piece of sculpture found at Neumagen near Trèves in the seventeenth century, among the ruins of a fortified camp attributed to Constantine the Great. Two divisions, full of rolls, are shewn,
A representation of rolls arranged on the system which I have attempted to describe, occurs on a piece of sculpture  found at Neumagen near Trèves in the seventeenth century, among the ruins of a fortified camp attributed to Constantine the Great. Two divisions, full of rolls, are shewn,from which a man, presumably the librarian, is selecting one. The ends of the rolls are furnished with tickets. 


From THE CARE OF BOOKS An Essay on the Development of Libraries and their Fittings, from the earliest times to the end of the Eighteenth Century By John Willis Clark, M.A., F.S.A. Cambridge. 1901
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26378/26378-h/26378-h.htm