This valuable book surveys the available evidence for Roman book collections (from the time of Cicero to Constantine), looking at what the collections we know about contained, and how they were formed and maintained (physically and intellectually). To do this, George Houston brings together a large body of material, chiefly papyrological, some of which is very well known, but which has not previously been systematically studied with these questions in mind. The result is a lucid, engaging and accessible survey that will be very useful to scholars and students of ancient book culture.

The book begins with a brief discussion of the physical form of the Greco-Roman book. The first chapter looks at how Romans (by which H. means members of what he sees as a largely homogeneous Greco-Roman literary culture) acquired and developed book collections, by copying, purchase, gift, loan, bequest, confiscation and so on. The resulting collections would, H. argues, have tended towards heterogeneity, with even rich collections containing books from different sources with varying levels of quality and completeness. Several examples show that collections, once formed, could be preserved and added to for several generations.

H. then turns to different bodies of evidence for the contents and nature of book collections in the Roman world. Ch. 2 analyses eight book lists on Egyptian papyri, whose contents are helpfully given in an appendix. These documents, partial as they are, give some insight into the principles of collection and organization of the books they list, indicating (for example) mostly small- to medium-sized collections of widely different natures, some division between prose and poetry, and different attempts to find ordering principles which included alphabetization and division by genre or by the physical nature of the books.

The well-known material from the Villa of the Papyri is presented in ch. 3 (and appendix 2). The papyri are considered with book collection questions in mind, offering a valuable summary of, and contribution to, existing scholarship. There is discussion of the physical form of the books, paratextual features like subscriptiones and stichometric counts, and the range of their dates and scribal hands. Overall H. sees this as a moderately large, specialized collection of six hundred to a thousand book rolls, comparable to some of those attested by the book lists of ch. 2, and generally of good quality; some books may have been acquired from commercial copyists — H. sees no evidence for an in-house scriptorium, or even for the presence of Philodemus in the villa itself.

Ch. 4 examines five book collections from Oxyrhynchus, seeing in them collections shaped by individuals with distinct intellectual aims (though acknowledging the paradox inherent in deducing what ancient book collectors were interested in by examining material which they or their successors threw away). As with the Herculaneum papyri, the presence in these collections of multiple hands and formats, and of papyri of widely differing date (and quality), suggests a multi-stage process of acquisition, often spanning generations, that involved numerous commercial copyists rather than a small number of in-house slaves.

The remaining chapters consider the evidence (literary, archaeological, epigraphic, iconographic) for the sorts of equipment and personnel that would have housed and worked on these collections. Ch. 5 begins with book storage and shelving, and moves on to a brisk discussion of two of the best-known public library buildings in the Roman world (at Ephesus and Timgad), giving estimates of their book capacity and brief accounts of their architecture and operation. Sections on furniture (chairs, tables, step-ladders for reaching high shelves), scribal equipment and artworks follow, giving an overview of the physical environment in which these books were collected and consulted. This, though concise, is a valuable addition to the book — the discussion and illustration of writing materials, seats, and surfaces such as tables, for example, is in itself a very useful synopsis of evidence and recent scholarship.

The final chapter gathers the evidence for library personnel (almost entirely from Rome) from Cicero's assistants to the directors, freedmen and slave staff of the imperial libraries. H. lists the tasks they might be supposed to have done in preparing and maintaining books and ends with a summary of various threats to book collections (damp, neglect, theft, fire). Three appendices containing the material analysed in chs 2–4 complete the book, and will be an extremely useful resource for the study and teaching of literary culture and book history.

The subject is a large one, and no book can aim to cover all of it. The focus here is on book collections belonging firmly to a Greco-Roman tradition, in which H. sees continuity in material, substance and intellectual practice from individual collections of a few book rolls made in Egypt to the collections of the great libraries in Rome and the Greek East. The book is chiefly interested in the formation and housing of book collections rather than their civic, social or symbolic functions, or the various processes of engagement with texts that they may have sustained. H.'s aim is rather to furnish material for his reader to envisage ‘a variety of Roman book collections, large or small, set within more or less clearly defined physical spaces and supplemented with appropriate equipment, furniture, and persons' (253), and in this he succeeds amply. This volume will be an excellent teaching resource and a valuable addition to the collection of anyone with an interest in the book in the ancient world.