Breeding Books

In today’s age of online scientific publishing, it’s hard to remember the days when one would have to trudge to the library to do significant research. Even harder to think about are the days before the printing press, when books were translated by hand. In those old days, knowledge moved slowly and truly such work must have been a labor of love (two good words, scrivener: “a professional or public copyist or writer” and scriptorium: “a copying room for the scribes in a medieval monastery.” Scrivener, of course, is probably most famously known from the short story Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville.) And when we think about it a bit, we realize that the resemblence between copying books and the other labor of love, having children, is more than just superficial. Indeed, in order for a book to be born, a previous copy must exist. Similarly books are destroyed over a given of years. A little more sophisticated model suggests that the birth rate for books will not be constant but will decrease as the number of books saturates “the market.” Thus we can map the growth and survival rates of books as a function of time.
In this months Science (307, p. 1305-1307 , 2005) John Cisne proposes just such a model for the survival of books during the Middle Ages. What Cisne finds is that indeed the age distributions of books surviving today predicted by a simple population dynamic model indeed appear to be correct. So here are some cool numbers:

…manuscripts were about 15 to 30 times more likely to be copied as to be destroyed and had a half-life of four to nine centuries, and that population’s doubling time was on the order of two to three decades.

I wonder if one of the reasons why science didn’t advance as much during the Middle Ages was that this long doubling time (two to three decades) ment that it was very unlikely that the fruits of your hard work producing a book would not be disseminated during your lifetime. Think if you could work on science but that the implications of your work wouldn’t ever be reveal until long after your death. The invention of the printing press sure was a marvelous event, wasn’t it?