The cost of literacy [medieval hist]

[siderea]

I knew that other contemporaneous cultures than those of Europe had unfathomably higher numbers of books than Europeans did, but I didn't know about this in retrospect obvious reason why:

2026 Mar 19: Dwarkesh Patel feat. Ada Palmer [DwarkeshPatel YT]: "Why Medieval Books Cost as Much as a House" (1 min, 7 sec):

Watch on YouTube

Without papyrus, what you're writing on is a dead sheep. And 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. So every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. And a medieval book hand written costs as much as a house.

And so to have a library is to be not just rich but mega rich. So 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 600 books.

There's definitely more than 600 books in this room. Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than 600 books. This is nothing.

And at the same time as that, in the Middle East, sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or 5,000 books. There are libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books.* There are libraries in China with thousands of books. Because they in China have cheap paper and rice paper. The Middle East has papyrus.

Europe, and only Europe, is writing on a leather jacket.

* Three hundred thousand. It's been thirteen years and I am still not remotely over that fact. Every time I encounter it anew, my SCA persona gets acrophobic trying to imagine a library that big and has to sit down and put her head between her knees so she doesn't pass out.