=187. Mounting and Rolling of Books.= The mounting of the papyrus long roll is a great art, especially if the book is intended for a fine library. First, the whole long strip of papyrus is dressed with cedar oil to repel worms--thus giving the pages a pleasing yellow tinge. Then the last leaf is fastened to a thin cylinder of wood or of rolled papyrus called the _umbilicus_. The ends of the roll itself are carefully cut and smoothed with pumice stone, and the ends of the umbilicus are often gilded. Next a strip of solid parchment bearing the title of the book in handsome red letters is attached by a string at one end, where it will hang down when the volume is rolled. After the book itself is ready a neat cylindrical cover or case must be made of parchment, colored red or yellow, and also marked with the title. For really fine volumes additional elegancies are possible; for example, a handsome portrait of the author can be painted or pasted upon the first page, and the edges of the entire scroll can be colored. Handsomely illustrated works grace every good library. [Illustration: BOOK SCROLL.] To read these books will seem to persons familiar only with _codexes_ (flat opening books) extremely cumbersome.[114] You have to take the volume in both hands, unrolling with the right while you roll up with the left. It seems nigh impossible to “run through” such a volume, and hard to trace down a passage; and there are apparently no indices. However, practice can make almost perfect. Calvus can roll and unroll his books with remarkable dexterity and by a kind of instinct hit promptly upon almost any allusion. It will be a real gain for the world, nevertheless, when the roll is supplanted by the many-leaved book. =188. Copying Books: the Publishing Business. Horace’s and Martial’s Publishers.=--Books abound, although of course all are multiplied by painful human effort. This is because slave copyists are relatively cheap. Atticus, Cicero’s friend, seems to have made a real fortune in the publishing business--that is, he owned a great corps of skilful slaves incessantly busy transcribing manuscripts. The finest copies must be made deliberately one by one, but ordinary volumes can be multiplied more summarily. As you go about Rome you will perhaps come on large rooms where a great number of scribes are seated in a kind of lecture hall desperately following word for word some reader who, in a smooth, monotonous voice, is giving out the text either of an established classic or the newest essays or epigrams of the successors of Pliny the Younger or Martial. In this way what is really an “edition” of say a hundred or even two hundred copies can be produced in a remarkably short time, without the aid of the printing press.[115]