Since the publication of the first edition, the larger work, as an introduction to which this essay was planned, _Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages_, has been brought before the public, and has been received with a very satisfactory measure of appreciation. The readers of this last have occasionally raised question concerning a lack of harmony of design or of uniformity of method between the two books. It is in order therefore again to explain that they were never intended to serve as two sections of a continuous narrative. The record of the making and distribution of books during the centuries after 476, I have attempted to present with a certain degree of comprehensiveness; but for classic times, there are no materials available for any complete or comprehensive record. The sketch presented by me is, as stated, based upon a few references to literary methods which are scattered through the writings of classic authors. A much more comprehensive study of the conditions of literary production among the ancients could very easily, however, be prepared by a student who possessed the requisite familiarity with the literature of the time, and who was sufficiently free from limitations as to eyesight to be able to trace and to verify his quotations for himself, and I trust that some competent scholar may yet interest himself in producing such a treatise. NEW YORK, June 15, 1896. [Illustration] PREFACE. THE following pages, as originally written, were planned to form a preliminary chapter, or general introduction, to a history of the origin and development of property in literature, a subject in which I have for some time interested myself. The progress of the history has, however, been so seriously hampered by engrossing business cares, and also by an increasing necessity for economizing eyesight, that the date of its completion remains very uncertain. I do not relinquish the hope of being able to place before the public (or at least of that small portion of the public which may be interested in the subject) at some future date, the work as first planned, which shall present a sketch of the development of property in literature from the invention of printing to the present day, but I have decided to publish in a separate volume this preliminary study of the literary conditions which obtained in ancient times. In the stricter and more modern sense of the term, literary property stands for an ownership in a specific literary form given to certain ideas, for the right to control such particular form of expression of these ideas, and for the right to multiply and to dispose of copies of such form of expression. In this immaterial signification, the term literary property is practically synonymous with la _propriété intellectuelle_, or _das geistige Eigenthum_.