Papyrologist Roger Bagnall has a book out in September, in which he looks again at the physical books and papyri discovered in Egypt and generally has the drains up on the dates of them. I only hope it isn’t a bit of revisionism; but I don’t get that sense from the little that I know.
Much of the established knowledge on this subject was done in some really rather splendid articles by T.C.Skeat, who did not seem to share the fear of numbers and statistics endemic in the humanities and consequently produced quite a lot of hard data. But much of this was now a long time ago, and a new take on it would be interesting. Not that I will ever see the book, I suspect, being offline; but such a study ought to be interesting.
Thanks to What’s new in Papyrology for the tip, and more details. The PDF link to chapter 1 does not seem to work, tho.
The link to Chapter 1 works fine here. I’m curious as to the result of Bagnall’s work, if it is not too costly, i’m thinking of buying it, but we’ll see.
I’m curious too, but it will probably be priced for library sales.