I.

Introduction

Book Trade, the manufacture, publication, and distribution of books. The origins of the book trade can be traced to the graven clay and stone tablets and the polygonal cylinders of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms, or the bound bamboo strips of the earliest Chinese scribes, but most authorities consider the papyrus scrolls of antiquity the true progenitors of the book. As early as 600 bc, scribes were known to have copied poems, speeches, and orations on these scrolls to sell them at high prices.