One thing that arrived in Baghdad just in time to really help the translation movement, and the whole of Arabic scholarship, was paper. There is an apocryphal story that the Muslims learned the art of papermaking from Chinese prisoners they caught at the Battle of Tallas in 751. It’s probably just as likely that paper arrived from China with the many traders who were at that time journeying far across Asia, and that they brought back Chinese calligraphy as well as paper. Either way, it arrived in Islam just about the same time as the founding of Baghdad by the Abbasids. Its impact was enormous. Parchment was very expensive, hard to come by, thick and awkward to use. Paper, on the other hand, was cheap, available in bulk, light and thin, and was perfect for a new calligraphic style of Arabic writing. If in China, papermaking might have been an art, in Baghdad it became an industry.
With paper, books could be made and copied comparatively cheaply in large numbers, and the boost this gave to learning in Islam is immeasurable. Previously, parchment codexes and scrolls of books had been so rare and so bulky and precious that they were held only in a very few private or royal libraries. With the coming of paper, books and bookshops appeared not just in Baghdad but in many other Islamic cities too. Even those who were moderately wealthy could build up their own private library, and public libraries appeared for the first time. In Bukhara, for instance, there was a public library where scholars could simply drop in, ask the librarian to get them a particular book from the library stacks off to the sides of the main hall, and then sit down to make notes. The library even provided free paper for the scholars. By the 13th century, Baghdad had many public libraries and bookshops, with numerous publishers employing scores of copyists to make the books.
With paper, books could be made and copied comparatively cheaply in large numbers, and the boost this gave to learning in Islam is immeasurable. Previously, parchment codexes and scrolls of books had been so rare and so bulky and precious that they were held only in a very few private or royal libraries. With the coming of paper, books and bookshops appeared not just in Baghdad but in many other Islamic cities too. Even those who were moderately wealthy could build up their own private library, and public libraries appeared for the first time. In Bukhara, for instance, there was a public library where scholars could simply drop in, ask the librarian to get them a particular book from the library stacks off to the sides of the main hall, and then sit down to make notes. The library even provided free paper for the scholars. By the 13th century, Baghdad had many public libraries and bookshops, with numerous publishers employing scores of copyists to make the books.
