Would wealthy Greeks and Romans put up stacks of bookshelves at home? What would they read during leisure?
Books before were extremely expensive so it would have been very few who would have been able to fill a bookcase and of those who in theory could even less would have forgone the luxuries that would have otherwise been bought with the money.
In the Villa of the Papyri buried by the eruption of Vesuvius (79 CE) all the discovered texts are still scrolls and were kept in pots rather than on shelves.
As to what they read we get a very distorted impression as what has survived is very highbrow. There are hints that there was pulp fiction being circulated but when many great classics have been lost it is not surprising that so few texts of a less high register have survived.
Salvete,
considering the difficulty and costs of amassing a large amount of texts, I found it rather astonishing that Seneca found it necessary to warn against “discursiveness in reading” (second epistola moralis). The ancients would have been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of texts, images, sounds, we are confronted with in our lives.
Valete,
Carolus Raeticus
daivid said (in part):
As to what they read we get a very distorted impression as what has survived is very highbrow. There are hints that there was pulp fiction being circulated but when many great classics have been lost it is not surprising that so few texts of a less high register have survived.
Yes, it is understandable that garbage would not have been meticulously copied and re-copied by monks in monasteries over the hundreds of years that passed before reproduction got so much easier, but it makes it hard on us poor beginners to learn the language! Plus, I was very frustrated to learn that only fragments survive from Sappho, who probably wrote more on daily life and relationships than any author whose works are extant. Xenophon makes a poor substitute for Jane Austen, whereas Sappho might have done 
Personally, what I wouldn’t give for the Attic Greek equivalent of Dr. Suess & P.D. Eastman’s children’s books! I was rather tickled to learn (when browsing the Wikipedia article on Attic Greek yesterday) that there is an Ancient Greek version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone available! The article by the translator was very interesting, since it points out the difficulties involved in such a translation, and highlights some of the fascinating differences between Ancient Greek and modern English. It’s not just the lack of words for modern technology, it also includes differences in names for colors, number of different words for various noises one might hear, which categories of things are lumped together under just one, or way fewer words than are used in English, etc. I find such things a great spice to my language study … a welcome change from endless declensions, etc!
Salvete,
this reminds of something. I have just started to read The Legacy of Greece by Mr. Finley et al. In the Introduction it says:
The reality […] is that classical Greek culture was essentially an oral one, in which ideas as well as their literary expression were transmitted and debated primarily by word of mouth, publicly and privately.
Is this equally true of the Romans, especially during the late Republic and the Empire?
Valete,
Carolus Raeticus