The Roman poet Marcus Tullius Cicero had a serious thing for books. For Cicero, books were more than just physical texts full of abstract ideas—books were objects that imbued their surroundings with metaphysical meaning. “A room without books,” Cicero famously, if somewhat apocryphally, declared, “is a body without a soul.”

As a stalwart book collector in the first century BC, Cicero maintained several extensive personal libraries at his country estates as well as a library in his villa on the Palatine Hill in the center of Rome, near the Forum Romanum and the Circus Maximus. For many of Cicero’s affluent colleagues, the mere show of books was enough to cement their elite, educated status in Roman society. The architect Vitruvius, Cicero’s contemporary, noted, “Among col...