It’s impossible to know who was the ‘first publisher’ (though it was certainly not Gutenberg ,which is the strange and wrong answer many internet sites provide), but it won’t harm us (as it never does) to look to Rome. There we can find a thriving industry, a street crammed with booksellers, and authors bemoaning how little they earned from sales. 1 Let’s start with Atticus, Titus Pomponius Atticus. He was friends with Cicero, who was at the time a celebrated orator, public figure, and writer.