Now this is going to be a bit more of a broad and (probably not) less dumb of question than that, but I have always been boggled by how historians worked before books were widely available. Maybe I am overestimating how much you need books to learn things or how much effort you need to write one by hand, but I look at my textbooks and it just boggles me how anyone would be able to be well-read in ancient Greek and Roman history, or learning the finer points of another language in the 1100's when books were a hand-copying affair that took an extremely large amount of effort. It also boggles me how historians worked back in the medieval and ancient era, simply because I might be overestimating how difficult research was back then.

So make me feel dumb/pampered r/AskHistorians, because I know this probably is a stupid question.