[1] Birt's father intended for him to become a shopkeeper but allowed his musically talented son to attend the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums, a gymnasium in Hamburg, for three years where Johannes Classen and Adolf Kiessling were his teachers.

Apart from his scholarly research, he became well-known to a wider public after 1913 for a large number of works that aimed to popularize scholarship on ancient Greece and Rome.

Although, perhaps, it is less important in scope and subject-matter than the earlier book, this elaborate study of the scroll as it appears in art is a useful contribution, exhibiting the same qualities of untiring search for all possible material bearing on the theme, fresh judgments on that material, careful exposition of fact, often enlivened by a pertinent comparison with modern practice, and a genius for classification which in combined comprehensiveness and attention to detail is admirable, even for a German.

From the time of Bernard de Montfaucon (1655 –1741), the field was dominated by palaeography, which married an interest in tracing the evolution in Greek and Latin handwriting through the centuries with techniques for deciphering, annotating, and amending manuscripts.

As important as this was for interpreting the books recovered during the Renaissance, the narrow focus on writing and grammar gave only a limited view of the central medium for organizing and communicating knowledge and literary art.

Before his premature death, Graux together with Martin Schanz and other scholars launched the modern study of the spatial organization of ancient books, which is now called stichometry.

As Hermann Alexander Diels said, The investigations of the recently deceased Charles Graux, taken all too early from the world of scholarship, have made it henceforth inalterably certain that the standard line (the stichos) of the ancients was a unit of spatial length equal to the hexameter.

[9] Many of Birt's theories and interpretations are dated and have been superseded by later research, but he permanently broadened and deepened the methodologies used in histories of the ancient book.

In addition to Cohen and Natorp, Marburg's philosophy department was home during Birt's career to such important figures as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Paul Friedlander, Ernst Cassirer, and José Ortega y Gasset.