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In terms of mainstream printing, historians of the book have observed that once printers began issuing editions of the Bible demand for produc- tion of new manuscript Bibles appears to have essentially ceased, except for the production of a few great luxury manuscript bibles such as the Bible of Borso d’Este Duke of Ferrara, with its more than 1000 miniatures, commis- sioned by the duke in 1455, coincident with the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible. Undoubtedly, the cost of copying the lengthy texts of both the Old and New Testaments by hand was extremely high, and based on the com- ment in 1468 of humanist Giovanni Andrea Bussi cited in a prior essay, we may assume that the cost of printed editions was significantly less. Whether or not cost savings was the primary cause, the shift in production of Bibles from manuscript to print within the first decade of printing, or shortly thereafter, was one of the first major signposts in the transition from old to
new technologies in fifteenth-century book production.
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