Page 187 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

made a copy or exemplar of his own on equal quires or pieces (peciae), each of which was numbered in sequence, so that he could hire out these pieces for copying to professional scribes. Once the copies of the set of peciae were completed by the various scribes the bookseller would have them bound in the numbered sequence, and the finished book would be sold to the cus- tomer who had placed the order. The bookseller would retain his original peciae so that he could loan them out again when another copy of the text was ordered.
By the mid-fifteenth century, when Gutenberg introduced printing by movable type, the production and sale of manuscript books had been sys- tematized, and many of the elements of the book as we know it were well-es- tablished. Through the technology of printing—the first widely applied process of mass production— book production was further systematized, and new distribution methods evolved for the sale of editions rather than for individually commissioned manuscripts. As we have seen, the transition from manuscript to print was one of a series of transitions in the form and function of the book, in which innovations were introduced while usable elements of prior book technologies remained in place to a greater or lesser extent, either because of resistance to change or because the prior technol- ogies were effective enough for their intended purposes. Because of the cu- mulative nature of information, and our desire to understand and preserve our past no matter how fast technologies advance, usable prior technologies of the book such as medieval manuscripts, early printed books, and even Egyptian papyri continue to co-exist, if only as historical records, along with the latest innovations in recording, distribution, and storage, much as print co-exists with digital today.
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