Page 58 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

Repairs to holes in the margins, and stretching the parchment: 2 livres
Binding: 1 livre 12 sous.28
What we may observe from this listing was the high cost of writing, based undoubtedly on the extensive amount of time involved in writing out such a long text on nearly 800 leaves. The second largest cost (11 livres 18 sous plus 2 livres for repairs and stretching the parchment) was for the production of the nearly 800 leaves of parchment—a labor-intensive process. The gather- ing (4 bifolia, consisting of 8 leaves), sometimes called a “quaternion,” was the unit of production for medieval manuscripts, and the unit by which professional scribes and illuminators charged for their work, the illumina- tor working on a gathering after its writing was completed. Because nearly all manuscripts consisted of several gatherings, and these had to be kept in a discernable order, systems of numbering developed, the earliest in mo- nastic scriptoria being numbers or letters written on the last page of each. This system was sufficient in monasteries where, it is believed, there was little danger of confusing a gathering from one manuscript with another. As commercial manuscript production developed, and different scribes might be working on one copy, or producing several copies of the same text at a time, each scribe might have a slightly different character count per page, and a system of numbering gatherings could have resulted in gaps in the text if gatherings from one copy were confused with another. To prevent this problem commercial book producers developed a system of catchwords, by which a catchword would be written in the lower corner of the last page of one gathering that would be matched up with the first word of the next, making it easy to keep the gatherings in the correct order. This catchword system would later be continued by printers who printed the catchword at the end of each gathering to be matched up with the first word of the next, and who also developed an abbreviation system, using letters, numbers and symbols for each gathering that they printed at the foot of the first page of
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