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fifteenth-century printed books produced in the forty-five years from 1455 to 1500. A significant increase in information production, and survival is ev- ident from these totals, but they cannot be used to show a quantifiable ratio of the increase because the number of surviving medieval manuscripts is inevitably the result of considerable information loss over the nine hundred years of the Middle Ages.
. . . many more incunabula have survived from the second half of the fifteenth century than manuscripts from the entire Middle Ages. Of circa 28,000 fifteenth-century editions known today (the number of publications printed is bound to have been much larger), German collections preserve a total of 135,000 copies. As a result of two decades of work on the “Inkunabelcensus Deutschland,” these are now recorded in the London database of the “Incunabula Short Title Catalogue” (ISTC). By contrast, the number of medieval manuscripts in German libraries is estimat- ed at circa 60,000. Holdings of the Bayerische Staasbibliothek at Munich display a similar relationship: about 20,000 copies of 9,700 fifteenth-century editions are kept alongside circa 10,500 medieval Latin and 1,800 German manuscripts—roughly a sixth of the total German holdings (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufren ler- neten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert [2009], p. 15).
With more and more information more readily available as a result of printing, the usage of books began to change. It became increasingly un- necessary for scholars to commit to memory a significant percentage of the information that they were likely to use, as some had done during the ancient world and the Middle Ages, partly because books were scarce and expensive, partly because papyrus or parchment for storing permanent notes remained expensive, and partly because of an intense pre-occupation during the Middle Ages with a relatively small number of texts considered to be essential that could be committed to memory. Because papyrus production remained an Egyptian monopoly through the Middle Ages, papyrus was always expensive. Though production of parchment was not limited to a
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