The “Grete Booke,” described above, is now among the Lansdowne Manuscripts (No. 285) in the British Museum, and is fully described in the Catalogue of that Collection, 1812 (Part II., pp. 99-102).
In quoting the foregoing particulars of the early sale of MSS. and of the cost of production, no attempt has been made to calculate the present value of the amounts set down, because the data for such a calculation are not available. It will, however, be well if the reader remembers that the various amounts mentioned must have been equal at the very least to ten times these sums in the present day. Professor Middleton multiplies by ten, but when we find an expert scribe charging one penny and twopence for one leaf, and the “commons” of another is set down at tenpence per week, we may safely reckon the multiplier at considerably more than ten in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The scribes and illuminators already mentioned were the individual workers, who were employed by corporations and men of wealth to produce books for their libraries; but the wholesale producers of books, who employed armies of scribes, must not be overlooked in this place. Vespasiano di Bisticci of Florence (b. 1421) was the chief of these booksellers, and he assisted to form the three most famous libraries in Italy—the Laurentian in Florence, that of the Vatican, and the library of Federigo, Duke of Urbino, which was afterwards bought by Pope Alexander VII. and incorporated into the Vatican Library. Vespasiano was an author as well as a bookseller, and has recorded some of his doings in his Vite degli Uomini Illustri. He gives a detailed list of the works he obtained for the Duke of Urbino, which comprised all the known classics, the Fathers, books on astrology, science, medicine, art, music, and all the Italian authors and poets. Vespasiano claimed that in this magnificent library, which cost 30,000 ducats, every author was found complete, and not a page of his writings was missing. Every book was written on vellum, and there was not a single one of which he was ashamed. Vespasiano was ever ready to form a library, as the following anecdote will prove.
Niccolo Niccoli having spent a long life and all his patrimony in collecting, left his books to Cosimo to found a public library. Cosimo built the fine pillared hall in the Convent of San Marco, and then proposed to form a worthy public library, of which the legacy of Niccoli should be the nucleus. He sent for Vespasiano for his advice, who said, “You could not buy books enough.” “Then what would you do?” asked Cosimo. “Have them written,” replied the bookseller. On which Cosimo gave the commission, and Vespasiano set forty-five scribes and illuminators to work, and furnished two hundred volumes in twenty-two months. Cosimo was so pleased with the books, that he employed the successful purveyor to supply the illuminated Psalters and Missals for the Church of the new Convent of San Marco.[22] No wonder, perhaps, that Vespasiano expresses his great dislike for the new-fangled art of printing. Every century has its own social convulsion, and thinks it the most important of all time. We talk of the revolutionary change made by the introduction of machinery in the nineteenth century, but we seldom realise how great a change in the occupations of the people took place in the fifteenth century, at the period of the invention of printing. Large numbers of men entirely dependent on their labours as scribes were thrown out of work. Many of these men were members of influential bodies, who were not inclined to sit down idly under their misfortunes, so they petitioned against the use of printing; but fate was too powerful for them, and their endeavours to boycott the printing-press were not successful, even though Vespasiano di Bisticci said that Duke Federigo would have been ashamed to have a printed book in his library.
John of Trittenheim, Abbot of Spanheim, who is known in literature as Trithemius, said some hard things against printing in an essay, De Laude Scriptorum Manualium, thus—
“A work written on parchment could be preserved for a thousand years, while it is probable that no volume printed on paper will last for more than two centuries. Many important works have not been printed, and the copies required of these must be prepared by scribes. The scribe who ceases to perform his work because of the invention of printing can be no true lover of books, in that, regarding only the present, he gives no due thought to the intellectual cultivation of his successors. The printer has no care for the beauty and the artistic form of books, while with the scribe this is a labour of love.”
When, however, Trithemius found it necessary to exhort his own monks, he was not able to speak very favourably of their love of books—
“There is, in my opinion, no manual labour more becoming a monk than the writing of ecclesiastical books, and preparing what is needful for others who write them, for this holy labour will generally admit of being interrupted by prayer and of watching for the food of the soul no less than of the body. Need, also, urges us to labour diligently in writing books, if we desire to have at hand the means of usefully employing ourselves in spiritual studies. For you see that all the library of this monastery, which formerly was fine and large, has been so dissipated, sold, and made away with by the disorderly monks before us, that when I came I found but fourteen volumes.”[23]