required for a book of the usual size. It was necessary that books sold at this price should be of the cheapest materials, and that the text should be abbreviated by contractions[1] so that it would occupy but little space. The despised fabric of paper, and the remnants of vellum rejected by professional copyists after the skin had been cut up for leaves of folio or of quarto size, were cheerfully accepted by readers who valued a book more for its contents than for its appearance.
The scarcity of vellum in one century, and its abundance in another, are indicated by the size of written papers during the same periods. Before the sixth century, legal documents were usually written upon one side only; in the tenth century the practice of writing upon both sides of the vellum became common. During the thirteenth century, valuable documents were often written upon strips two inches wide and but three and a half inches long. At the end of the fourteenth century these strips went out of fashion. The more general use of paper had diminished the demand for vellum and increased the supply. In the fifteenth century, legal documents on rolls of sewed vellum twenty feet in length were not uncommon. All the valuable books of the fourteenth century were written on vellum. In the library of the Louvre the manuscripts on
- ↑ Abbreviations which deformed written language to such an extent that it is almost undecipherable to modern readers, were once esteemed a positive merit. The habit of making them was continued after printing was invented. In 1475, a printer of Lubec said, in commendation of one Of his own books, that he had made free use of abbreviations, to get whole work in one volume instead of two—a procedure, he thought, that deserved special praise, for he said that the contractions made the book more readable. The modern reader will be of a different opinion. The Logic of Ockham, in folio, printed at Paris in 1488, by Clos-Bruneau, contains, among other abbreviations, this bewildering passage:
(The text as printed.)
Sic hic e fal sm qd ad simple a e pducibile a Deo g a et silr hic a n g a n e pducibile a Do.
(With words in full.)
Sicut hic est fallacia secundum quid ad simpliciter. A est producible a Deo. Ergo A est. Et similiter hic. A non est. Ergo A non est producible a Deo.
In 1498, John Petit, of Paris, published a dictionary which professed to be A Guide to the Reading of Abbreviations. It was not published too soon, for the practice of making contractions had increased to such an extent that books with abbreviations were legible only to experts.
