books soon go out of fashion. The business of making fine manuscript books was not entirely destroyed by the invention of printing. Lacroix, a French antiquary,[1] has shown us that copyists, illuminators, designers and painters found employment in the embellishment of books even as late as the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
During the middle ages, books of merit were everywhere sold at enormous prices. Illustrated and illuminated volumes in elegant bindings seem specially exorbitant, when we consider the greater purchasing capacity of money. Daunou says, that in a computation of the value of a large library of the fourteenth century, the average price of each manuscript book should be fixed at about 450 francs. Didot says that, of three hundred books contained in the library at Ratisbon, during the year 1231, the average price of each book was 600 francs. What proportion should be allowed for binding and illumination is not stated, but it can be proved that copying could not have been the labor of greatest expense. In the fourteenth century the price of copying a Bible at Bologna, exclusive of the value of binding, parchment and illumination, was 80 Bolognese livres. In the fifteenth century, the price of copying was steadily declining, while the prices of illuminating and binding were increasing.
Books were expensive, not so much through the labor of the copyist, who did the simplest and cheapest part of the work, but through the extravagant ornamentation put on
- ↑ He has given an extract from an ecclesiastical account book in which are found the items of expense for the making, binding, and presentation of the manuscript book Royal Chants to Princess Louise of Savoy.
To Jacques Plastel, for sketching the designs for forty-eight pictures, 45 livres; to Jehan Pichou, illuminator, for coloring the designs, 80 livres; to workmen of Jehan Pichou, 50 sols, and for vin du marché (in colloquial English, treating or drink money) with illuminator Pichou, 24 sols; to Jean de Béguines, priest, for engraving the ballads, 12 livres; to Guy-le-Flamenc, for illuminating the large initial letters, 13 livres, 3 sols; for vellum, 3 livres, 12 sols; for the binding, expenses of presentation to Louise of Savoy, and the journey to Amboise, 68 livres, 8 sols. Sum total, 366 livres. Lacroix, Histoire de l'imprimerie, p. 47.
