y of those days was almost entirely book study, the maintenance
of a university library with one or two copies of each book studied was
inadequate. There grew up in each university city an organized system of
supplying the students with textbooks. The authorized book-dealers of a
mediaeval university were called =stationarii=, or stationers, a term
apparently derived from the fixed post or station assigned in or near
the university buildings to each scribe permitted to supply books to the
students and professors. A stationer in England has always meant
primarily a book-dealer or publisher, as for example in the term
Stationers' Hall, the guild or corporation which until 1842 still
exercised in London the functions of a copyright bureau. Incidentally a
stationer also dealt in writing materials, whence our ordinary American
use of the term. Another name for the university book-dealers was the
classical Latin word =librarii=, which usually in mediaeval Latin meant
not what we call a librarian but a vender of books, like the French
=libraire=. These scribes were not allowed at first to sell their
manuscripts, but rented them to the students at rates fixed by
university statutes. A folded sheet of eight pages, sixteen columns of
sixty-two lines each, was the unit on which the rental charges were
based. Such a sheet at the beginning of the thirteenth century rented
for about twenty cents a term; and since an ordinary textbook of
philosophy or theology or canon law contained many sheets, these charges
constituted no inconsiderable part of the cost of instruction. The books
must be returned before the student left the university; sales were at
first surreptitious and illegal, but became common early in the
fourteenth century. Reasonable accuracy among the stationers was secured
by a system of fines for errors, half of which went to the university,
the other half being divided between the supervisor or head proof-reader
and the informant who discovered the error.

The original regulation which forbade the stationers to sell books was
intended to prevent students of a profiteering turn of mind from buying
books for resale to their fellow-students at a higher price, thus
cornering the market and holding up the work of an entire class. In
course of time, however, the book-dealers were permitted not only to
sell textbooks, at prices still controlled by official action, but also
to buy and sell manuscripts of other books, both those p