roduced by local
scribes and those imported from other cities and countries.

This broadening of the activities of the university bookstores led
naturally to the third and last stage which the publishing business
underwent before the invention of printing. This stage was the
establishment in Florence, Paris, and other intellectual centers, of
bookshops selling manuscripts to the general public rather than to
university students. These grew rapidly during the first half of the
fifteenth century, receiving a marked impetus from the new interest in
Greek studies. Some years before the fall of Constantinople in 1453
Italian book-sellers were accustomed to send their buyers to the centers
of Byzantine learning in the near East in quest of manuscripts to be
disposed of at fancy prices to the rich collectors and patrons of
literature. There is evidence of similar methods in France and Germany
during the earlier decades of the Renaissance.

This preliminary sketch of the book-publishing business before printing
is intended to correct a rather common misapprehension. Manuscript books
were indeed relatively costly, but they were not scarce. Any scholar who
had not been through a university not only had access to public
libraries of hundreds of volumes, but might also possess, at prices not
beyond the reach of a moderate purse, his own five-foot shelf of the
classics. The more elegant manuscripts, written by experts and adorned
with rich illuminations and sumptuous bindings, were of course not for
the humble student; but working copies, multiplied on a large scale by a
roomful of scribes writing simultaneously from dictation, might always
be had. Chaucer, writing of the poor clerk of Oxford at the end of the
fourteenth century, tells us that

"Him was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophye,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye."

We are not sure that he had the whole twenty books; that was his
ambition, his academic dream of wealth; but we are assured that he
spent on books all the money he could borrow from his friends, and that
he showed his gratitude by busily praying for the souls of his
creditors.

When we consider the enormous number of manuscript books that must have
existed in Europe in the middle ages, we may well wonder why they have
become relatively rare in modern times. Several explanations account for