Searching for Manuscripts and Running a Business: Printing and the Search for Texts in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

This contribution seeks to examine how the commercial production of printed books interacted with the search for manuscripts of texts not otherwise known to survive, during the first fifty years after the European invention of printing. Searching for manuscripts is thus considered from the perspective of it being an economic activity. Producers of manuscript and of printed books alike had to locate and acquire a text to work from. This could range from the easy acquisition of a local exemplar, the acquisition of exemplars from known but distant locations, to the search for texts whose location was unknown, and all the way to the search for exemplars of texts whose survival was uncertain. By exploring the most ambitious types of search within this broader context, we will seek to understand better the circumstances under which the commercial production of printed books could enable a business model, one amongst many, that not only made such a search possible but even required it. We will seek to establish when the associated direct and indirect cost of an ambitious search could be a worthwhile investment, or at least could seem to be. In doing so we also aim to understand more clearly why this could be a potential path towards profit for commercial producers of printed books, while it would have been unviable for commercial producers of manuscript books.