twopence for one leaf, and the “commons” of another is set down at tenpence per week, we may safely reckon the multiplier at considerably more than ten in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The scribes and illuminators already mentioned were the individual workers, who were employed by corporations and men of wealth to produce books for their libraries; but the wholesale producers of books, who employed armies of scribes, must not be overlooked in this place. Vespasiano di Bisticci of Florence (b. 1421) was the chief of these booksellers, and he assisted to form the three most famous libraries in Italy—the Laurentian in Florence, that of the Vatican, and the library of Federigo, Duke of Urbino, which was afterwards bought by Pope Alexander VII. and incorporated into the Vatican Library. Vespasiano was an author as well as a bookseller, and has recorded some of his doings in his Vite degli Uomini Illustri. He gives a detailed list of the works he obtained for the Duke of Urbino, which comprised all the known classics, the Fathers, books on astrology, science, medicine, art, music, and all the Italian authors and poets. Vespasiano claimed that in this magnificent library, which cost 30,000 ducats, every author was found complete, and not a page of his writings was missing. Every book was written on vellum, and there was not a single one of which he was ashamed. Vespasiano was ever ready to form a library, as the following anecdote will prove.
Niccolo Niccoli having spent a long life and all his patrimony in collecting, left his books to Cosimo to found a public library. Cosimo built the fine pillared hall in the Convent of San Marco, and then proposed to form a worthy public library, of which the legacy of Niccoli should be the nucleus. He sent for Vespasiano for his advice, who said, “You could not buy books enough.” “Then what would you do?” asked Cosimo. “Have them written,” replied the bookseller. On which Cosimo gave the commission, and Vespasiano set forty-five scribes and illuminators to work, and furnished two hundred volumes in twenty-two