Columbians Giant Encyclopedia                       9

portions just as altar Bibles are designed today. But the three
manuscripts mentioned above were books for home reading. The
Vernon volume, the Bodleian Library's largest manuscript, and
the Simeon manuscript in the British Museum, both written about
the end of the fourteenth century, contain collections of English
literature, prose and poetry. The Chaworth volume, copied about
1440, is an encyclopedia with the title The Properties of Things.

It is difficult to understand why these English peers had such
unwieldy and unusual volumes made for themselves. The expense
was enormous for the raw material alone. Probably calfskin, that
is, vellum, was used for all such large books as it gives a larger size
than a sheepskin. According to Graham Pollard the average size
of a calfskin is four by six feet. A single skin would yield eight
leaves (sixteen pages) each two feet by eighteen inches—almost
the exact page size of these three books. By this standard the
Plimpton manuscript required the skins of about fifty calves, while
the vellum used for the Vernon manuscript, the bulkiest of the
lot, needed a herd of more than sixty. Had sheepskin been used,
the parchment makers would have needed twice as many animals.

It looks as though our Sir Thomas really wanted a show-piece.
While the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts have close-packed
pages of eighty to ninety lines per column, the Plimpton encyclo¬
pedia was planned and is written with wanton waste of pages.

The scribe ruled guide lines for margins and lines, planning the
layout in luxurious style with two widely spaced columns con¬
taining only forty-three lines per column, thus leaving margins
so ample that less than half of the page area is used for writing.

Then the scribe began writing in a large clear English Gothic
minuscule, less formal than he would have thought suitable for
a Latin Bible but far larger and clearer than is to be seen in many
an English-language manuscript of the period. On he wrote, line
after line, long column after long column, huge page after huge
page. Another scribe took over, but the style of script remains
the same for all the four or five penmen who apparently worked
on the volume.