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 produced 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.