Consider, too, the all but prohibitive cost of books, when made by hand and estimated by the labor of their making, and you must have a new and a truer basis of valuation for manuscript literature. A few facts and incidents will illustrate and enforce the foregoing observation: It required nearly three years in the time of Wycliffe (who died in 1384) for a copyist to transcribe the entire Bible, and this labor cost the equivalent of $1,500. Even tracts of Wycliffe, containing isolated texts of scripture, were sold for forty or fifty dollars as the money of that day would be estimated in our currency. (Christ in the Gospels.) It is credibly stated that, in the century before Wycliffe's time, "an ordinary folio volume probably cost 400 to 500 franks," or the sum of eighty to a hundred dollars in present values. Very few books could be bought at all, at some periods of time, for less than the equivalent of one hundred dollars; and illuminated or illustrated and embellished books, of which there then were and there yet remain exquisite examples, cost much more than this amount. And yet books never seem to have been a "drug" upon the market. And while it required four years for Gutenberg to print his first edition of the Bible (consisting of a hundred copies) yet the time employed in its making, if compared with the time and labor requisite for the transcription of a hundred copies of the Bible by hand, would represent a net gain or saving, in time, of nearly seventy-five years and, in money, of more than a hundred thousand dollars. It would represent other values: as uniformity of text, economy of material, and larger aggregate immunity from error. It is stated that the common price of a Bible in the thirteenth century ran as high as $300, and that in the fourteenth century Bibles were sold for as much as $2,000. It is said that Bibles were left as precious bequests to relatives and friends and that they were even given as security for large debts.