Storehouses of parchment

[-JKP-]

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Paper was gradually replacing parchment already before the introduction of printing, but it was not very popular. Even while it had become cheaper than parchment, it was considered to be of inferior quality.
By 1420 or so, when the Voynich MS was written, the MS could very well have been written on paper, and this would have been cheaper, but this seems to have been a choice by the MS composer. This implies that he opted for durability.
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Yes, I'm aware of this. I've been keeping track of which manuscripts were written on paper and which were written on parchment and when the transitions were occurring in different countries.

But the time it takes a scribe to handwrite a manuscript on parchment or on paper is not hugely different.

The amount of time it takes to print 200 copies of a book on paper is far less than the time it takes to handwrite a book on parchment or paper. Paper production ramped up substantially after the invention of the printing press and many presses in the HRE were directly connected to the mills.


But my point in starting this thread was simply to pass on the information I found (in a number of places over a number of years) that scribes did not always have storehouses of parchment. Often the patron was expected to provide the medium. I thought this might not be well known.