Tuesday Trivia | Forgotten Day-to-Day Details

[u/caffarelli]

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/sarahfrancesca!

Okay, this topic is actually really interesting but it’s a bit esoteric so you’ll have to bear with me for the explanation!

What we’re looking for here is those little bits of daily life in history that no one would realize are missing from modern life. As an example, the person who submitted this said that she likes to think about how in the era before modern ballpoints and typing, people who wrote would have been walking around with ink on their hands quite a lot, whereas now our hands are very clean. What we’re basically looking for are the sorts of little asides that good historical fiction writers pop in to add verisimilitude to the story!

Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: going back to a nice simple theme: HAIR. All times, all places, all genders. Just what was doing with hair in history.

[u/[deleted]]

Think about how cheaply a paperback book can be produced. A hardback book won't run you much more. Even if you're buying a limited edition academic book, the cost won't run you more than a couple hundred dollars. In the middle ages, books were really expensive until paper became popular in the fourteenth century. Many medieval people, especially in England, wrote on parchment. Michael Clanchy estimates that the average medieval person had equivalent of two cows worth of property on any given year. To produce one good copy of the New Testament, one of the most popular works in the middle ages, took about 150 calfskins. A good cow cost about 10 shillings (20 shillings = 1 pound), which means the approximate cost of a nice new testament is 75 pounds. For comparison, in the fourteenth century, you could build a nice stone house with a courtyard and garden for less than 100 pounds.

The number of books available at even small public libraries or community colleges, let's say 10,000 volumes, is truly staggering compared to the middle ages. Even if we lowballed the price of a medieval book to 5 pounds, that would be 50,000 pounds - in medieval England the king's annual income was only sometimes above 20,000 pounds.

We owe Gutenburg, paper makers, and publishers a truly great debt.

[u/farquier → u/[deleted]]

It's not just that, our whole relationship with books is different. Medieval books were very often made on commission or to spec and were normally sold unbound(something like half the cost of a book was in the binding). And books were made in a larger range of sizes, from little pocket girdle books to massive graduals made for an entire choir to be able to see(unlike today, when by and large most books are around the same size unless they are certain kinds of specialty books. If you were well-off, it might be normal to have a book specially made to your tastes and in any case it was common to bind quite a few different books together or to keep rebinding books(to the point where it's actually very rare for some kinds of early medieval books to have their original binding intact). And last but not least, the medieval book in Western Europe was just plain heavier and bulkier.