An interesting observation on Quire 13

[MarcoP]

Hi Marco,

I think we should distinguish between two cases:

a) a manuscript is written as if it is to be bound, and it is intended to be bound in some future time (no matter whether this intention comes to reality or not)

OR:

b) a manuscript is written as if it is to be bound, but it is intended to be never bound.

It is not clear from your description whether the case was a) or b). If it was really b), then that's indicative indeed.

In other words, I mean that unbound manuscripts just may have failed to get an occasion to be bound, but they were designed with binding in mind.

Hello Anton, Collins does not say if St.Gall 207 was meant to be left unbound or not. She writes that it was bound later and that "the chapters are out of order and have been so since at least the fifteenth century".

The St.Gall library site says that the last part of the manuscript is "a medical-pharmaceutical compendium, ....  parts of it badly bound, [it] consists of the folded reference manual of a wandering physician from northern Italy, the so-called St. Gall Botanicus, and the St. Gall Bestiary".

From this description, I understand that the manuscript being unbound and double folded is interpreted as intentional, so that the wandering physician could more easily carry his text around.

The fact that it is badly bound is apparent if you look at some consecutive pages:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. belongs to a bifolio written in sepia and single column

60 pages in two columns, sepia and red, with spaces for plant illustrations (that were never painted) are then inserted from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 
334 is the end of a chapter.

At You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the single column text restarts mid-sentence.