Paragraph layout

[davidjackson]

I think the latter would make business sense for a pay-per-page hired copyst. (Is anyone old enough to have had a paper typed by a hired typist?) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Purely as speculation, image a scenario where an older, now wealthy hedge doctor or herbalist gathers up his life's work and puts them into order. He tidies them all up and makes lots of notes to the scribes. He's old, he's got cash. So he gets scribes to copy out his notes into a book as a keepsake. He personally oversees the design of each page before breakfast and then wanders off for the day while the boy with a quill gets busy and does the day's work. 

He's not too worried about the wasted parchment, it's going to be a family heirloom like the fancy local Lord has. Our hero has seen such works and is impressed, but of course he's spent his life with "working books", notebooks and almanacs and the like. So the influences of his design are naturally from what he's familiar with, but with an eye towards "fancy" works with one image per page like the books of hours etc. He even oversees the font he wants and every time he changes scribes he orders them to imitate the master font and page templates. 

The old chap gets his life's work into a nice book. We get a weird book with strange influences and lots of different scribal hands.