While miniatures may not show us groups of scribes collaborating to make a manuscript, they do depict, in detail, scribes at work, as the previous chapter outlined. Let's stay with these images of individual scribes and examine what we can learn about the practical context of producing a manuscript. To do so, this chapter zooms in on one particular element of scenes showing the copying scribe: his desk. Desk space was a bit of a thing in the Middle Ages. Not all desks were as small as the one shown in the frontispiece at the very beginning of this book, which looks like a small podium. Bigger desks were sometimes a necessity. Manuscripts can easily have a wingspan of half a metre when open. The scribe who used such a book to copy from also had to have space, however, for the empty sheets that would contain the copied text. As this was challenging, special scribal desks were invented, as becomes clear here. Others fought the same battle for space, such as readers and translators, who might also have had several books open at the same time. Let's examine medieval depictions of desktops and the strategies of increasing one's desk space.

Scribes

The first group of people who had to manage multiple books were scribes. By definition, a scribe had to have at least two books on his desk: the one he was making (a growing pile of quires filled with text) and the one he was copying from, called the “exemplar.” While keeping track of the loose quires may have been challenging, of those discussed here, the scribe had it easiest. After all, he was only technically reading one book: the one being copied from. This explains why a scribe's desk was of limited size, at least judging from surviving depictions. In most cases their working surfaces were also slanted rather than flat. There are two well-known images of author and scribe Jean Miélot at work (Brussels, KBR, 9278, fol. 10r), which show how his desktop rested at a forty-five-degree angle. In fact, in both depictions his desk is also split in half: he uses the lower half for writing and as his tools (ink pots and pens), while the upper level holds the exemplar he copies from.