Reading was—and is—the ultimate reason for producing and purchasing a book. This opening section of Books Before Print therefore gravitates around key issues related to the transfer of text from the exemplar (the original placed in front of the scribe as he made a copy) to the sheets that were prepared to receive it. Focusing on layout and script, which are the material results of this migration of text from original to duplicate, this first section shows how the medieval page was designed and filled with text. The chapters in this section not only discuss the decisions made by the scribe—what script to use, what quality the script would have, how large the margin would be—but also address the rationale behind these decisions. As becomes clear, some decisions were made without further thought: the scribe simply did what he was trained to do. Others, however, reflect conscious decisions, for example, because the scribe knew, or heard, what function the book would have once it was completed.

The first two chapters home in on the actual process of writing down words with a quill. Chapter 1 shows how medieval letters were created from multiple strokes and what their construction tells us about the moment of production. As is explained, a script family is a style of handwriting shared by scribes in a given time period, region, or sometimes individual religious community, and its execution varied across time and geographical space. To show this, the chapter introduces the three most commonly used book scripts of Europe and shows how their letter shapes changed over time. While the three scripts are regarded as different families, each having their own distinct set of features, they actually share a great deal of paleographical (script) traits.

Chapter 2 discusses a specific dynamic of writing: it highlights strategies available to scribes to abbreviate the words they were copying. Here, too, lie important clues related to the background of both the maker and reader of the manuscript.

Abbreviations only work, of course, if the reader can solve them. Abbreviation signs in manuscripts therefore confirm the close relationship of the scribe to the reader of the book he made: after all, the maker of the manuscript would only have included abbreviations which he knew the future reader was familiar with.