All Four Gerson volumes (88–91/SR39) that today play host to the Merlin fragments were printed in folio in Strasbourg, though only the first three (88–90/SR39) were produced by the same printer in the same year—1494. As indicated in Chapter 1, though, the four certainly seem to have been intended to form a set. The printer of the first three volumes, Martin Flach, died in 1500, after which his son, also called Martin Flach, took over his printing business. Flach the younger’s mother then married another printer in 1501, Johann Knobloch, who took on the press, but who appears to have maintained a good relationship with his stepson. Using borrowed equipment from Knobloch, Flach the younger set up a second press nearby. The fourth volume of Gerson’s Opera omnia (91/SR39) was printed on this second press (for his cousin Matthias Schürer) in 1502, suggesting that Flach the younger may have taken it upon himself to complete, or at least add to, his father’s work on Gerson’s Opera omnia. Indeed, it is common to find the four volumes kept together as a set, and certainly it would appear that the first owner of the Bristol copies, who probably had them shipped unbound from Strasbourg, purchased the four volumes with precisely this intention, due to his/her having them bound in matching covers shortly following the final tome’s publication.

The bindings of the four volumes, except for the rear board of 88/SR39 (more about which below), are made of mid-brown calfskin over wooden boards and are typical of early sixteenth-century bindings of both Oxford and Cambridge, including a patch repair to the rear board of 90/SR39. The bindings as a whole are fairly robust, given that a later repairer, in an effort to conserve them, replaced their spines entirely, and took what remained of the leather covers and mounted them onto new ones (see below for more on these repairs). However, there had clearly already been heavy wear to the original leather covers, such that the blind-stamped impressions are not as clear as they must once have been; worse still, the mounted remnants of the original covers are now heavily cracked and flaking off in places, with some sections missing entirely.