david casacuberta digged deep for the exhibition "hiberiment" and also found agostino ramelli. nice, nice ;)

bill hilf in first mondy on reinventing w's

Before the advent of the printing press, books were made of vellum (lamb or calf skin) because of its durability. The problem was, for print books, vellum was too costly to produce and use for mass distribution. However, at the time there was a large surplus of rag paper. The surplus was from the (literally) tons of clothing left over from the massive numbers of dead caused by the Plague in the mid-15th century. This surplus drove the price of rag paper down significantly (before the Plague, rag paper was an expensive commodity) and therefore provided an affordable, accessible media on which Gutenberg could use his tool to print and distribute information.