Note 292 — XXIII

Bernard’s conjectures as to the reason for this change are plausible. He says: The sales of the Bible had not been so great as Fust had expected. Envious copyists had probably fostered a prejudice against the printed Bible as purely mechanical copying, and for that reason, or on account of its known errors, inferior to the ordinary manuscript. Fust hoped to remove these objections, and to attract purchasers by giving the unsold copies the appearance of a new edition. Madden does not accept this hypothesis. He thinks that the two kinds of copies were composed at the same time by different compositors, who, setting their types from dictation, not seeing the manuscript copy, made their abbreviations without uniformity, and, as a necessary consequence, produced pages of unequal length. This explanation is quite as reasonable.