At the time of Nero's copying, around the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century,
quire structure was moving toward standardization; in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries sexternios, or
quires of six bifolia, became a much more common arrangement.
Consider also that collation of our Vergil with paper copies shows the vellum settings differ in a (the entire first
quire), e2|7, and X4|5.
(3) Booklet 3 =
quires 7-12, but the first of these might be construed as an independent booklet: as elsewhere in the manuscript, Dygon began the text, here the single item 2, and wrote all of the first
quire before surrendering the copying to a second scribe.
Evidently he became aware that some text, perhaps a
quire of eight leaves, was missing in his exemplar.
The
quires themselves appear to have been prepared one at a time.
* short or long terminal
quires (the Royal MS was persistently produced in twelve-leaf units): short
quires conclude Booklets 1, 4, 7, 9, and 10; a long
quire concludes Booklet 3 (and Booklet 13 was deliberately created as an "oversized"
quire to handle possible extensions).
The second portion of this manuscript showing Shirleian influence immediately follows this, in the first several
quires of Part 3 (which altogether comprises fols 33-[119.sup.v]), the first four
quires being written by scribe C with only a single folio, the first of the fourth
quire, by scribe B.
This observation may well imply that this book "began small," that M had begun producing for private consultation a sequence of loose
quires with some texts of personal interest.
Quires from both the thirteenth-century and the fifteenth-century sections also show pricking marks at the edge of their outer vertical leaves, while all the gatherings are approximately the same size and shape.
1459 to 1461 Sanvito began to sign
quires with letters of the alphabet (a system found in late Antique and Carolingian manuscripts) rather than using catchwords.
Indeed, the two scribes contributed independent portions to a third book, British Library, Harley MS 4196, where scribe G copied
quires 18-21 and scribe R
quires 27-34.