Danièle Cybulskie writes: “If a medieval person wanted a copy of a book or a poem, acquiring one wasn’t usually quite as simple as heading to the local bookstore. Every book prior to the invention of the printing press was hand-copied from an original, which meant that it involved a lengthy process. Here’s a five-minute look at the process by which a book came to be copied.” Arranging to borrow a work and finding a scribe to hire were both challenging tasks, even before the months of painstaking copying work.