As you can see, I am trying to note medieval book prices as I come across them after Gneuss’s psalter colophon piqued my interest (and so I thought to give categorize the notes).
For the Gutenberg Bible, customers paid around 20 gulden for paper and 50 for parchment. For the sake of comparison, we are told that a stone house in Mainz in the mid-fifteenth century ran 80-100 gulden and a master craftsman earned in the neighborhood of 20-30 gulden a year.*
So rather expensive at a year’s + pay. But I’ve yet to work out how to compare that to the cost of the lost psalter described by Gneuss (perhaps the ZaÅ‚uski psalter is a good nickname).
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* Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010), 29 (citing Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg. The Man and his Invention (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1996), 180-183).