What seems extraordinary to us was that many of these books were incunabula, books from the first age of print, the fifteenth century. The Dominican convent at Frankfurt had flourished precisely around the time that printing was invented in nearby Mainz, so the library had over 1,000 incunabula, many of them printed on parchment. Today, these books would be sold for phenomenal prices. To the Dominicans they were worth no more than the reuse value of the parchment.

Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile Hist…, loc. 497