The printed book may be seen as the natural outgrowth of several factors which were beginning to influence the manuscript book by the fifteenth century: specialization, standardization and speculation. All three contributed to the rapidly expanding market in books, which importation sought to satisfy. Manuscript books of hours produced in the Netherlands for an English market show evidence of standardization in the decoration programme, and of speculation in the shields left blank, to be filled in with the coats-of-arms of prospective owners. Rouen also supported a specialist book-trade in, among other texts, books of hours, which seems to have supplied Scotland as well as England. On native ground, there was routine production of Chaucer, Lydgate and Hoccleve texts in the fifteenth century which observed a scribal economy in a standardization of format for those texts. A centre in Suffolk ‘seems to have specialized in issuing Lydgate’s poems in copies ranging from the luxurious to the more routine’. Thus specialization and standardization in some sorts of manuscript text already led to a speculative market before the introduction of printing.

Unlike manuscripts, which were produced in England and Scotland as well as on the Continent, no printed books were produced on native soil before Caxton set up his shop in Westminster in 1476, more than twenty years after the introduction of printing in Mainz. It was not until the sixteenth century that books were printed in Scotland. Thus any demand for printed books from the 1450s to 1476 – which, as we shall see, was considerable – had to be met from abroad.