For all these services the librarian received, besides the reward of a good conscience, — and if he were not vowed to poverty, — a modest stipend, sometimes as much as forty-three shillings and fourpence, or even ten pounds and four yards of woolen cloth, yearly. One received “considerable landed possessions.” On the other hand, the librarian was sometimes held financially liable for every book lost or damaged.

In spite of the small number of books and comparative infrequency of lending, the librarian's office was no sinecure. To begin with, funds were scanty, as a rule. It is true that some libraries were endowed. Sometimes they had by right the regular income from certain parishes; again it was the income from “two mills” (a very different matter, by the way, from the “two mills on a dollar” out of which State law allows the modern library to draw its usual scant “one-third of a mill”; these were real mills for grinding, not taxpayers, but grain). More often, however, the libraries had no fixed income from endowment. Sometimes they got regular funds from a capitation tax on monks or clergy, and in the universalities they were allowed to charge so much per page for books loaned; but often in the monastic libraries there was no fixed source of income at all, and all money must be begged, as was of course the fact always in the mendicant orders, at least in their earlier days. In spite of this, however, they must have managed to get a good deal of money for the purchase of books, for so keen was the competition from purchase, especially by the begging orders, in the thirteenth century that an appeal was actually made to the Pope for relief, because, it was said, all the good books were bought up by the monks, and no layman had so much as a show at getting anything worth while.

The begging of books too, as well as of money for books, was a fruitful source of increase to these libraries as it is shown by the frequent records of gifts, many very considerable ones, and peculiarly in the record of testamentary gifts. This source became specially valuable when, as in some orders, after the middle of the thirteenth century, such legacies were compulsory on members of the order. The monks, even though vowed to poverty, were allowed to gather libraries for their private use. In the case of the mendicant orders, they were expressly allowed to beg money of their friends for this purpose, and there is plenty of evidence that many of the monkish collectors were true bibliomaniacs, who, as a certain general of the Dominicans once said, “love books too much, especially rare and curious ones; they never have enough, and sometimes never read what they have. They have learned bookshelves and empty minds.” However that may be, these collections by voluntary and compulsory bequest became a rich source of increase for the libraries.

The most characteristic source of increase was, however, neither purchase nor gift, but the writing and copying of books, done in the writing-rooms of the library. In those days of small things, original composition even was no slight source of growth. The passion for making many books belongs neither to Solomon's time nor to the age of the German university alone, and it belongs in large measure to the middle of the thirteenth century, when there was a production which can only be compared with the thesis output of the modern university. It was at this time that Humbert of Romans thought it necessary to curb the zeal of his preacher friars for this occupation with the dry remark, “There were twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples; very few of them wrote books.”

But the most characteristic of all sources of accession and the most curious of the librarian's duties was the work of the copying-rooms. In these rooms manuscripts, borrowed from other libraries, far and near, or from private persons, were copied for the library. Sometimes the books borrowed were received on condition that an extra copy should be returned with the book itself in payment for the loan. One shrewd fellow built up a considerable business on this basis.