Buying Parchment

As a follow-up to my post about parchment, I have noticed that a lot of people find my site by doing internet searches about where to buy parchment. Well, there are two places you can buy parchment in the US:

• John Neal Booksellers (incidentally, this is the best place to go for calligraphy supplies)
Talas

Sheets of parchment are pretty expensive, but if you’re just interested in seeing/handling some, they sell scraps for pretty cheap. The modern stuff is still nothing like medieval parchment, though.

If you want to feel medieval parchment, I recommend inquiring at the nearest library. Most large academic libraries and an awful lot of large public libraries have rare book collections, and more often than not they will at least have a few leaves from medieval manuscripts, if not complete books. Rare book collections might seem intimidating at first, but the librarians are usually delighted when people actually want to see the books. Some libraries will make you wear gloves to handle medieval manuscripts, but most will let you touch the parchment with bare hands, as long as you wash them first.