Reposting this question hoping I might get an answer this time:
Gutenberg changed printing around 1440. In the years afterwards, so between the mid 15th and the end of the 16th century, how common was it for people to own books?
When I say people, I'm less interested in great lords or kings and also not so much in the peasantry, though I'd be glad to hear about those too. But let's focus on more "middle class" people. What about small nobles and knights? What about a merchant or craftsman in a city? What about scholars? How many books might such a person have at their castle, their house etc.? What about the protagonists of the Reformation or humanists, how many books might someone like Melanchthon, Zwingli, Reuchlin, Erasmus or rather one of their less famous peers own?
In addition to the question of how many books they might earn, I'm also interested in what sort of books these might be. Bibles or at least New Testaments were probably common. Surely there were other religious works, like books of hours. But there must also have been secular literature. Don Quixote owns a whole private library full of chivalrous novels. Obviously he's depicted as being obsessed with such novels. But I'm wondering how realistic Cervantes' portrayel is and if it might in theory have been possible for a small hidalgo to own so many books.
Andrew Pettegree’s The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age specifically examines print culture, production, and consumption of different socioeconomic levels including Dutch outposts in Asia and North America. Long story short, many of the items read by the masses - mostly religious content, classics, and educational - don’t survive to present because of heavy use in contrast to the reference / research libraries built by professional classes, government officials, and some clergy. He examines library catalogs, auction announcements, public notices, newspapers, etc. there is some comparative aspect with French, German, English, Polish, Danish, and Swedish, practices and book markets / trade. The Dutch likely had the highest literacy rate in Europe of the time and supported a market with innovations like auctions and government printing contracts.