Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I was interested in calculating some stats for low-tech libraries, but ran into problems with the numbers. To double-check them, I grabbed a few examples of manuscripts and data on book production.

From a dataset of about a hundred manuscripts gathered from various sources (mostly codicology books online) I calculated a few reference values. (The dataset included books of different sizes, mostly quartos and octavos, written in Europe, North Africa and Middle-East in various languages.)

The average page count was 560 (230 folios) and was pretty close to this value for 4s, 8s and 16s sizes. The average words/page was 90 (for quartos in the set 140, and for 16s & 32s smaller). The average words/manuscript was then about 50 000.

Comparing these to the values in LT, HT and LT:C1 (500 words/page printed, 125 words/page handwritten) seemed close enough (several sources put modern words/page average in the 400-450 range and modern book lengths in the 70-100k words range).

Back-calculating from the weight of paper I arrived to the result that a "small collection" contains 20k hand-written pages. Therefore it consists of ten 2000 page manuscripts, probably split into four 500 page books.

So far the numbers match nicely. However when calculating the price from the time it takes to produce the books (mostly the scribe-work), the total costs for low-tech libraries and books seem too low.

From various sources I checked, the speed of scribing was in the range of 1.5-10 folios/day, mostly quoted as 2-3 folios/day. With an average speed of 5 pages (2.5 folios) per day, it would take 50 days (2 months) to scribe an average (500 page) book.

As several sources (and at least one primary source) claimed that the scribe-work accounted for half of the final cost, I used the 0.55 ratio of labor to price to calculate the labor costs. From this I get $770 to scribe a single book and $1400 for the finished product.

Since the manuscripts used as reference were written on parchment, I checked the total cost of the parchment used (250 leaves). It was $150, which is about 1/5th of the scribing cost (and the value of materials calculated from labor).

A small collection of manuscripts would therefore cost $1400*4*10=$56k, a lot more than the $3500 estimated in LT:C1. The parchment alone would cost $6000.

Since most of the higher cost comes from scribing, changing the media to paper ($600) wouldn't help.

To check my numbers, I re-read everything in the relevant chapters and realized that the assumed writing speed was 4000 words/day. Calculating the scribing rate from the previous sources, gave me significantly lower rate: 1250 words/day (if scribing 10 pages/day at 125 words/page). To verify this, I checked some new sources on scribal speeds. Those mentioned writing cursive at a rate of 8-20 folios/day (average 28 pages/day) and a dataset of samaritan scribes (in "semi-cursive" script) averaged at 10 pages/day (confirming the numbers given by several sources). From this I noted that the 4000 wpd rate would probably be achieved with cursive style.

Still even at the rate of 4000 wpd, it would take 16 days to scribe a book, at a labor cost of $240 and a total cost of $480. It is still high compared to the cost of parchment, but would result in the "small collection" valuing close to $20k.

From these I would suggest that the real cost of a low-tech (scribed on parchment) is multiplied by 16 (like very fine quality, 4 for writing speed & 4 for lower words/page count to achive the same information content) in addition to the 10 in LT:C1. To match the prices of writing materials, they should be multiplied by 5.

For printing on paper at a rate of 250 pages/day, the price of a book would be $137 ($62 labor + $75 paper, close to the estimated ½ of total costs for early printing). A "small collection" would be about $1400, which is about 4 times the High-Tech cost. Increasing the printing speed to 1000 pages/day and dropping the paper price multiplier gets us close to the HT price. We could say that the price drop on paper comes from switching from rag to wood pulp paper.

Comments? How do my assumptions differ from the authors? Do the differences come from using differents sources for the numbers?

I ignored the cost of binding and covers, although I calculated some costs to make covers (ca. $31 for ½" oak covers with leather on top, including labor, around 2% of total), and renting an exemplar (6% of the total costs).

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

First off, the library costs assume printing - multiply by 10 for handwritten manuscripts. That's $35,000, and 1000 lb, for the basic library. Assuming negligible weight for binding material, that's 100,000 sheets and $3,000 in paper. At 125 words per sheet, that's a whopping 12,500,000 words. A professional scribe is going to have effective skill around 18, maybe 20 for a really good scribing shop (DX-based scribe of 12, +6 to be legible, up to +2 for the shop) when writing at a rate of 4,000 words per day. That's going to take 3125 man-days, or 125 man-months (over a man-decade). The scribe could probably take -6 for -60% to time necessary, for 50 man-months. LTC1 notes that scribing is almost the entire cost for such documents, so you're looking at $40,000, which is pretty darn close to the $35,000 estimate. Your estimate of 20,000 pages for 250 lb would put us at 80,000 pages and 10,000,000 words. Taking the -6, the scribes would be able to churn something like that out in 40 man-months, costing $32,000 - adding in the cost of paper, you get to exactly $35,000.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I love GURPS.

This really reinforces why religious books were so prevalent compared to non-religious books, though: the church didn't need to pay its monks the going rate.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

The other source of free labor is students renting a book for a course and copying it themselves. That was a standard way of students building their own library.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I studied some medieval book history back in my undergraduate days, and 230 folios is pretty high for a medieval book. There definitely were things like "the Old Testament in one volume" or illuminated chronicles of 216 folios, but it was much more common to have one volume of the psalms, one volume of the gospels, and a notebook with your family's secret recipes and words of wisdom. You might want to check that your source is not mixing up printed books and manuscripts. Ninety words per page sounds like it might include manuscripts which had more picture than text, or very small manuscripts. Fifty thousand words per volume seems about right.

Rosamond McKitterick has some estimates for early medieval prices using Diocletian's Edict of Maximum Prices in The Carolingians and the Written Word. They are pretty hand-wavy but would be fine for gaming.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I haven't ran into any systematic study of manuscript lengths, but I made a (semi-random, ie. first books of the alphabetical pages) sampling of the Parker Library (http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker/) online manuscript data for comparison. The average of this small sample was about 160 ff, or 320 pages. Since the variation on the whole dataset is very high (standard deviation of 170, min. 13, max. 944), I too am sceptical of the average page number. If anyone knows of a good study on the subject, please let me know. Otherwise I'll improve the data by adding more manuscripts from different collections.

Some manuscripts are bound into several smaller volumes, so we may assume that one modern book is equivalent to 4 manuscript volumes on paper, 8 (of ½ page count) on papyrus or vellum and 20 (of 1/5 page count) on parchment. This way the approximate thickness of each book/volume remains the same as the thickness is probably based on keeping the books of manageable size.

With this lack of data word count should be a better estimate for the information content (which should be the same for all libraries of the same size).

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Alas, the article I wrote for web-Pyramid on information density is no longer available, though the data-to-oxcart converter is still out there.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Using "basic library" as the unit of information, I calculated the costs for different TLs to see what the base price of $3500 consists of (and when was it closest to that value).

The basic library is 100 modern (TL8) books with 500 pages each, totaling 25M words. I'm ignoring the weight and cost of binding and covers for now.

I'm calculating from the basics given in HT and LT, with 0.55 of the monthly pay at average status as the labor production of printers and scribes (Skill 12 professionals).

Printing at TL8 the materials (paper) cost $100, capital depreciation (at 10%/annum) is $6 and labor (offset press) $36, totaling at $142 (4%).

Printing at TL6 the materials (paper) cost $125, capital depreciation is $13 and labor (offset press) $44, totaling at $182 (5%).

Printing at TL5 the materials (paper) cost $1500, capital depreciation is $3 and labor (10 men operating a steam rotary press) $126, totaling at $1629 (47%).

Printing at TL4 the materials (paper) cost $750, capital depreciation is $42 and labor (movable type) $1210, totaling at $2002 (57%).

Printing at TL3 the materials (paper) cost $1500, capital depreciation is $2 and labor (block press) $513, totaling at $2015 (58%).

Hand-copying at TL3 the materials (paper) cost $6000 and labor (cursive at 4000 words/day) $96 250, totaling at $102 250 (292% of $35k).

Hand-copying at TL3 the materials (parchment) cost $60 000 and labor (calligraphy at 1250 words/day) $308 000, totaling at $368 000 (1051% of $35k).

So in summary, printing the library is always cheaper than the $3500 value and hand-writing is always more expensive than the $35k value.

In the case of printing this is most likely because I'm ignoring things like IP in this calculation. In medieval copying culture they didn't matter (except when having to pay rent for exemplars).

Making manuscripts is more costly even at the very high rate of 4000 words/page, which is most likely too optimistic for medieval scribes (averaging at 5 pages/day).

As I previously mentioned, another problem is that on contemporary sources on the costs of making books, the cost of labor is considered to be only half of the total, both for manuscripts and early printing.

All of this applies to commercially produced books and libraries, but are of course applicable to situations with free labor (monks, students) to calculate the time required for copying.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Hi!

What values did you place your calculations on? (words/page, pages/book, pages/pound..)

Many of the library manuscript collections list the number of folios and even number of lines/page, but not how many characters per line.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

At the core is a measurement of words per area; w/m^2 to be precise, though any convenient units can be used there. The texts I used in the analysis were all of known length. They were all editions of one of the few standard late antique/Medieval/Renaissance texts: the Latin vulgate Bible or subsets such as the Gospels. Those texts are still widely available and easily counted. The full Bible, for example, is about 712k words (it's certainly possible that any given text might miss some words here or contain a few more there; taking a single word count for any given text was a simplifying assumption). Knowing the word count, dimensions, and number of pages, it's trivial to figure out words per unit of page area. The conversion from that to weight, which relies on exceptionally variable properties of page density and thickness, admittedly has very large error bars attached, but is close enough, as they say, for government work.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I'm not going to go through each example, but I should note here that a handscrew press can manage an entire basic library (25,000 pages) in a single man-month. As a skilled scribe makes $800/month, you're looking at a of $1550. Presumably, the other $2k or so is going into binding, upkeep, organization, and so forth.

As I noted upthread, a scribe is probably producing at a faster rate than this by taking a penalty. A document that is 74% to 91% (depending on tool quality) perfectly legible, with the remainder being a slightly-harder-to-decipher scrawl, is likely acceptable compared to one that's 98% perfectly legible but takes over twice as long. The former seems appropriate for a typical library, the latter would be more likely found in a higher-quality one.

Additionally, note that the prices given in LTC3 are explicitly for TL4, not TL3. I already showed how the prices can work out at TL4. If you're wanting to match the assumptions from LTC3, you'll want to start with that.

Well, yeah, a piece of art is going to be a lot more expensive than a utilitarian book. GURPS prices for swords are horribly off if you're assuming they have gilded blades and gem-studded hilts as well.

...

All in all, keep in mind that the LTC3 prices and weights are explicitly noted as rough averages, not absolute numbers. If you'd prefer to go with different values, feel free to do so.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

OK. Did you see any dependence between page size and lettering size?
In my data the words/page drops with smaller page sizes, but not by half as one would expect as the folios are halved. This may be both because smaller books have smaller writing, but also because they have less illuminations.

I should check some of the manuscript pages available as images online and calculate the metrics from them to account for other (ie. not Bible) texts.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I didn't have data on the size of the text, so I didn't analyze that. That said, smaller pages require smaller text, but a cultural tendency towards huge margins means that you don't necessarily get particularly large letters on large pages.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I want to base my numbers on what's known of real book manufacture, and the scribing speed seems to be the biggest difference. I'd like to calibrate the values to real life, preferably with simple multipliers so I can use the values in the books without having to recalculate everything.

Also on the speed calculations, I'd rather use the skill level 12 for an journeyman/professional level at the listed wages (I'm using the cost of living rather than the $800 to account for different TLs). As mentioned in LT:C3, masters will have skill level of 14+, but also one higher status (double wages). A master hurrying with -2 to skill will take 80% of the time of a journeyman, producing only 125% as much at 200% of the cost. This way I'll know the average time and cost and can then take into account changes in skill and circumstances.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Perfectly understandable, although you'll probably end up just needing to recalculate the prices of all the libraries. Fortunately, as they scale linearly with weight, that means you just need to figure out one of them to get the cost of all the others.

There is a key feature you're missing here. Under "Can You Read It?" it notes that writing legibly is a roll against DX, DX-based Artist Calligraphy +6, or DX-based Professional Skill (Scribe) +6. That +6 means your skill 12 scribe is starting out with functional skill 18. Rereading that section, it doesn't explicitly state you can take a penalty to write more quickly, but as a scribe could presumably get away with having only skill 8 or so if this weren't the case (and my recent analysis shows that Haste is necessary to meet the listed prices), it seems appropriate to allow it.

As an aside, I'm curious about the bolded section. GURPS default doesn't adjust CoL by TL. I've tried to come up with my own schemes that do, but the problem I keep running into is adjusting wages without screwing up the LTC3 rules for labor costs. How have you resolved this?

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

The interesting question here is how rare scribal ability is.

Out in the mundane medieval world, it was quite rare, and so scribal work was expensive. Very few townsfolk were literate and able to do decent caligraphy, and so they could demand high wages, well above the cost of materials, mainly parchment and ink.

But in the monasteries, you had a significant minority of monks (a majority in some monasteries, or at least close to it) who could perform this work, and all you had to do was to feed, clothe and roof them, and cheaply at that, since they were supposed to live austere lives. They didn't always, but even in luxury monasteries, their upkeep still wasn't very expensive.

Also, to the OP: Are you familiar with an early online work by S.John Ross, titled GURPS Books or GURPS Libraries or something? I think it is still somewhere on his The Blue Room web page, or if not then you may have to try to find it via the Wayback Machine.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

The Ars Magica RPG consistently insists that books that are not "illuminated" are much less useful than books that are. Given how well researched it tends to be, and how well versed its line editor is in matters medieval, I'm inclined to just accept that position as being fact.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

The lower legibility would be something that is taken into account on the quality modifier for the book price. So unless the assumption is that only fine-quality books are easy to read, I would keep the speed at 98% legible level.

For TL4 movable type printing the ca. $2000 is rather close to the library value given.

For the same TL cursive manuscript the total is $113k. (Actually more expensive than TL 3 if we take into account the increase in labor productivity. If not, the higher price of early paper will make TL3 more expensive than TL4).

If we use the same number of pages for that too (not multiplying by 4 for hand-writing), the scribe-work will cost $27.5k, for a total of $30.5k. As this is close to the value given for hand-written library, maybe the increase in page count was forgotten in the estimation of the price multiplier. So for a cursive manuscript library, we would multiply the prices given by 40 instead of 10.

As for the cursive vs. calligraphy issue, we could think of the cursive as the cheaper, less legible method of book production.

For a daily speed of 32 pages for cursive, 10 for calligraphy and 2 for illumination we could approximate those to quality levels: cursive for "good", calligraphy for "fine" and fully illuminated for "very fine".

Maybe say that "fine" books are fully legible and the "good" rate will only produce (skill 12+6-8=10) 50% legible text in 20% of the time it takes to copy a book with calligraphy. "Cheap" would take the maximum reduction, for 37.5% legible text in 10% of the time. This would mean that the real price of cheap and good libraries would be the extra effort in reading them. This way the quality wouldn't only be about resale value and prestige.

With these quality levels a cheap hand-copied basic library on TL 3 paper would cost $36800, which is close enough, although for pre-paper societies some other cheap material like leaves would be used.

Even with these modifications the high cost of parchment will push the prices of better libraries up. Because paper had a long time stigma in Europe as a poor substitute for parchment, it wasn't used in better books. The choice of materials should be taken into account on calculating the total costs for libraries of different qualities.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Oh, it's in the Basic Set: Campaigns, pages 516-517. Basically, the cost of living is equal to the monthly wage rate for that status level. Here I used it as is (even though there is a separate TL1 wage in LT:C3). For more accuracy I would do like I did with G:Traveller and just adjust wages by difference in cost-of living at different TLs.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

This would also mean that the extra cost of illumination affects the utility of the book. So except for gilding and other extravagance, the price of a book should be tied to it's utility. Maybe give it an equipment modifier that affects reading speed, learning from books, research and data search rolls.

This would also nicely keep the value of the book independent of the actual information within. As in manuscript cultures the value comes from the manufacturing, information has almost zero value (once you copy a book you can keep on copying without having to pay for the content).

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

The literacy rate does affect the prices of books, but the high price of writing materials will keep them high even if you could set up a work-house of literate poor or slaves to do the scribe work. As there were various shorthand writing styles in the antiquity, the cost of scribing could be pushed very low at the price of legibility.

The "Book Rules for GURPS" is still online. I'll check it and apply them to the current edition.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Great for magical tomes, but not really applicable to reality.
Degree of fanciness rarely coincides with usefulness.
Haven't we all read pretty calligraphy fonts that slow reading? And obviously anything but very tiny illumination is all about pretty, taking up space that could be used for more words.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

That, I strongly suspect, is a question of familiarity rather than fanciness vs. utility. If, say, blackletter and ligatures were inherently difficult to read, I can't imagine that they'd have been used for centuries. Now, modern calligraphic styles may substitute aesthetic effect for utility, but at this point, manuscript traditions are pretty much dead, and those styles are deliberately designed to look good, not to be read. Different bag of cats.

That said, I largely agree that fanciness and utility are orthogonal. A Bible, for example, might gain a bit of utility by larger capitals at the start of each chapter, verse numbers set off to the side, and the words of Christ in a different color of ink, but does it really become easier to read and comprehend if there are jousting muskrats in the capitals and a shiny splash page for every book? I don't think so. Now, they certainly have utility in a social context. Fancier stuff impresses people (and GURPS has rules for that, of course). That's why books like that were produced. But as an improved information resource? I'm not seeing it.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

That's 98% perfectly legible, meaning you can just glance at it to read it. The 74% version isn't "26% of this book is unreadable," it's "26% of this book looks cramped and hastily written - you'll need to read a little more closely to make the words out." Offhand, I'd say that reading time should be increased by 20% per MoF - so 74% of the book can be read at full speed, 9.7% takes 1.2x as long, 7% takes 1.4x as long, 4.6% takes 1.6x as long, 2.8% takes 1.8x as long, 1.4% takes 2x as long, and 0.5% takes 2.2x as long. That works out to an average increase of around 12%, which is probably acceptable.

EDIT: I should note here that I'm just using the actual MoF for critical failures. If instead you'd like to go with "Critical Failures are automatically MoF 10 or worse," this is a 13% or so increase instead; this boost can probably be safely ignored.

Note tools (like books) actually follow the scheme of Basic for +0, Good for +1, Fine for +2 (rather than Good for +0, Fine for +1, Very Fine for +2), but that's just nomenclature. A 50% perfectly legible book would, using my above suggestion, take around 1.3x as long to read as normal, which may be acceptable. A 37.5% legible one would take nearly twice as long (1.9x) to read as normal. That's probably not a horrible scheme, honestly.

Wait, so instead of Cost of Living (B265), you're just assuming characters spend their entire* wage on supporting themselves?

*Assuming they simply have average wage for their Status, that is.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Supply was also a thing in medieval Europe - IIRC it was the 1300s before paper making made it into Northern Europe and another century before it became common.

Again, IIRC this was more or less the Roman method of "mass publishing" that allowed them to have a "leisure" books trade: one reader dictated the work to a room full of slave (or very low paid) scribes, thus producing as many copies as there were writers. Using low production standards and (relatively) cheap Egyptian papyrus paper this allowed (relatively) cheap publication of books (generally in scroll format) on (relatively) trivial topics.

Meanwhile ... all this sort of gives the laugh to the huge libraries found in most fantasy works. Any kind of realistic pricing should see those books being worth an absolute fortune rather than just being set-dressing.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Yes: I'm using it as the total monthly budget. For TL0 it mean's that most of your labor goes to support you at a basic level and all the luxuries allowed by higher technology will keep you spending most of your salary each month on "essentials". Also jobs with higher wages than the TL norm for that status mean that you'll have more to spend after keeping up with the Joneses. What you get in those "essentials" is a lot higher on TL8 than on TL0. Why there's no TL adjustment on the CoL table in the Characters, I don't know.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

As far as I known, one aspect of the Carolingan Reform was the introduction and dissemination of a simpler caligraphy, one that was quicker and more efficient both to write and to read. And in general, I don't think medieval books are caligraphed in a way that makes them hard to read, although personally, I find even modern handwriting hard to read. Not just my own which is clearly barely legible, but even that of others. I seem to partly have lost the ability to read handwriting easily, and partly I lack the patience.

But most medieval texts? I'd imagine they were pretty easy, if I knew Latin.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

"The Long Ships", famous Viking novel, mentions one senior Catholic clergyman, below the rank of Bishop but still quite senior, as having a huge library of "more than 70 volumes". My impression from "Name of the Rose", taking place several centuries later, is that its library had many hundreds of books.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

That's certainly reasonable. There are quite a few surviving medieval catalogs, and the most impressive ones run to a few thousand items. The famous 11th century inventory of Cluny (a very important monastic house) only has 570 items on it, but may be incomplete. The 14th century inventory for Christ Church, Canterbury is about 1850, Leicester 900, Dover 450.

Since the total number of surviving works from the Classical world is seldom estimated at more than 10,000 volumes, a medieval library with two thousand volumes may actually hold 5 or 10% of everything that exists, as impressive a collection as a major national library today.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Well, that depends. Many settings seem to have paper and industrial magic, and some printing and various kinds of mechanization or its magical equivalent, so it is not surprising if the availability of books is more like 19th century England than 10th century Hungary. Sadly many fantasy authors do not study history so do not do this consciously!

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Agreed. When I first started uni I didn't know the Greek alphabet. Within 3 months of daily exposure I was reading Greek as quickly as English. However, even today, I still struggle with texts that are written in all capitals because I had mainly been exposed to lower case.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

There probably are some differences - it can after all take a page or two to get used to a big font change, and essentially every manuscript is in a different font - but they're small.

I suspect the contractions are the biggest hurdle for modern readers, and that's no different than learning to penetrate texting, which uses lots of them for not so dissimilar reasons. Being familiar enough with the variations to read any legible manuscript as easily as clean print is a reasonable perk. If you don't have it, reading time for a short text in an especially poor or eccentric hand might go up enough to notice, or require some sort of PER roll to avoid getting confused.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

I'm sure I remember just such a suggestion in one of the Perk Threads.
At least such a person wouldn't have such the hassle I often have with Captchas.