Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas
I studied some medieval book history back in my undergraduate days, and 230 folios is pretty high for a medieval book.
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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).