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

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

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).