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

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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

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.