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

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

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.

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.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

OK. Did you see any dependence between page size and lettering size?

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.