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

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

Printing at TL4 the materials (paper) cost $750 and labor (movable type) $1210, totaling at $1960 (56%).

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.

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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).

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.

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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).

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.

[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.

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

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.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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.

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?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by ArchonShiva

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.

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.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

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.

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.

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

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.

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

Originally Posted by Varyon

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?

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.

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.

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).