types of jungle

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Witchking

Also the big problem (pre-presses) is that books die. The original author may have written only the source copy. That was valued enough that copies were made and spread. However that process is so slow in the stages of the Literacy Revolution that a library fire or two, a flood, a ship sinking and boom...a book dies.

There is also the issue of copyists' errors. When I copy edited Historia Mathematica, I worked on the occasional article that traced the genealogy of individual copies of ancient books by identifying points where specific bits of text were altered, omitted, or interpolated and then passed on to subsequent copies.