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

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.

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.

The literacy rate does affect the prices of books, but the high price of writing materials will keep them high even if you could set up a work-house of literate poor or slaves to do the scribe work. As there were various shorthand writing styles in the antiquity, the cost of scribing could be pushed very low at the price of legibility.

The "Book Rules for GURPS" is still online. I'll check it and apply them to the current edition.

[Flyndaran]

Great for magical tomes, but not really applicable to reality.
Degree of fanciness rarely coincides with usefulness.
Haven't we all read pretty calligraphy fonts that slow reading? And obviously anything but very tiny illumination is all about pretty, taking up space that could be used for more words.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Degree of fanciness rarely coincides with usefulness.
Haven't we all read pretty calligraphy fonts that slow reading?

That, I strongly suspect, is a question of familiarity rather than fanciness vs. utility. If, say, blackletter and ligatures were inherently difficult to read, I can't imagine that they'd have been used for centuries. Now, modern calligraphic styles may substitute aesthetic effect for utility, but at this point, manuscript traditions are pretty much dead, and those styles are deliberately designed to look good, not to be read. Different bag of cats.

That said, I largely agree that fanciness and utility are orthogonal. A Bible, for example, might gain a bit of utility by larger capitals at the start of each chapter, verse numbers set off to the side, and the words of Christ in a different color of ink, but does it really become easier to read and comprehend if there are jousting muskrats in the capitals and a shiny splash page for every book? I don't think so. Now, they certainly have utility in a social context. Fancier stuff impresses people (and GURPS has rules for that, of course). That's why books like that were produced. But as an improved information resource? I'm not seeing it.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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.

That's 98% perfectly legible, meaning you can just glance at it to read it. The 74% version isn't "26% of this book is unreadable," it's "26% of this book looks cramped and hastily written - you'll need to read a little more closely to make the words out." Offhand, I'd say that reading time should be increased by 20% per MoF - so 74% of the book can be read at full speed, 9.7% takes 1.2x as long, 7% takes 1.4x as long, 4.6% takes 1.6x as long, 2.8% takes 1.8x as long, 1.4% takes 2x as long, and 0.5% takes 2.2x as long. That works out to an average increase of around 12%, which is probably acceptable.

EDIT: I should note here that I'm just using the actual MoF for critical failures. If instead you'd like to go with "Critical Failures are automatically MoF 10 or worse," this is a 13% or so increase instead; this boost can probably be safely ignored.

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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.

Note tools (like books) actually follow the scheme of Basic for +0, Good for +1, Fine for +2 (rather than Good for +0, Fine for +1, Very Fine for +2), but that's just nomenclature. A 50% perfectly legible book would, using my above suggestion, take around 1.3x as long to read as normal, which may be acceptable. A 37.5% legible one would take nearly twice as long (1.9x) to read as normal. That's probably not a horrible scheme, honestly.

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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.

Wait, so instead of Cost of Living (B265), you're just assuming characters spend their entire* wage on supporting themselves?

*Assuming they simply have average wage for their Status, that is.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

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.

Supply was also a thing in medieval Europe - IIRC it was the 1300s before paper making made it into Northern Europe and another century before it became common.

Originally Posted by Jussi Kenkkilä

The literacy rate does affect the prices of books, but the high price of writing materials will keep them high even if you could set up a work-house of literate poor or slaves to do the scribe work. As there were various shorthand writing styles in the antiquity, the cost of scribing could be pushed very low at the price of legibility.

The "Book Rules for GURPS" is still online. I'll check it and apply them to the current edition.

Again, IIRC this was more or less the Roman method of "mass publishing" that allowed them to have a "leisure" books trade: one reader dictated the work to a room full of slave (or very low paid) scribes, thus producing as many copies as there were writers. Using low production standards and (relatively) cheap Egyptian papyrus paper this allowed (relatively) cheap publication of books (generally in scroll format) on (relatively) trivial topics.

Meanwhile ... all this sort of gives the laugh to the huge libraries found in most fantasy works. Any kind of realistic pricing should see those books being worth an absolute fortune rather than just being set-dressing.

[Jussi Kenkkilä]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Wait, so instead of Cost of Living (B265), you're just assuming characters spend their entire* wage on supporting themselves?

*Assuming they simply have average wage for their Status, that is.

Yes: I'm using it as the total monthly budget. For TL0 it mean's that most of your labor goes to support you at a basic level and all the luxuries allowed by higher technology will keep you spending most of your salary each month on "essentials". Also jobs with higher wages than the TL norm for that status mean that you'll have more to spend after keeping up with the Joneses. What you get in those "essentials" is a lot higher on TL8 than on TL0. Why there's no TL adjustment on the CoL table in the Characters, I don't know.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Great for magical tomes, but not really applicable to reality.
Degree of fanciness rarely coincides with usefulness.
Haven't we all read pretty calligraphy fonts that slow reading? And obviously anything but very tiny illumination is all about pretty, taking up space that could be used for more words.

As far as I known, one aspect of the Carolingan Reform was the introduction and dissemination of a simpler caligraphy, one that was quicker and more efficient both to write and to read. And in general, I don't think medieval books are caligraphed in a way that makes them hard to read, although personally, I find even modern handwriting hard to read. Not just my own which is clearly barely legible, but even that of others. I seem to partly have lost the ability to read handwriting easily, and partly I lack the patience.

But most medieval texts? I'd imagine they were pretty easy, if I knew Latin.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Meanwhile ... all this sort of gives the laugh to the huge libraries found in most fantasy works. Any kind of realistic pricing should see those books being worth an absolute fortune rather than just being set-dressing.

"The Long Ships", famous Viking novel, mentions one senior Catholic clergyman, below the rank of Bishop but still quite senior, as having a huge library of "more than 70 volumes". My impression from "Name of the Rose", taking place several centuries later, is that its library had many hundreds of books.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

"The Long Ships", famous Viking novel, mentions one senior Catholic clergyman, below the rank of Bishop but still quite senior, as having a huge library of "more than 70 volumes". My impression from "Name of the Rose", taking place several centuries later, is that its library had many hundreds of books.

That's certainly reasonable. There are quite a few surviving medieval catalogs, and the most impressive ones run to a few thousand items. The famous 11th century inventory of Cluny (a very important monastic house) only has 570 items on it, but may be incomplete. The 14th century inventory for Christ Church, Canterbury is about 1850, Leicester 900, Dover 450.

Since the total number of surviving works from the Classical world is seldom estimated at more than 10,000 volumes, a medieval library with two thousand volumes may actually hold 5 or 10% of everything that exists, as impressive a collection as a major national library today.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Meanwhile ... all this sort of gives the laugh to the huge libraries found in most fantasy works. Any kind of realistic pricing should see those books being worth an absolute fortune rather than just being set-dressing.

Well, that depends. Many settings seem to have paper and industrial magic, and some printing and various kinds of mechanization or its magical equivalent, so it is not surprising if the availability of books is more like 19th century England than 10th century Hungary. Sadly many fantasy authors do not study history so do not do this consciously!