me:
> > My fairly small academic library (~4000 users, ~150,000
>> items, not counting electronic resources) is likely bigger
>> than any collection anywhere in Glorantha by an order of
>> magnitude.
>
>Again, I must disagree. Granted, it's an extreme case, but the
>Library of Alexandria was (IIRC) ~500,000 volumes. While such a
>resource would probably only be found in Dara Happa, there were
>several other libraries in antiquity that could boast ~100,000 or
>more volumes, including Byzantium. I would suppose that the Final
>Information Library would comprise something on the order of (at a
>minimum) 100,000 volumes; if I was feeling generous, perhaps two or
>three times this number might be possible.
Some quick research turns up a figure of 700,000 items for the Library, but these were scroll rolls, not complete books. The number of discrete items at Alexandria seems to have been more like 100,000. Pergamum, another large Hellenistic library, had some 200,000 scrolls -- presumably that works out to about 30,000 items. A bit later Constantinople had a library with 120,000 items (how many discrete titles, I have no idea) about 300 AD. Medieval libraries were mostly much smaller -- a pair of notable Carolingian libraries (800-1100 AD) had 400 and 650 volumes each (presumably codex-format books). Islamic libraries were larger, by 1100AD at least one had more than a million items. There were some big Chinese collections as well, but I don't have figures for them
Anyway, my crack about an order of magnitude is incorrect. There may be a few Gloranthan libraries that have 100,000+ items, but most will be much much smaller.
Peter Larsen
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