So.
Let's talk library design. I am not a library scientist nor a historian, so all information here has been compiled from frenzied googling and wiki walking.
Influences
Mathilde has some influences in how she will approach creating a library - most notably, the library of the Grey College, which is likely to be in large part a chained lectern library similar to the
Trinity Hall library at Cambridge - it would have been the academic custom in the Empire at the time the Grey College was created, and keeping sensitive materials restricted seems in keeping with the Grey College ethos. Of course, some influence from Ulthuan and the Tower of Hoeth likely made it into the structure of the libraries of the Colleges of Magic, but it's hard to speculate what that influence would look like - the Library of the White Tower is said to be absolutely enormous, with magic guiding scholars to the knowledge in particular they seek if they have earned it.
Beyond that, she will be influenced by the Verenan take on sharing knowledge, where I suspect they have historically filled a role similar to that of monasteries of the Benedictine order in our history - monasteries such as Canterbury would fastidiously copy manuscripts to ensure they were maintained, and lend them to other monasteries or even secular people as long as they were given a security.
There will be a significant influence on the library's design from the dwarven architects who actually build it - they in turn will likely be drawing on the experience of Dwarf archives and recordkeeping, like that used to maintain the Dammaz Kron - we know that dwarves have Runes they use to preserve books, but there are likely architectural choices they're liable to make as well to ensure that books do well in subterranean environments.
Finally, she will be influenced by various private book collections, including her experience maintaining her own collection- an example would be the Royal Library assembled by Charles V in 1368, which would span over 900 volumes by 1390, or the collection of Richard de Bury (author of the
Philobiblon).
The time period Mathilde is in is roughly equivalent to when some of the first public libraries opened, such as the library opened by
Cosimo de' Medici in 1444. (Notably, this was still prior to the Gutenberg press.) The Library of Karak 8 Peaks will likely begin at a scale comprable to a notably large private collection of the era - this would be 800 to 900 volumes. It will then continue to grow with time -
especially once movable type becomes a thing, and especially as funding continues to be provided and private collections get bought up whenever anyone with a notable one passes away.
Design
LK8P has been given a whole mountain, but it's very unlikely to need
all that space to begin with. Even if we assume that Belegar can outdo even the wealthiest Medici for book procurement threefold over the next few years, and including all of Mathilde's existing collection, we'd still be looking at " " "merely" " " around 5000 volumes - that's more than enough books that chained lecterns aren't going to cut it, but still few enough that you could easily fit them in a single large hall. (For comparison, an average high school library in North America has around 9000 books.)
However, dwarves build things to
last, and so that likely means that they will either create the library design in such a way that it can be expanded upon near-indefinitely as more and more books come in, or massively
over-designing the library and making use of only part of its space capacity for the first few decades. (For example, we might have several wings be planned out for various subjects, and then use the first wing to be completed as a catch-all library while the other wings slowly finish construction.)
It looks like the primary considerations of library architects of the era were ensuring that there were high enough ceilings that things didn't feel cramped around all the shelving, and making sure that enough light comes through to allow for scholarship and study. Dwarves will no doubt do fabulously on the first front - high-ceilinged caverns are kind of their
thing - but I wonder how the lighting will work. Then again, we know that Belegar's great hall (with the Weber crest prominently displayed) seems to be well-lit enough, so this seems like a solved problem.
That said, there's more to a library than just space to keep the books, especially given the time period. A significant amount of space is going to need to be dedicated to creating copies of books - both copies of books already in the LK8P collection to ensure that they get preserved, and books on loan from other institutions so that LK8P can make a new copy for their collection. Someone is going to have to be in charge of all the various intra-institutional loans, someone else is going to have to be in charge of book collection efforts, and a whole host of somebodies are going to be busy constantly rotating through the library and ensuring that the books are well kept for, and given these are dwarves all of the various rooms that all of this will be happening in will no doubt be part of the library's design - and quite possibly the living quarters too, especially if the Library is meant to host visiting scholars.
The Ranald Question
I do think that there should be some minor Ranaldian symbolism subtly worked into the library somewhere, since I do like the idea of this being something of an olive branch between Ranald and Verena that Mathilde is facilitating. However, by that same token, said symbolism should be
subtle and
minor. It's not much of an olive branch if it has Ranald's name gaudily scrawled all over it, and a library really doesn't need cat statues every few feet to trip over. We can likely do something tasteful with how the dwarven rune for book involves four lines crossing over each other - not hard to hide some crosses in that design.
