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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Btw, Negaverse's TWW would lack "martial-focused" Legendary Lord from The Empire. (Unless "Big Three" of The Empire's LLs would be made of Mandred, Mathilde & Roswita Van Hal)
 
Boney said:
It's book-sized, bound in leather, and has a plain embossed or branded title, because that is what books look like in this era. You bind it in leather because that's what lasts and you don't have printings on the outside because ink doesn't play nice with leather. Any illustration would be on the page opposite the title page, called the frontispiece.
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Wood lasts too, and you can get neat shit on it by way of ironbinding (Codex Gigas has eight pointed star on it. Coincidence? I think not!), thought thats more middle ages than reneissance. And i think you can have nice carved patterns and whatnot. Its probably not academia remit, but i would honestly say era appropriate books that were left to us in original binding are flat out opulent. Or maybe thats a bias because the more famous ones are and the ones that are straight up plain don't show up as much in popular consciousness.

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Look at that sucker.

Or is Empire more 18th century? Im never really clear what anachronism stew it is in.
 
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Survivorship bias. Fancy books were not the norm, the fancy books survived because they were fancy and because the ones that were made fancy were the ones that had greater meaning - holy books and prestige pieces and the like - that would see more effort go towards their preservation. Also the cost of parchment meant that less meaningful and fancy books would be reused, the ink scraped off the parchment to be rewritten into some other book. Aethyric Vitae is not made to be a treasured centerpiece of a literary collection, it's meant to communicate information and likely be present for consultation during experiments with apparitions and/or their blood. It would also be leaning into Grey College aesthetics - understated, subtle, reliable. My mental image would be something like this:


If there was an image, it'd be stylized and similarly foil embossed, something like this:


These are, of course, more modern than the books we're talking about, but I'm not gonna not use the books I've got when I'm staring down the barrel of having to get a fifth bookcase.
 
Boney said:
Aethyric Vitae is not made to be a treasured centerpiece of a literary collection, it's meant to communicate information and likely be present for consultation during experiments with apparitions and/or their blood. It would also be leaning into Grey College aesthetics - understated, subtle, reliable. My mental image would be something like this:
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Ah i see. About what i expected. So Modest Treatise on Magic is basically the most blinged out book in existence, right?
 
Boney said:
These are, of course, more modern than the books we're talking about, but I'm not gonna not use the books I've got when I'm staring down the barrel of having to get a fifth bookcase.
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As a professional bookseller, I can assure you that you don't need another bookcase—not when any mostly flat and even surface will serve adequately as a storage receptacle for books. Tables, chairs, the end of the bed, the floor, windowsills, the kitchen counter, on top of the fridge, under the PC desk—just stack them wherever you can.

At least, that's what I tell myself because I really don't know where I'm going to put another bookcase in here at all.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
As a professional bookseller, I can assure you that you don't need another bookcase—not when any mostly flat and even surface will serve adequately as a storage receptacle for books. Tables, chairs, the end of the bed, the floor, windowsills, the kitchen counter, on top of the fridge, under the PC desk—just stack them wherever you can.

At least, that's what I tell myself because I really don't know where I'm going to put another bookcase in here at all.
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Most people really underutilize their ceilings.
 
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I have so many books that i will never read again, some that i have never read, and never will (gifts or ones that turned out to be very bad before i got halfway through).
I really should sell most half third some any of them to make some space.
Like, what am i going to do with Crystals of Air and Water, The Parsina Saga, volume 3 (i have never been able to locate any other volume, i am half convinced they never existedin the first place), or Lemmus 2 Beyond the Outer Mirr (i have no memory of ever reading this).
Read them? Like i got the time or Energy (and not sure the books would survive at this point).

I know what i should do with The Name of the Wind, but unfortunately i don't own a fireplace.
 
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I can't claim to be avid reader, my bookshelf is fairly small. I balance it out by living with my family that collected like two metric tonnes of the stuff. Repainting rooms every decade or so is a nightmare.
 
The only part of our library that I'm disappointed with is the seeming lack of visitors. I mean, yeah, giant spiders, but they're friendly. Surely, at some point, people will take notice of the incredible breadth of lore and knowledge we've got lying around for free, right?
 
SaltyWaffles said:
The only part of our library that I'm disappointed with is the seeming lack of visitors. I mean, yeah, giant spiders, but they're friendly. Surely, at some point, people will take notice of the incredible breadth of lore and knowledge we've got lying around for free, right?
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If we wanted people to use the library we shouldn't have voted for it to use territorial giant spiders for its librarians.
 
You know, I should not be surprised by these comments - we're all nerds here, after all (and I am similarly a proud member of the many-books-having club) - but they do offer significant clarity on the impetus behind the thread's choice to found a library.

...

Hmm. Scrolling through, a few voting options do go along these lines but none with quite the right ambition.

[X] Plan: All the Books Forever
-[X] KAU to become a legal deposit library for the Colleges of Magic, with the intent of preserving their collective knowledge in the event of an existential catastrophe befalling Altdorf or the wider regions containing it.
--[X] Current and new written works held within the Colleges to be copied, and the copies transferred to KAU, as swiftly and comprehensively as practicable, subject to discussions and arrangements around security, sensitivity and accessibility of materials which are to be conducted as soon as possible.
--[X] Should imperial copyright law at any point in the future become sufficiently comprehensive to make it possible, the Colleges will prefer and use their influence to push for KAU to become a legal deposit library for the Empire as a whole.

[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer (Researcher ver)
[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer
[X] Flying Vehicle
[X] Elector-Countess
[X] Support in dispatching Battle Wizards to one major conflict of Mathilde's choice
[X] Rainbow Throng: Full Collegiate Aid to be called upon during one of the campaigns of Nexus reclamation
[X]Enchant We-Silk Robes as best as Collegiate is able
 
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Boney said:
Survivorship bias. Fancy books were not the norm, the fancy books survived because they were fancy and because the ones that were made fancy were the ones that had greater meaning -
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Don't think that's the full thing, or even the biggest.

One big factor is also that the base cost is already high, between material (cowskins cost a lot of cow, cheap paper doesn't preceed the printing press by all that much) and high labor costs (it's going to take a trained professional months). If it's already expensive, you might as well add some decorations to make look nice, it's not gonna make such a difference in the price anyway.

The other big factor is that medieval scribes where either church affiliated, or at least church trained, and for monks transcription could be a holy work. It takes a while for fully commercial scribes to show up, but by that point the expectations of what a book looks like were set.
 
Books were often a status symbol.
Less fancy books did exist yes, but less fancy is not the same as not fancy.
Any book intended to last, instead of just for note taking before being bound to a proper book, was expensive to make and some falir on the bindings would not raise the price noticeably.
 
I do think our library has its dedicated fans that have at least managed to learn to ignore the gigantic spiders reading over their shoulder. It just aren't that many, we are a safeguard, not meant to attract huge crowds.
 
Tobtorp said:
I do think our library has its dedicated fans that have at least managed to learn to ignore the gigantic spiders reading over their shoulder. It just aren't that many, we are a safeguard, not meant to attract huge crowds.
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Every now and again somebody asks who is using our library, and how much. Generally, it's not as used as you'd intuitively expect because most of K8P's human population isn't literate.

But then you get little nuggets of gold like Kragg walking in to make sure there's no funny business going on with the collegiate "runes" section, or hunter spiders watching people reading very intently just in case, or Mathilde taking Panoramia not having looked up the relevant books in the library as an urgent reason to reorganize the whole thing though I think that last one was a shitpost that maybe wasn't even boney's

So I think it's getting used, just that it's not showing up on screen.
 
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