Alpine Papyrus

This is one of the rare episodes where I haven’t written up a script, so you’ll pardon me if
I’m very rambly.

This week I had hoped to present to you the episode which involves The Fairy with the Blue Hair, also known as the Blue Fairy, from “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, but having just halfway written her out, it’s already 3,000 words long and most of those are statistics, so it’s clearly not suitable as a podcast episode it will instead become part of the upcoming second issue of Mythic Europe magazine. For those who want a quick look at the art in advance, the inspiration for that article is a painting called The Antique Pottery Painter, also known as Painting Breathes Life Into Sculpture by Jean-Lion Jerome.

And so, to rapidly patch the whole that’s been left in my schedule, let me mention something that I saw in an interview with Professor Ada Palmer who wrote Inventing the Renaissance, which is a book that I intend to plunder for plot ideas because I listened to her speaking for an hour and I thought ah yes I have at least three episodes here. Her point was, and this was new to me, the reason that the libraries in the Arabic parts of Mythic Europe are so much bigger than the libraries in the Catholic parts of Mythic Europe are because the Catholic parts use vellum and the other parts use papyrus. I knew that, but I didn’t understand what that implied.

Her implication is that because, and this is her example, the difference between a page made out of papyrus and a page made out of vellum is that one costs the same as a lettuce and the other costs the same as the leather jacket. That additional cost forces choice. You can’t copy everything, so you only copy the things that are worth, in the case of a vellum book, the equivalent of a small house. Arabic libraries can be larger and, critically,
more diverse because the medium they are copying in does not force choice.

Now in my own defence here I would like to state that I’m a very old person, and when I studied history originally,
the idea that people copied only the things that were most valuable to them was considered old hat and disproven. Everyone had assumed that Mesopotamian writing would all be of great importance and Egyptian writing would all be of great importance and actually no, they’re not. One of the earliest pieces we have of Mesopotamian writing is a recipe for boiling goat in milk. Some of the earliest Egyptian writing we have is just the ephemera of running a public service. So I had been trained to see her insight, that people would choose to record the things that they value the most, was an old fashioned idea that was wrong. She argues it very persuasively and so let’s assume that it is true for the rest of our brief conversation here. You can see that having to slaughter dozens of cattle and scrape their skins, and dry their skins, and stretch their skins, and scrape their skins again, is time consuming. Compare to cutting up a readily growing-reed, essentially a grass, that happens to ooze a sticky glue that binds pieces of it together into large flat sheets if you leave them lying in the sun.

Now I’ve said that Valnastium has the largest mundane library in Western Europe. That is technically only about 600 books to be bigger than Paris and a couple of thousand to be larger than some of the largest Arabic libraries. Clearly Valnastium has got around this problem of cost forcing choice. They could have used magic they could have just said “We can have as many bits of dried sheep as we like”. Fair. It is not, however, all that difficult to create a greenhouse using ring/circle enchantments and just grow papyrus.

Papyrus has certain problems with it. For example it’s quite brittle (which is why scrolls were so important by the way) rather than codices. A codex is made by folding pages and sewing them together. When you do that with
papyrus, the papyrus cracks along the gather. So wouldn’t it have been easier for one of these culture-obsessed people, or someone with a single pawn of Herbam vis, to instead create a massive greenhouse at Valnastium. They don’t even need the glass for the greenhouse: ring/circle magic is relatively cheap. They could therefore have so much papyrus that they were not forced to choose, which would explain why theirs is the largest library in western Europe.

The alternative thought that I was having on this (a very long time ago) was that the development of the paper
industry around Amalfi in Italy was due to House Jerbiton needing paper so that they could maintain their library. I tried to research how Amalfi but couldn’t find a decent history, gave up, moved my attention to Venice and then that worked out as it worked out. So I think there is a distinct possibility that when your magi are touring Valnastium and looking at the ice grape orchards and the wonderful old Roman ruins, now converted into the sancta of magi, there’s a decent chance that they’ll find a large quasi-Egyptian lake growing tropical reeds in the middle of the Alps.