Book

Basic Information

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side.

In strict terms a book may also be recorded on one or more scrolls, a linked collection of writing tablets or something similar.

A collection of books is termed a library - this can refer both to the books themselves and to the room or building in which they are found, although a library which contains only records may also be called an archive.

Famous Real Books

• Bible
• Book of Shadows
• Codex Gigas
• Handbook of Ritual Power
• The Black Book
• Voynich manuscript

Famous Fictional Books

• Necronomicon

See Also

• Anthropodermic bibliopegy
• Big Book Of War
• Book And Switch
• Bookcase Passage
• Book code
• Chirograph
• Cookbook
• Hagiography
• Hortus Siccus
• It's For A Book
• Library
• Library of Lost Books
• Palimpsest
• Read The Freaking Manual
• Religious Text
• Scribe
• Spell Book
• Tome of Eldritch Lore

• News: British Library mislays 9,000 books
• News: Ancient Egyptian Handbook of Spells Deciphered

Sources

Bibliography

1. The Most Unusual Books of the World

2. Wikipedia entry

Game and Story Use

• Books serve as a useful repository of plot-relevant information.
  • Most famously is the Tome of Eldritch Lore which contains the banishing spell for the Cosmic Horror - but which might drive the reader insane in the process.
• As the "Unusual Books" link demonstrates, books can be far more than a mere collection of sheets of paper. Come up with an unusual book description, and make your players curious.
• Prior to the invention of the printing press books required significant amounts of (relatively) skilled manual labour and (relatively) expensive materials, making them rare and valuable objects (for reference, in the C14, a University college might consider itself fortunate to have a library of a dozen books (possibly including duplicates). Even after the printing press it takes time, and technological advances to make books cheap - it was well into the C20 in most of Europe (and the US) that a working class family would expect to have any books beside The Bible (or equivalent) in their home and a large library would remain rare and expensive for most of the period.
  • This of course makes books treasure, and also plot relevant where books have been rented/borrowed/stolen/used as collateral.
  • Some subversion is possible - medieval books tended to be "somewhat over engineered" in terms of illumination and the like - a society which, like the Romans, can use mass scribe workshops may be able to push the cost of books down to early printing press levels if a cheap enough source of paper can be found.
  • It was also common to borrow/rent a book and make your own copy … either of the whole thing or of the parts you consider relevant. You could then have your transcriptions bound, which could lead to some highly esoteric texts … imagine, for example, in the cthulhu mythos someone's collected notes ranging from gnostic gospels, chunks of traditional mythos works and tracts on mathematics, astronomy and geometry. Moving between chapters from Euclid to Abd Al Hazarad could be a nasty surprise….