The Wisdom of Emperors kickstarter -- Book Excerpt + Merch Reveal!
Oh my god we're only one week away from launching this bad boy, and I'm both nervous and excited and trying not to stress out. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has been signal boosting and telling friends about it, y'all are such a huge help!!! I have another cool piece of merch to show you AND a thematically-related excerpt from the book...
This smallish notebook is purse-sized (or pocket-sized if it's a large hoodie pocket, I suppose), made of eco-conscious materials with a sewn binding and unlined, tinted pages -- the closest we're likely to get to one of Talius' papyrus notebooks!
The cover features an ink splatter and the words "Hic scriba humilis incipit", meaning "This humble scribe begins." These words are the customary official opening with which Talius begins every new codex in his journaling of his ten-year adventure following Emperor Cabian. (Please note they'll be printed with metallic gold ink, so the contrast against the matte, light-brown cover will be a little sharper in person!)
Read an excerpt of the book about Talius' codices behind the cut -- or, if you're hearing about this for the first time and you're wondering what the FUCK I'm talking about, read the summary of the whole book over on Kickstarter (and check the previous merch reveals on the Updates page to read more excerpts from the book!)
A new fantasy novel by Alexandra Rowland, author of A TASTE OF GOLD AND IRON, RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND, & YIELD UNDER GREAT PERSUASION
EXCERPT BELOW, it's just from the very beginning of the book so it won't spoil anything for you! Because social media cannot handle properly-formatted footnotes in any kind of convenient way, I've chosen to format the them vaguely in-line with the text (at the end of the paragraph that they appear in) so that you don't have to keep scrolling all the way to the bottom :)
This is the format of the Salyra Manuscript: A papyrus codex.
In fact, it is multiple codices, bound together into a single, unusually hefty one. My mentor, Dr Bea Apiana, was the first researcher to do an initial examination of the manuscript as a physical object. However, due to the fragile state of the materials, concerns about its stability, millennia of accumulated dirt and debris, and the clumsy execution of the secondary binding, it proved impossible at the time to determine precisely how many codices the manuscript was comprised of—Apiana et al was able to estimate between ten and thirteen.(1) Since that time, the manuscript has been treated by the Chantry’s conservation and preservation department (under the supervision of Chant-of-Ancoux IV), who were able to count twelve total codices.(2) My own examinations agree—now that the manuscript has been cleaned, the separation between each codex is starkly defined. The individual codices are all identical or near-identical in construction and made to standard Imperial specifications: 10 quires, with 5 sheets of papyrus per quire, resulting in 100 leaves (or 200 pages, counting the recto and verso separately).(3)
(FOOTNOTES:
1. Apiana, Chant-of-Ancoux IV, et al (6034).
2. Chant-of-Ancoux IV, et al (6035).
3. Greetings, O confused and perhaps panicking member of the esteemed general audience. Let me assist you: Find a small stack of paper, fold it in half—that’s now a quire. If you sew a few stitches of thread through the fold to keep them together, you technically already have a (small) codex. For a larger codex, you can attach this quire to a number of others, whether by sewing, glue, or a combination of both. Leaf is a more technical term for page, as there can be ambiguity as to whether “page” refers to the original sheet before it is folded into the quire, a single half of the sheet (as in, the thing you move when you are “turning the page” of a book—this is what leaf means in technical jargon), or one side of single leaf (as in, “page 7”, which has “page 8” printed on its reverse). Recto means the right-hand page when you are looking at an open book; verso means the left-hand page—so each leaf has a recto (the “front side”) and a verso (the “back side”). Therefore: 10 sheets in a quire = 20 leaves = 40 pages.)
The first problem point of the Salyra Manuscript as a physical object, which has raised some skepticism as to its authenticity, is that the dimensions of the codices fall just under Imperial specification for bureaucratic use. As we know from surveys of other extant codices made during Cabian’s reign and used by the Imperial service, the mandated dimensions were a precise 9.5 unciae by 7.5 unciae (9.22 inches by 7.28 inches). However, the Salyra Manuscript’s codices measure a half-unciae short (8.73 inches by 6.79 inches). The initial study of the manuscript(1) had posited that it is possible the slight discrepancy in dimensions could be explained either by, first, shrinkage over time due to the suboptimal conditions in which the manuscript was found or, second, by extreme wear and tear to the edges during the manuscript’s use (of which there is ample evidence, discussed below).
(FOOTNOTE:
4. Apiana et al, 6034.)
However, I would offer a third, fourth, and fifth possibility:
Third: A temporary shortage of available papyrus in Khabi due to the sudden huge increase in demand in the immediate aftermath of Cabian’s conquest. If supply could not meet demand, then demand may have been forced to adjust its expectations, and slightly smaller codices could have been a way of stretching the available supply of papyrus.
Fourth: Any papyrus supply manufactured pre-conquest would not have not been made to Imperial specifications in the first place. If, upon the conquest, Cabian’s administrators seized what was available, whether or not it had been made to order, they would have been forced to work with the restrictions of the materials.
Fifth: In light of the aforementioned passage from az-Fahal’s Ashiryat, I also see a possibility for subtle but deliberate subordination on the part of the papyrus-makers and bookbinders of Khabi who, as suggested by the displeasure of the 85th quatrain’s poet, may have been less than happy to be pressed into Imperial service. How better to snub one’s nose at the imperialist occupiers than to practice a small, surreptitious act of rebellion?
While my hypotheses and those of Apiana et al (6034), are all more or less speculative, this does illustrate a spectrum of entirely reasonable possibilities to account for the discrepancy in the manuscript’s dimensions. Therefore, although the size of the codices are anomalous in comparison with other works, this alone is not enough to disprove authenticity.
But there are additional anomalies of the manuscript to consider: the pattern of wear marks (unusual in other extant codices used by the scribae for similar purposes), the leather wrapping found around it (similar to what was sometimes used to protect vellum scrolls, but unheard of for simple codices during this period), and particularly the rather clumsy, cobbled-together secondary construction of the twelve codices into a single volume—the codex maximus, if you will. While the individual codices are made neatly and with evident skill, the secondary binding(5) is definitively not. By comparison, its technique is imprecise, sloppy, and in fact overly-worked, with so many threads that it would take dedicated study of many months or years to diagram each stitch.
(FOOTNOTE:
5. That is, the sewing-together of multiple previously-finished codices into the codex maximus.)
Not content to wait for some masochist to do that, nor to confine myself to speculation, I set out on a task to study this construction by lived experiment: I acquired papyrus paper,(6) gut thread, and a needle; with these, I made myself a stack of codices, using both the Imperial specifications of Cabian’s reign and the same bookbinding techniques.(7) I then used these codices as my personal notebooks for the next three years(8) and elected to carry all of them at once, as I guessed Talius would have had to do during his mysterious disappearance—please note that I had not yet begun my study of the Salyra Manuscript itself at that time.
(FOOTNOTES:
6. Ordered from a specialty artisan in Tash at enormous expense. A fervent thank you to my fellow members of the “Classics Department Galley Slaves” (Hannit Vesiling, Oyo Sanga, Drossi de Elanri, and Isabella Conditto) for passing around the hat to help cover the cost.
7. Krisith (6015).
8. Esteemed readers, I must confess: In all honesty, I had no intention at the time of embarking on a deliberate experiment. I made the codices a year or so into my master’s degree program because I was breathlessly excited about the Salyra find and was beset by that particular pretentious mood unique to historians. “Why yes, I do use Imperial-standard papyrus codices to take notes in,” I used to say to anyone cute who sat near me in class. “Do you want to look at them? Do you want to go for coffee and look at my Imperial-standard papyrus codices made with period-accurate materials and construction methods?” (I am pleased to report this worked shockingly well.))
i am banned from eating my herring inside. they make me eat it on the smoking area by the loading dock, under the theory that it already smells bad there. but it was raining today which was preventing my breakfast, so i was feeling sad and hungry and then i realized that there was a large cardboard box in the dumpster from a previous delivery. like a fridge sized box. so i fished it out of the dumpster, then tipped it on its side and had a nice little cardboard cave to watch the rain and eat my fish in. which was a great experience. very soothing. very zen. at least until the security guard from the day before stepped outside to smoke. then i tried hiding from him by crawling deeper in the box, which unfortunately did not work. instead he saw a sort of damp sniveling pale hairless creature eating fish in a box, and delivered the verbal killshot of "good morning, mr. smeagol." which is how my day was ruined before 8 am.
a person from 150 years ago would be terrified by modern stuff . however , a duck from 150 years ago would just be all like ,still got lakes? yes ? okay cool
Prince whose noblest knight keeps insisting that he would throw himself upon his own blade to bleed himself dry of sin should his liege request it has to reassure concerned citizens, "I've never asked him to do that."
kermit and scooter riffing on how their physicality doesn't let them open the envelope to announce the winner. the audience immediately cracking up when it cuts to statler and waldorf because they know what the bit is gonna be. jim henson slipping into the kermit voice accidentally before bouncing back at record speed and riffing on it. richard hunt genuinely laughing at jim's joke but doing so in-character. prime muppets was something else man
