Articles
Stories followed through the books, reading tours, research notes and things to try. Every claim is grounded in primary sources from the collection.
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Stories18 October 202625 min read
Harmonic Justice
Money as proportion, from Xenophon to Bastiat and Carey: Cosimo de’ Medici’s Hermes, Pacioli, Copernicus at the mint, Kepler correcting Bodin, Adam Smith.
Reading tours16 October 202615 min read
Maya Religion in the Colonial Sources
Maya religion from the friars who burned its books and the Maya who kept it: Landa, the Motul dictionary, the Bacabs and the Chilam Balam books.
Stories16 October 202612 min read
Preserved by Their Enemies
Books written to stamp out a religion often keep its only record: Hippolytus and Epiphanius on the Gnostics, and Landa’s Maya alphabet.
Stories16 October 202633 min read
Beyond the North Wind: Hyperborea and the Amber Coast
Herodotus doubted the blessed people beyond the north wind and the amber from the world’s edge. Later Prussian historians claimed both for the Baltic.
Reading tours16 October 20268 min read
Shipwrecks and Buried Treasure
Charles V’s gold off Cadiz, an Armada ship in Tobermory Bay, a sexton’s pot of Saxon silver and a Tibetan guide to where to dig treasure.
Reading tours15 October 202620 min read
Trees of Life Across the Traditions
World trees and tree diagrams in the library’s plates: the sefirot, Yggdrasil, the Assyrian palm, the Waqwaq tree, the wayang kayon and Darwin.
Research notes8 October 2026
Search by Meaning
How the library finds passages that say the same thing in different words and languages, using a 768-number index of each page, and its limits.
Stories8 October 202612 min read
One Sentence of Hermes, Copied for Sixteen Hundred Years
One Greek word misread by a late-antique translator of the Asclepius, followed through a manuscript, five printed editions, a commentary and our own OCR.
Stories7 October 202612 min read
Four Commentaries on Nothing
Candrakīrti on Nāgārjuna, Wukong on the Diamond Sutra, a Kabbalah dictionary and Eck on Dionysius, with our translation errors and fixes.
Research notes7 October 202610 min read
What the Models Cannot Name
For about half the distinct works we hold, none of Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 5.5 or GPT-5.6 can name the author from the title. A preregistered re-run.
Reading tours6 October 2026
Beeckman on Drebbel: the journal passages, 1619–1634
Isaac Beeckman’s journal entries on Cornelis Drebbel: the submarine, perpetual motion, the weather-glass, in his Dutch or Latin beside English.
Stories6 October 202612 min read
The Engraver Who Went Under the Thames
Cornelis Drebbel built a submarine and a perpetual-motion clock and wrote almost nothing. A map of the 57 people around him, and his own book.
Research notes4 October 202610 min read
Should a library train its own AI models?
Where Gemini’s readings of our pages are good enough to train a smaller open model of our own, where they are not, and what it would save.
Research notes28 September 20268 min read
Checking the Archive’s OCR against proofread pages
On 122 proofread English pages our reader beat the Internet Archive’s OCR, which in a first count misreads about one printed number in a hundred.
Research notes20 September 202612 min read
How We Measure OCR Quality
One page per book, sealed before anyone looks, scored against a published edition: how we test OCR engines, and a woodblock cell that was manuscript.
Reading tours15 September 202625 min read
Techniques of the Body
Postures, breathing and exercises from the books that prescribe them, from Ge Hong’s Baopuzi to a 1922 Marathi manual, beside translations.
Research notes12 September 20269 min read
The Reading We Did Not Have to Pay For
We tested the Internet Archive’s OCR of 5.5 million of our pages against ours, kept it where they agree, and found a cheap model cannot fix the rest.
Reading tours11 September 202612 min read
An Atlas of Lost Instruments
A keyed fiddle, a cat organ, a wind harp, the megaphone quarrel and a 31-note keyboard: nine events from the library’s music books.
Stories27 August 202611 min read
Technique Is Local, Crisis Is Universal
Meditation manuals read as research: the Visuddhimagga on temperament, Iamblichus on dose, shared safety warnings and seven testable hypotheses.
Research notes21 August 20268 min read
Two Copies, Two Languages
Our two copies of the 1495 Aldine Lascaris are catalogued Greek and Latin, both rightly. Measuring 21,481 books to fix it, and two false findings.
Stories20 August 2026
The Aldine Roman: a facsimile type from De Aetna (1496)
Francesco Griffo’s roman for Aldus, cut in 1496 for Bembo’s De Aetna and traced letter by letter from our copy: the type Garamond and Times descend from.
Research notes11 August 20269 min read
Graded by the Suda
Our AI translation of the Suda graded against the Suda On Line, 31,000 entries by 200 volunteers. A cheap AI judge fails silently. Cost: $1.15.
Research notes10 August 20265 min read
Every Shape of Every Word
A table of 570,000 Greek word forms and their dictionary entries, so you can tap a word in a 1590 book, checked against 132,000 verified words.
Research notes9 August 20266 min read
Nobody Knows What Has Been Scanned
No one can say whether a book has been digitised. We harvested 3.5 million records for one library, found 3,655 unscanned books, and ask for a registry.
Research notes30 July 20268 min read
Reciting, Not Reading
We hid four lines of Genesis in a 1566 Vulgate under a grey box and our OCR transcribed them anyway. Four prompts failed to make it admit the gap.
Research notes23 July 20269 min read
Nine Models, Forty Pages
Nine OCR-capable models, Google’s newest and three open-weight ones among them, on forty historical pages. The newest budget model lost to its predecessor.
Interactive19 July 20263 instruments
The Playable Page
Three instruments from old treatises, strung to play: Galilei’s two-string bench, the Lyre of Mercury and a Boethius two-octave system.
Interactive19 July 20267 min read
Chart a Word, Then Read the Page
A word-frequency chart over five centuries of alchemy and early science that follows one concept across Latin, German and French, linked to the pages.
Interactive16 July 202610 experiments
The Sound Laboratory
Ten stations testing old claims about harmony by ear: the smith’s hammers, the Pythagorean comma, Bharata’s vīṇās, Kepler’s planets and Euler.
Stories15 July 202618 min read
The Nature of Harmony
Twenty-five centuries of the idea that the world is built like music, and the quarrel between those who heard an order and those who measured it.