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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From the library13 April 20265 min read
10,000 Books
Source Library passes 10,000 translated books. The 10,000th is Champier’s Four Volumes of Divine and Human Marvels (1517), first in English.
Research notes24 March 202610 min read
The Rashi Problem: When AI OCR Hallucinates in Hebrew
Gemini reads Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese well, but on the Rashi script of the 1558 Cremona Zohar it invents text, and our quality metrics passed it.
Research notes21 March 202610 min read
How Many Renaissance Books Get Translated Each Year?
We searched the UNESCO Index Translationum and other catalogues to count early modern books newly put into English each year. Fewer than you would guess.
Interactive16 March 20266 min read
Visualizing 20,000 Books Across Six Dimensions
Four interactive D3 views of the six-facet classification of 20,000 books: scatter plot, heatmap, Sankey flow and chord diagram.
Stories16 March 202620 min read
Ten Thousand Years of Tagging
Classification through books the library holds: Callimachus, Aristotle, Porphyry, Llull, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Ranganathan and our faceted tags.
Research notes15 March 20268 min read
We Spent a Day Counting What Hasn't Been Translated
We matched 1.6 million early modern editions against the Library of Congress and other catalogues. The corrected share translated is under 1%.
Research notes15 March 202610 min read
How Much of the Renaissance Has Been Translated?
A first translation census: 1.4 million early modern editions matched against every English translation catalogue we found. The gap is enormous.
From the library15 March 20268 min read
Where Source Library Came From
How Source Library began in 2022 with Ficino’s untranslated Liber de Voluptate at the Embassy of the Free Mind, and grew to over 5,000 books.
Research notes14 March 202612 min read
Can AI Read Hieroglyphs? (No.)
Four ways of getting Gemini 3 Flash to read hieroglyphs, from Unicode to glyph-by-glyph description, tested on Budge’s 1896 reader. All failed.
Research notes14 March 202610 min read
What Does a Library of 3,400 Rare Books Look Like?
We embedded 3,424 book summaries and let HDBSCAN find the structure: 48 clusters, curated to 34 in seven traditions, from alchemy to Sanskrit astronomy.
Stories8 March 202615 min read
The Deeper Roots of Progress
Mokyr, Howes and Crawford ask why innovation happens. Newly translated books show experimental habits inside alchemy and natural magic.
Research notes7 March 202612 min read
How Consistent Is AI OCR?
A scanning error left 1,448 pages photographed more than once. OCR’d independently, the copies differ by a median 1.8% across six languages.
Research notes7 March 202620 min read
Can AI Read Cuneiform?
Gemini named Law 196 of the Code of Hammurabi and spotted a 2,500-year-old forgery, then invented a Sumerian document. AI on cuneiform tablets.
Reading tours2 March 202618 min read
Rithmomachia: The Forgotten Game That Taught Europe to Think Like Pythagoras
Rithmomachia, the board game where you capture by arithmetic and win by harmony, from five treatises of 1496 to 1616, all now in English.
Interactive2 March 2026
Play Rithmomachia
The medieval board game won by arithmetic, playable in the browser, with rules from five Renaissance treatises and Lever and Fulke’s 1563 play.
Stories27 February 202622 min read
The Hidden Engineers
Before engineering was a discipline it lived in books of magic and alchemy. One manuscript binds Hero’s steam engines with the Corpus Hermeticum.
Stories27 February 202620 min read
What Is the Philosopher's Stone?
Eight sources, eight answers on the Philosopher’s Stone: Lambspringk’s emblems, Ali Puli’s salt of nature, and Edward Kelly’s red powder.
Research notes23 February 202610 min read
How We Identify First Translations
How we decide a book has never been translated into English: AI enrichment, bibliographic heuristics, a six-level status system and known limits.
Reading tours22 February 202615 min read
Astrological Diagrams from Nine Centuries
Astrological diagrams in the library, from the 10th-century Dunhuang Star Chart to Kepler’s cosmic harmonics, in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Chinese.
Stories21 February 202618 min read
What Are Demons? Five Answers from the Primary Sources
What a demon is, from the primary sources: the Greek daimōn, the Hermetic guardian, the Islamic jinn and the Christian fallen angel.
Stories21 February 202622 min read
A History of Astrology Across Traditions
Astrology from Babylonian omen tablets to Kepler’s geometric cosmos, in Greek, Indian, Arabic, Chinese and European texts the library holds.
Reading tours20 February 202620 min read
Over 500 First English Translations
Nearly 2,000 books here had never been in English: lab manuals, radical theology, women alchemists, Sanskrit astrology, early biblical criticism.
From the library18 February 20268 min read
Claude Can Now Read Thousands of Rare Books
An MCP server that gives Claude direct access to Source Library’s texts, translations, entity graph and illustrations. One command, no API key.
Stories17 February 202616 min read
The Year of the Fire Horse
2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse, yang fire on yang fire. The Chinese texts behind the cycle, and why Japan’s birth rate fell in 1966.
Reading tours16 February 202618 min read
The Sacred Texts That Were Never 'Texts'
Over 90 volumes on indigenous traditions from every inhabited continent: Navajo ceremonies, Yoruba cosmology, Celtic place-lore, the Eddas.
Stories16 February 202615 min read
The Mystic Who Invented Psychophysics
Gustav Fechner founded experimental psychology to prove the universe has a soul. Seventeen volumes of his German show the Böhme behind his law.
Stories15 February 202620 min read
The Invisible Hand Has a History
The invisible hand before Adam Smith: Aristotle, Florentine merchants, Salamanca theologians and Cambridge Platonists, in original editions.
Reading tours15 February 202612 min read
Recovering the Chakra Tradition
The Sanskrit tantric sources on chakras, nadis and kundalini, several never before in a Western language, from the Internet Archive and Wellcome.
How this article was made
This is an AI-assisted article. Derek Lomas set the question; AI models searched the library, read the sources and drafted the text, which was reviewed before it was published.
Every quotation is checked by machine against the scanned page it comes from and links to that page, so you can read the original yourself. The article is a living document: it is revised when a reader finds an error or the library gains a better source.
How these articles are made · Revision history · Spot an error? Suggest an edit