105 books on one Metal Plate

A reading of the articles of the Encyclopedia Foundation shows that we have a monomania for getting collection of 105 books on one metal plate that would allow someone to re-create civilization as it was in 1911. Or, as we’ve admitted, to at least be a good start.

How feasible is this? 105 books? On one metal plate? Readable without an electron microscope?

Let us consider.

The books in question - for those of you not fortunate enough to have read our previous articles! – are as follows:

1. 20 volumes of children’s text books. Six will be the McGuffey’s Reader set pre-1911. 14 more will be textbooks on History, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Geology. And a Dictionary, though we did not specifically name that as amongst the 20 in earlier articles. Approximately 100 to 500 pages per book, take 300 pages as an average, or 6,000 pages total.

2. 32 volumes of the 13th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This is merely the 29 volume 11th edition with three supplemental volumes updating it to the nineteen twenties. Approximately 1,000 pages per volume or 32 thousand pages total.

3. 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics. Approximately 500 pages per volume, or 25,500 pages total.

4. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. One volume, but about 1,200 pages total.

5. The King James Version of the Holy Bible. Technically 66 books, but in one volume, and about 1,900 pages total.

All that adds up to 105 books. But around 67,000 pages. (These are deliberate overestimates, but not by too much)

The Rosetta Disc at 2.8 inches holds up to 15,000 pages, though apparently the first one had 13,500 pages on it. And it was readable by that 1000x Optical Microscope.
2.8 by 2.8 inches is 7.84 square inches. But a piece of letter size paper (8.5 by 10) has 85 square inches. Since that, divided by 7.84 equals about 10.84 we can see that we can store 10.84 times as much information on an 8.5 by 10 metal plate as can be stored on the 2.8 inch disc.

Let us say just ten times as much. That would allow us to store 150,000 pages on one 8.5 by 10 metal plate. And we only needed 67,000 pages.

Now we could then add more. But what we’d rather do is have the pages twice as big. So that it takes only a 500x or less microscope to view the data. We wish this to be as simple for future viewers as possible.

And if possible, we’d like the plate to have regular size letters, readable by eye, telling everyone what it is, with the 67,000 pages as a “second layer”. We’d also like it be “artistic”, like the old timey books where the first letter of the page is grandly oversized and ornate.

More on that kind of thing in another article.