Worldbuilding Phrase Sheet for Scrolls, Tomes, and Grimoires Galore!
“Tyrion climbed to the castle library and tried to distract himself with Beldecar’s History of the Rhoynish Wars, but he could hardly see the elephants for imagining Shae’s smile.”
If you want to add depth to your fantasy world, take a note from George RR Martin and consider the publishing/literary aspect of worldbuilding.
Has the printing press been established yet? What’s the literacy rate like? Do your cultures read from books, scrolls, or runic records? Below you’ll find a phrase sheet intended to get the brain jogging.
TYPES OF BOOKS
Court rolls
Tomes
Ledgers (book containing accounts to which debits and credits are posted from books of original entry)
Missal (book containing all that is sung during mass in a given year)
Hymnal (book of hymns)
Analects (a collection of short literary or philosophical extracts)
Apologia (a formal written defense of one’s opinions or conduct)
Codices/codex (an ancient manuscript text in book form | an official list of medicine, chemicals, etc)
Catechism (a summary of principles of the Christian religion in the form of questions and answers)
Horarium (liturgy of the hours)
Medical texts
Chapbooks (a small pamphlet containing tales, ballads or tracts, sold by peddlers)
Volume
Handbook
Tractate (a treatise)
Drill books
Book-rolls
Lampoon (harsh satire usually directed at an individual)
Technical treatise
Spellbooks
saga (prose narrative recorded in Iceland in the 12th-13th centuries’ ; 2. A modern heroic narrative resembling the Icelandic saga ; 3. A long detailed account)
Parables (usually a short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or religious principle)
INK/QUILLS/ETC
Inkstand/inkpot
Ink-horn
Inkblot
Lampblack (a black pigment made from soot | cheap ink)
Ink was brown (old)
Runny ink (wet)
Glisten (fresh)
Dipped his quill
Scratch of pen against paper
Pumice scrapers for scraping parchment clean of old letters to use again
“An aestel is a device to help reading. You use it to follow the lines. It’s a pointer.” / “What’s wrong with a finger?” / “It can smear the ink. An aestel is clean.”(Bernard Cromwell)
Pens cut from the feathers of eagles and peacocks, so long that you wouldn’t be able to use them without wiping your eye with every stroke (KJ Parker)
“some quills, and a small knife for keeping them sharp”
black vulture quill
Pigeonhole (hole or small recess for pigeons to nest; small open compartment in cabinet or desks used for storing letters or documents)
Letterbox
Maildrop
HANDWRITING
“The delicate, looping writing”
Spindly
Narrow script
Cramped
Doodled
Jotted
Spiky
Longhand
Flowing
Shaky
Scrawled
Bold
Scratched out
spidery
Squiggles
Big square letters
Quill-stroke (penstrokes)
In long thin letters
Notation (1. a series or system of written symbols used to represent numbers, amounts, or elements in something such as music or mathematics)
Swirly
“The flowing script precise and perfectly proportioned”
Serifs (a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter)
“Toby read on, wincing at the horrible grammar and utter abuse of capital letters” (Hearne & Dawson)
“swift strokes with a stylus in rapid shorthand”
Penmanship
Chirography (handwriting penmanship;)
INTERACTING WITH BOOKS
Unclasped the cover (of a book)
Riffle pages
Leafing through
Flipped through
Referred (“Trinker referred again to the scrap of paper.”)
Skimmed through (missives)
Poring over pages
Thumbed through the pages
From cover to cover
Followed them to the letter
Slapped shut/snapped closed
Lost his place
Read up on
Want it in writing
Get the paperwork drawn up
Spelled out
Signing away
Reading off the names
Cracked the seal
“With a glove across the page to keep the place in case a bump on the road closed it” (KJ Parker)
Marking place with a leaf
CONDITION OF BOOK
Hand-copied
Smutty
Slim
Fragmentary (treatise)
Insipid (lacking flavor | insipid poetry)
Creamy paper
Crumbling pages
Crumpled
Yellowed
Stiff pages
Rat-eaten
Worm-eaten
gold-edged pages
Clothbound notebook
Leatherbound
bound in blue leather
Wooden covers
WRITING SURFACES
Stationary (writing paper; esp with matching envelopes)
Ostracon (a potsherd used as a writing surface)
Buckram (heavily sized fabric of cotton or linen used for interlinings and in bookbinding)
Pressed-linen paper
vellum (a fine-grained unsplit lambskin, kidskin, or calfskin prepared especially for writing on or for binding books | strong cream-colored paper)
Palimpsest (writing material [such as a parchment or tablet] used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased)
GENERAL UNITS
Scrap of parchment
Ream of paper
A roll of parchment
Slip of paper
Sheaf
Sheet of paper
PARTS OF A DOCUMENT/BOOK
Flyleaf (one of the free endpapers of a book)
Folio (an individual leaf of paper or parchment numbered on the recto or front side only; occurring either loose as one of a series or forming part of a bound volume)
The foot of the document
Blank page
Spines
Columns (in a ledger)
entry/entries
Lines
PARTS OF A SCROLL
Whitewood rollers (scroll)
Scroll bound with a scarlet ribbon
Tube
Knob
Rollers
Rods
TABLETS & OTHER
Cedar-backed wax tablets
Wooden leaves of tablet
“wax tablet and stylus”
Runic (records)
RELIGIOUS DOCUMENTS
Encyclical (a papal letter sent to all bishops of the Roman Catholic Church)
Decretal (a papal decree concerning a point of canon law)
Liturgy (form or formulary according to which public religious worship, especially Christian worship, is conducted)
Homily (usually a short sermon; a lecture or discourse on a certain theme)
LEGAL DOCUMENTS
Deposition (testifying especially before a court; out-of-court testimony made under oath)
Charter (contract executed in due form)
Codicil (legal instrument used to modify an earlier will)
Legally binding
Necrology (obituary or a list of the recently dead)
Docket (a brief written summary of a document)
MISC DOCUMENTS
Screed (a lengthy discourse | an informal piece of writing | a ranting piece of writing)
Rebus (a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and individual letters)
Handbill (a small printed advertisment or other notice distributed by hand)
Bill of sale
Missive ( a letter; especially a long or official one)
POETRY/SONGS
Doggerel (comic verse composed in irregular rhythm. Verse or words that are badly written or expressed)
Eclogue (a short poem, especially a pastoral dialogue)
Epigram (concise poem dealing satirically with a single thought or event and often ending in an ingenious thought)
Antiphon (a short sentence sung or recited before or after a psalm or canticle)
Aubades (a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn or early morning)
Cantos (one of the sections into which certain long poems are divided)
Image: ‘Master of the Books’ by Waldemar Bartkowiak
