among the booksellers have affirmed that this man, Jābir, did not exist at all.”17 But al-Nadīm rejects this claim on the grounds that no one would write so many books—he lists about three thousand—and put another’s name on them. (Authoring three thousand books is not as absurd as it sounds, since these “books” [kutub] were akin to chapters or short essays of a few pages, not whole volumes.)
