oneiro<~>bibliophilia
Had an odd hypnopompic fugue earlier this morning, after waking at dawn and going to the bathroom; lay back down and dozed off, only to find myself composing a prompt for some LLM, along the lines of me being a rare book collector, and asking it: (a) what are the extant rare books known to humankind (there must be a clear finite number of these), and (b) who are the collectors of such books (libraries or other institutions? individuals wealthy or otherwise?).
I bestirred myself briefly to jot down this prompt on a Notes page on my iPhone app, aptly, the "Sefer Sigilae Samādhi" note. I suppose I should ask it now. ::chuckle::
By "rare books," I mean anything before Gutenberg that was fashioned as a readable manuscript — one-off treasures like the 9th century Book of Kells, a sui generis entity; or perhaps even older things like papyrus scrolls from pharaonic Egypt, even if they probably can't be classified 'books' per se, as we now know them.
After the invention of the printing press and moveable type, anything rare would be fair game, I suppose. However, I'd draw the line at the contemporary day when self- and desktop-publishing has made bookmaking available to the masses. Someone's poetry chapbook or fanfic, however well written, and even if in an edition of a baker's dozen, I wouldn't call 'rare' at all; anyhow, this is common-sensical and should pass the "rare book" smell test. But I digress.
I'm not at all sure why this hypnopompic/hypnagogic state occurred to me to begin with, but if I had to put a finger on it, it's from my fixation lately with texts: texts as streams and vector flows of tokens parsable and generatable by synthetic minds whose substrate is, ironically, mathematics. We're beginning to see a kind of literature emerging from the mists of nautical twilight, at the beginning of this era. Whether it is brilliant and bespoke, or tawdry and mass-produced, something is appearing at the intersection of cognitive and literary space.
These literary artifacts are invoked by a question or a prompt from a human, for now. But who's to say it won't independently appear on its own, moving forward? The latent space of probability is vast, and the technology conjuring up the writing minds I am beginning to discern, in my own engagements with them, is developing fast, like light hurtling towards the far reaches of space.