Analysing the Length of the Books - by Dante
Feb 23, 2009 6:10:43 GMT -5
Esmé's meme is meh likes this
Post by Dante on Feb 23, 2009 6:10:43 GMT -5
Analysing the Length of the Books - by Dante
Here are the page counts of the actual books themselves - finishing at the last numbered page in the book, and not including supplements like the BBRE notes, the U.A., and TBL, as they're not really comparable to main series books:
TBB: 162
TRR: 190
TWW: 214
TMM: 194
TAA: 221
TEE: 259
TVV: 256
THH: 255
TCC: 286
TSS: 337
TGG: 323
TPP: 353
The End: 324
+Chapter Fourteen: 13
= 337
Here's a handy chart to represent those findings:
To put that in perspective, I've got all thirteen books on my desk here; I have a stack on the left of TBB to TVV, and a stack on the right of TCC to The End, and THH sits snugly on top of both piles, indicating that the first seven books are roughly as long as the last five. Let's add them up. Even assuming I made typos using a calculator, this should be pretty watertight, as the distinctions aren't so fine. The first seven books are about 1496 pages, the last five are about 1636, but with less paper-over-board covers padding the height. Adding THH to the first pile puts it up to 1751, incidentally. So evidently we have an imbalance between the first and second halves of the series, as the first half is 1368.5 (splitting TVV in two), and the second half is 2018.5. The second half of the series has 650 more pages - that's the equivalent of two more end-series-length books, or three or so early books.
But that the series gets longer is only an average trend. Let's put them in order of length, longest to shortest:
1. TPP
2. TSS
3. The End
4. TGG
5. TCC
6. TEE
7. TVV
8. THH
9. TAA
10. TWW
11. TMM
12. TRR
13. TBB
(Note: I counted the amount of blank space at the end of chapters in books with similar page counts to establish which one was longest. It didn't make any difference except in the case of TSS and The End.)
Anyway, based on this, I'd say we can group the books into the series into a certain number of length-based categories:
TBB - TAA
TEE - TCC
TSS - The End
Number-cruching aside, what do we learn from all this? That the early books could do with at least another hundred pages to even them out.
Here are the page counts of the actual books themselves - finishing at the last numbered page in the book, and not including supplements like the BBRE notes, the U.A., and TBL, as they're not really comparable to main series books:
TBB: 162
TRR: 190
TWW: 214
TMM: 194
TAA: 221
TEE: 259
TVV: 256
THH: 255
TCC: 286
TSS: 337
TGG: 323
TPP: 353
The End: 324
+Chapter Fourteen: 13
= 337
Here's a handy chart to represent those findings:
To put that in perspective, I've got all thirteen books on my desk here; I have a stack on the left of TBB to TVV, and a stack on the right of TCC to The End, and THH sits snugly on top of both piles, indicating that the first seven books are roughly as long as the last five. Let's add them up. Even assuming I made typos using a calculator, this should be pretty watertight, as the distinctions aren't so fine. The first seven books are about 1496 pages, the last five are about 1636, but with less paper-over-board covers padding the height. Adding THH to the first pile puts it up to 1751, incidentally. So evidently we have an imbalance between the first and second halves of the series, as the first half is 1368.5 (splitting TVV in two), and the second half is 2018.5. The second half of the series has 650 more pages - that's the equivalent of two more end-series-length books, or three or so early books.
But that the series gets longer is only an average trend. Let's put them in order of length, longest to shortest:
1. TPP
2. TSS
3. The End
4. TGG
5. TCC
6. TEE
7. TVV
8. THH
9. TAA
10. TWW
11. TMM
12. TRR
13. TBB
(Note: I counted the amount of blank space at the end of chapters in books with similar page counts to establish which one was longest. It didn't make any difference except in the case of TSS and The End.)
Anyway, based on this, I'd say we can group the books into the series into a certain number of length-based categories:
TBB - TAA
TEE - TCC
TSS - The End
Number-cruching aside, what do we learn from all this? That the early books could do with at least another hundred pages to even them out.