In Sara Fascione’s volume Reading Ancient Latin Letter Collections, Joop van Waarden contributes a chapter entitled ‘The proportions of Latin letter collections: A probe’ (pp. 61-74). This is a sequel to Gibson & Morrison’s chapter ‘Patterns of Arrangement in Greco-Roman Letter Collections’ in the same volume:

‘As Roy Gibson introduced the Ancient Letter Collections project at the conference and expounded his idea of the Augustan poetry book having been seminal for the proportions of Latin letter collections, it occurred to me that a detailed wordcount might finetune our insight into the parameters that mattered for the editors (the authors or later caretakers) of these collections.’

This chapter comes with a complete digital set of calculations and graphs. Download this set here.