World Bibliography

There are places in a world that do not look like adventure until you have lived long enough to realize that paper can be as dangerous as steel. This archive is one of those places. It is where the setting keeps its books, not as scenery, but as evidence. Every in world volume that exists anywhere in Unknown Shores eventually passes through here in some form, whether it is a revered chronicle copied by careful hands, a merchant ledger that accidentally records a crime, a devotional tract meant to shape the conscience of a town, or a battered travel diary that preserves a name everyone else tried to forget.
  The World Bibliography is not a library in the romantic sense. It is a record of voices. Some of those voices are disciplined and official, written with the confidence of institutions that expect to be obeyed. Others are private and shaky, penned by people who never imagined anyone else would read their words. Put them side by side and you begin to see how the world truly thinks. You see what it praises, what it fears, what it refuses to name out loud, and what it insists happened even when the rest of history argues.
  What belongs here is simple. If it is a text that could plausibly exist inside the world, it earns an entry. That includes formal works like histories, legal codes, military manuals, and theological commentaries. It also includes the humble things that shape daily life, like cookbooks, children’s rhymes written down by anxious parents, dockside broadsheets, almanacs, shipping manifests, and handwritten instructions folded into a pocket and carried until the ink wears thin. A world feels real when it has paperwork, when its knowledge has friction, and when its stories have sources that disagree.
  Each entry is treated like an object with a past. It has a title, or the closest thing it has to one. It has an author, even if that author is unknown, invented, or disputed. It has an origin, a region, a language, a date that may be approximate, and a short account of what it claims to be. Many entries also carry the quiet details that make them useful at the table or in fiction. Who would own this book. Who would quote it. Who would ban it. Who would burn it and pretend it never existed.
  You should not expect these works to be reliable, and that is the point. In world texts are biased by design. A court historian flatters a patron. A priest edits a miracle into a warning. A sailor exaggerates because that is what sailors do, and because exaggeration keeps men awake on black water. Even honest writers make mistakes. Copyists introduce errors. Translators smooth over uncomfortable meanings. The bibliography preserves those problems rather than sanding them down, because a setting without misinformation is a setting without people.