There's more here. Perhaps the Archduke found it more interesting. There are dozens of different countries with their own summary-books, and then books on The Ancient Tian Empires and Lessons From The Pharaohs and Great Heroes Of History and then books on trade routes and shipping and what plants grow in what places and what magical beasts roam which wildernesses.

Several of the books have maps, and the maps agree on nearby things and diverge on faraway things. 

Nidal, a nearby country: ruled by Zon-Kuthon, the flipped utility function god. At the annual festivals of mutilation, people stab one eye out, or cut off some of their toes. Servants of other gods are barred from entering on pain of a slow and horrible death; some Good cults are suspected of operating there anyway, though it rarely ends well for them. A random flip reveals some sketches of Nidal's law enforcement, grotesquely scarred people with a bloody whip in one hand; a first-person account from a refugee who escaped to Cheliax and converted to the service of Asmodeus, an excerpt from Zon-Kuthon's holy book's writing about how best to keep people alive while you torture them.

Andoran, another nearby country: was part of Cheliax until it broke away blah blah blah. Andoran has now banned Evil and is trying to require everybody to be Good, with limited success. One of their major social problems is that all of their productive, intelligent Evil people left; another is that they keep aggravating their allies in the Inner Sea by refusing to contain piracy; another is that they abandoned Law when they banned Evil and there's been a corresponding breakdown of the social order. A random flip: Evil people forced to flee Andoran tell horror stories of the disarray caused by the country's ban on Evil; a ship captain killed by pirates and subsequently resurrected at great cost to his family accuses the government of Andoran of permitting the pirates to stalk the seas for their own benefit; a historian on how much more prosperous Andoran was when it was part of Cheliax.

Osirion is ruled by a god-king selected by Abadar, god of blah blah blah. It's a poor country but a populous one, fed by the generous grain crops of the Sphinx river, and has a wealth of ruins of the ancient Osirian empire that adventurers are now painstakingly extracting from their trapped tombs. A random flip: Osirion is a prospective ally for Cheliax due to their shared commitment to Law; Osirion's tombs contain relics of an ancient, more advanced civilization, the pharaohs of seven thousand years ago, and Cheliax is collecting and learning from many of those artifacts. Another flip is about how Osirion banned grain exporting.

Rahadoum, another neighbor, bans all the gods, and all their servants. On a random flip, a theologian argues that this is ineffectual, the exact way gods get information about the Material Plane isn't known and they certainly benefit from worshippers but banning their worship, even if people obeyed the ban, which they won't, just means the gods would rely more heavily on non-worshipper methods, which do exist; the gods, for instance, know of faraway worlds where they aren't worshipped at all. On another random flip the case is made that Rahadoum was more prosperous when it was part of Cheliax. Another one is about shipping lanes.

Any fine subtleties of the Chelish authors are going to be completely wasted on Keltham due to his absolute incredulity at this whole library section.

On the first random page Keltham opened to, the author was saying what some 'Duke' (high-level Government official) was thinking while ordering the east gates to be sealed, which, like, what, how would the historian know what somebody was thinking, at best you get somebody else's autobiographical account of what they claim they were thinking, and then the writer is supposed to say that what was observed was the claim, and mark separately any inferences from the observation, because one distinguishes observations from inferences.

This.  This is supposed to be an expository educational history book.  This is supposedly in the nonfiction section.  What did the author think they were doing.  This isn't reasoning, this is ink somebody spilled on a page and it happened to come out looking like words and everybody was so amazed at the coincidence they decided to reprint it.

There are no probability distributions on this page.  There are no numbers on this page.  There are no distinct premises and conclusions anywhere on this page.  This page contains more fallacies than it contains distinct words.

Keltham puts back the book.  Maybe it was just written by a three-year-old.  Yeah, Keltham already knows that it wasn't written by a three-year-old, it was written by somebody from a lower-intelligence world; but maybe the next book will have been written by a member of the cognitive elite wearing an intelligence headband.

The next random page in the next random book is written like a school parody of how you would critique somebody else's faction, if it had never occurred to the writer that anybody in the audience might think that the other faction would have a different story.  Like.  The author doesn't even try to explain what the other faction thought they were thinking.  The other faction is just supposed to be running around being Wrong because they are the Wrong Faction.

Okay, so, Keltham is just going to adopt the rule of not believing anything that a Golarion author seems to explicitly be saying or even calling attention to, and is going to flip through random pages only trying to infer the world that gave birth to these parodies of argument and exposition.  Just looking for things that the author seemed to assume away as politically nonvalent obvious uncontroversial truths, the equivalent of mentioning that the sky is blue when that's not a focus of political attention.

To the extent Keltham supposes that this class of inference is reliable, it does seem to be confirmed that a place called Cheliax exists.

Some other points that Keltham is able to pick up on:

- People had higher tech seven thousand years ago.  What?  What happened?  Some kind of infohazard thing that required all the tech to be buried?  But if that was true, why are they digging it up again?  When dath ilan ran into the Past Infohazard they went to a lot of trouble to mothball all the old cities, nobody sane would just wander in and start looking at them without knowing why they'd been hidden.

- You get to be a really powerful wizard by killing monsters rather than by deliberate practice.  Why.

- Governance as Keltham knows it does not exist.  Prediction markets do not exist.  Delegates, Electors, Legislators, and Tribunes do not exist.  Nobody seems to be talking about anything that looks like an obvious preference-aggregation mechanism.  Choices get attributed to people and it is at no point obvious why anyone would listen to those people.

- People fight giant destructive battles, and it does not occur to any author to remark or explain on how multi-agent-optimal this is not.  It doesn't seem to be a remarkable fact when it gets mentioned in passing.

- It looks sort of like... factions have sharp territorial boundaries, and there's a thing where you kill the person at the top of the faction and the people inside the faction all switch sides to the other faction that killed them; which, what why would anybody do that.  Why, of all the things to successfully coordinate on, would people coordinate on that?  Keltham is really missing something here about individual incentives.

- This entire planet is so on mind-altering drugs Keltham doesn't even just what what what

By the time Keltham reaches anything about Zon-Kuthon, he catches a glimpse of an infohazardous page, winces, and just shuts the book.  He may eventually have to work out what is true and what is Drugs; but whatever that was, it is probably not the most important thing for him to deal with right now.  In fact, maybe he should move on from the political history shelf entirely.

So is there a section of this library about "Magic: How Does It Even No Seriously What The Fuck Golarion"?

There's a book on wizarding education and a book on dragon spellcasting and a book on famous sorcerer bloodlines and their achievements.

And what occurs, do tell, if Keltham flips to the start of the wizarding education book, in hopes of finding a careful and reasoned exposition of background theory.

There's a long essay by the author about the foolishness of other wizards who took the wrong approach to the craft and didn't approach it with the discipline Asmodeus requires. Then there's a long recounting of his achievements as a wizard and as a teacher of wizardry. After that there's a discussion of the simplest spells and meditations you should do in order to find them easier to hold in your head and cast properly, and tips for common errors, and some argumentation about which simple spell is the best to start with. 

There's no mention of needing to fight monsters in the wizarding education book. There is a mention that you should inflict punishments at the end of the day because students are unlikely immediately after a punishment to be able to concentrate on their spellbooks, and if you're worried they'll run home and get it healed you can keep them late.

Maybe there's some local custom about how written knowledge is supposed to be a record of all the things you shouldn't do, and from this, you can infer what you actually should do instead.  Keltham genuinely has no idea if he's even supposed to believe all the bragging the author puts in front of the book about his achievements, as presented in a format that Keltham himself finds almost absolutely unconvincing.  Maybe it's this huge string of blatantly false advertisements, and it's actually signaling cleverness at crafting false advertisements, or... Keltham doesn't get Golarion at all.  Is he supposed to believe the thing about storing up punishments to be inflicted at the end of the day, in defiance of all behavioral shaping theory if you were even doing that in the first place; and the implicit claim that students are so admiring of this teacher and desirous to learn his knowledge, that they stick around even after being hurt?  Keltham is guessing this is just a deliberately-unbelievable status brag claim in a very alien format?  Whatever; it should mostly fall under the rule, for the moment, of not believing any fact which a Drugs Author seems to be actually trying to make him believe.

Mostly, Keltham is interested in the discussion of the simplest spells, the meditations, the tips for common errors.  How does a very basic spellcast actually work, if Keltham tries taking what the author says at face value, when it hopefully maybe looks like the author isn't being political and would be discussing something that ought to be politically nonvalent ordinary common knowledge.

Magic behaves sort of like a liquid, but it clings to itself. When you have a very little bit of it, the clings-to-itself effects dominate the behaves-like-a-liquid effects, and you can shape it, which is done through the will of the caster, on a complex scaffold that is itself magic (doing it without a scaffold is possible, magic got started in the first place after all, but much much harder). The simplest spells are those that need to be shaped as closed 2-manifolds, and you have to understand how magic behaves reasonably well to get it to the correct shape, and then you have to stabilize it and tie it off, after which it sits until you want to cast it. Casting it is much simpler - you untie it and flick it loose. 

Does it say how to get a very little bit of magic and use your will on it in the first place?  Sort of thing Keltham could try literally right now?

You need a spellbook, and inks which anchor the scaffold (the kinds of ink appropriate for spellbooks are so appropriate because the ink binds to the magic well). Here's the spell diagram he personally uses for new students, though of course they'll develop their own diagrams over time as they optimize their scaffold for their personal needs.

Once you have a spellbook and inks anchoring the scaffold, you should be able to learn to feel the magic. The meditations help with that. Book author recommends preparing spells on the student's scaffold while they concentrate; it might be easier for them to feel the magic while it's in motion. Some students pick it up quickly, within an hour, mostly predicted by lots of childhood magic exposure; he doesn't know any promising student to have taken more than a week.

...okay, promising enough for trying later.

But really, it feels like there should be - much more knowledge available on what magic does, even if the natives have no clue why, some overview of what it can do?  Fine, they didn't write their books for aliens.  But Golarion seems to run on magic to an amazing extent.  There really ought to be a book that gives him a better overview of magic than this, somewhere in this library.

Why is there no such thing as a subject-encyclopedia, on any of these shelves?  Do subject-encyclopedias just not scale down to a much smaller Golarion book market?  Shouldn't they be able to produce small subject-encyclopedias?

...maybe he's just not in the reference section, because the reference section is behind a secret door that looks like a bookcase, as any habitual user of Golarion libraries would surely know and take for granted.

(When you buy your houses separately from the land it's on, you can afford nice high-tech specialist-manufactured houses.  For many, many dath ilani, the definition of 'nice' would very much include a library with hidden doors that look like bookcases.  Why, what else would you spend money on?)

Keltham turns around, with the intention of identifying some prior library inhabitant who might be able to explain if he's just doing library exploration Completely Wrong.

Keltham very quickly turns around and looks back at the bookshelves again.  It's not what you would call an optimal strategy but it is, at least, a strategy which can be implemented fast.

EMERGENCY INTERNAL KELTHAM MEETING RIGHT NOW

That sure is a lot of girls his age.

Pretty ones.

In a high-security zone.

He does not, in fact, have any right to be surprised by this.

Dath ilani civilization would likely try exactly the same thing, if somebody showed up from an alternate timeline, with +4SD intelligence, derived from a different selection history, yielding an entirely different set of intelligence-promoting alleles.

What does his brain mean "    ", there's got to be more to think than that.

Could this have, like, happened in some way that would fit exactly into his prior life narrative, so he would already know exactly what to think of it.  Is that too much to ask?

Okay.  Okay.  Let's - just slowly back up - and start with most important question here.

Does he want to have sex with all the girls in this room?

...there's not enough girls in this room, if they want to make sure to grab a copy of each of his 46 chromosomes with say 99% probability.

While an interesting point, this is not really the central point under consideration.  Does he want to have sex with all of these girls plus a large further number of such, thus having enough kids to bring the dath ilani geneset to this world and - what, bump up the average central intelligence factor by half a standard deviation?  How many generations would that take, and would it actually be all that useful compared to whatever heredity-optimization processes the locals are running already?

Keltham doesn't actually know offhand how to do those calculations.  If Keltham had known this was how his life was going to go, he would have spent a lot more time studying population genetics, sexual technique, and flirting.

It has been a while since Keltham's mind has ended up in this much internal disarray.  It's going into loops and repeating the same facts, and occasionally the same blank stares, just rephrasing the same thoughts over and over.  Like "that sure is a lot of pretty girls" and "they're probably also some of the smartest girls around locally even if that's not directly visible, at least if they want the next generation of wizards directly off this event, which I would in their shoes" and "I should have realized earlier that, rather than just showing up with my head stuffed full of valuable extraworldly information in my brain, I actually had a whole lot more highly valuable information inside my testicles".

It is, in fact, this last thought that snaps him out of it.  Sometimes, just rephrasing your existing thoughts in slightly different ways does knock something loose, as long as you're not repeating exactly the same thoughts.

The sum of his private property on arrival: valuable knowledge, slightly valuable clothing, and valuable genes.

Those sneaky sneaks.  They thought that maybe if they threw enough girls at him fast enough, he'd be seduced into just going along with that, without first asking for any form of compensation for his valuable genetic information.

Or possibly they were planning to offer him whatever's standard.  Keltham has not observed them try to get away with his precious bodily fluids without paying; one must distinguish inference from observation, after all.

But, yeah, no actual sex with these girls until Keltham is oriented enough to know how local money works and set up an explicit contract.

...snuggles?

Oral?