As many (as possible)

[Arnold Zwicky]

i passed brian good's original message on to john rickford and
tom wasow, the senior authors of an article on AS FAR AS in
Language a few years ago.  they hadn't noticed this use of
AS MANY.  wasow did a quick search of a large corpus and came
up with a whole pile of examples, mostly indicating that
searching is challenging, since there are many reasons why
AS MANY might not have a following AS X phrase; for instance,
the missing AS X phrase might be anaphoric (THEY SAW A LOT
OF BIRDS, BUT I DIDN'T SEE AS MANY).

i suspect that there are more bg-type examples out there that
we just haven't noticed, and rickford is inclined to think
so too.  it sounds to me like good article-fodder (as ron
butters suggests), if not thesis-fodder.  faculty members,
speak to your students...

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), never short of thesis-fodder,
  often short of people to help with the farm work