Varying number of posts

Hi,

I’d like to display a lot more posts on the monthly archive than on the first page. I.e. Let the archive show 25 lines of post headlines, while there are only 4 or 5 posts visible on the start page.

AFAIK the loop doesn’t allow me to specify parameters, there’s only one “number of posts per page” setting in the options. I could manually respawn a query to retrieve the list of posts, but that’s rather inefficient: Getting 5 posts first, throwing them away, getting 25 posts instead…

What’s the WordPress way of doing this? Kind regards,

Christian