  We study the phenomenon of real space condensation in the steady state of a
class of one dimensional mass transport models. We derive the criterion for the
occurrence of a condensation transition and analyse the precise nature of the
shape and the size of the condensate in the condensed phase. We find two
distinct condensate regimes: one where the condensate is gaussian distributed
and the particle number fluctuations scale normally as $L^{1/2}$ where $L$ is
the system size, and a second regime where the particle number fluctuations
become anomalously large and the condensate peak is non-gaussian. We interpret
these results within the framework of sums of random variables.
