I have not provided a separate bibliography since most of the books that I drew upon are mentioned in the following notes. In any case, the vastness of the subject and the limitations of the author, would make such a list, gathered under the prestigious title of “Bibliography”, seem both mysteriously erratic and hopelessly incomplete.
1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955). Lévi-Strauss calls societies without writing “cold societies” because their cosmology attempts to annul the sequence of events that constitutes our notion of history.
2. Philippe Descola, Les Lances du crépuscule (Paris, 1994).
3. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, 2 vols., ed. Celina S. de Cortázar & Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires, 1969), I: 9.
4. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974).
5. Miguel de Unamuno, untitled sonnet in Poesía completa (Madrid, 1979).
6. Virginia Woolf, “Charlotte Brontë”, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London, 1987).
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris, 1964).
8. James Hillman, “A Note on Story”, in Children’s Literature: The Great Excluded, Vol. 3, ed. Francelia Butler & Bennett Brockman (Philadelphia, 1974).
9. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My Kingdom”, A Child’s Garden of Verses (London, 1885).
10. Michel de Montaigne, “On the Education of Children”, in Les Essais, ed. J. Plattard (Paris, 1947).
11. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978).
12. Samuel Butler, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (London, 1912).
13. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”, in Ficciones (Buenos Aires, 1944).
14. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (London, 1889).
15. Quoted in John Willis Clark, Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods (Cambridge, 1894).
16. Traditio Generalis Capituli of the English Benedictines (Philadelphia, 1866).
17. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York, 1988).
18. At the time, neither Borges nor I knew that Kipling’s bundled message was not an invention. According to Ignace J. Gelb (The History of Writing [Chicago, 1952]), in Eastern Turkestan, a young woman sent her lover a message consisting of a lump of tea, a leaf of grass, a red fruit, a dried apricot, a piece of coal, a flower, a piece of sugar, a pebble, a falcon’s feather and a nut. The message read, “I can no longer drink tea, I’m pale as grass without you, I blush to think of you, my heart burns as coal, you are beautiful as a flower, and sweet as sugar, but is your heart of stone? I’d fly to you if I had wings, I am yours like a nut in your hand.”
19. Borges analysed Wilkins’s language in an essay, “El idioma analitico de John Wilkins”, in Otras Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1952).
20. Evelyn Waugh, “The Man Who Liked Dickens”, a chapter in A Handful of Dust (London, 1934).
21. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Leer y escribir (Mexico, D.F., 1969).
22. Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie (Paris, 1994).
23. Jorge Luis Borges, review of Men of Mathematics, by E.T. Bell, in El Hogar, Buenos Aires, July 8, 1938.
24. P.K.E. Schmöger, Das Leben der Gottseligen Anna Katharina Emmerich (Freiburg, 1867).
25. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton, 1961).
26. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “In Praise of Illiteracy”, in Die Zeit, Hamburg, Nov. 29, 1985.
27. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987).
28. Charles Lamb, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”, in Essays of Elia (London, 1833).
29. Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, trans. Victoria Holbrook (Manchester, 1990).
1. This is not to say that all writing has its roots in these Sumerian tablets. It is generally accepted that Chinese and Central American scripts, for example, developed independently. See Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (London, 1984).
2. “Early Writing Systems”, in World Archeology 17/3, Henley-on-Thames, Feb. 1986. The Mesopotamian invention of writing probably influenced other writing systems: the Egyptian, shortly after 3000 BC, and the Indian, around 2500 BC.
3. William Wordsworth, writing in 1819, described a similar feeling: “O ye who patiently explore / The wreck of Herculanean lore, / What rapture! Could ye seize / Some Theban fragment, or unrol / One precious, tender-hearted scroll / Of pure Simonides.”
4. Cicero, De oratore, Vol. I, ed. E.W. Sutton & H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1967), II, 87: 357.
5. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), X, 34.
6. M.D. Chenu, Grammaire et théologie au XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1935–36).
7. Empedocles, Fragment 84DK, quoted in Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, 1992).
8. Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus”, in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 10, quoted in David C. Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics (London, 1983).
9. Ibid.
10. For a lucid explanation of this complex term, see Padel, In and Out of the Mind.
11. Aristotle, De anima, ed. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1943).
12. Quoted in Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago & London, 1990).
13. Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 8–11.
14. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine.
15. Kenneth D. Keele & Carlo Pedretti, eds., Leonardo da Vinci: Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, 3 vols. (London, 1978–80).
16. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
17. Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French (Princeton, 1984).
18. Sadik A. Assaad, The Reign of al-Hakim bi Amr Allah (London, 1974).
19. These rather elaborate explanations are developed in Saleh Beshara Omar’s Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics: A Study of the Origins of Experimental Science (Minneapolis & Chicago, 1977).
20. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Oxford, 1976).
21. Émile Charles, Roger Bacon, sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines d’après des textes inédits (Paris, 1861).
22. M. Dax, “Lésions de la moitié gauche de l’encéphale coincidant avec l’oubli des signes de la pensée”, Gazette hebdomadaire de médicine et de chirurgie, 2 (1865), and P. Broca, “Sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé”, Bulletin de la Societé d’anthropologie, 6 337–393 (1865), in André Roch Lecours et al., “Illiteracy and Brain Damage (3): A Contribution to the Study of Speech and Language Disorders in Illiterates with Unilateral Brain Damage (Initial Testing)”, Neuropsychologia 26/4, London, 1988.
23. André Roch Lecours, “The Origins and Evolution of Writing”, in Origins of the Human Brain (Cambridge, 1993).
24. Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York, 1985).
25. Roch Lecours et al., “Illiteracy and Brain Damage (3)”.
26. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1965).
27. Personal interview with André Roch Lecours, Montreal, Nov. 1992.
28. Émile Javal, eight articles in Annales d’oculistique, 1878–79, discussed in Paul A. Kolers, “Reading”, lecture delivered at the Canadian Psychological Association meeting, Toronto, 1971.
29. Oliver Sacks, “The President’s Speech”, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York, 1987).
30. Merlin C. Wittrock, “Reading Comprehension”, in Neuropsychological and Cognitive Processes in Reading (Oxford, 1981).
31. Cf. D. LaBerge & S.J. Samuels, “Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading”, in Cognitive Psychology 6, London, 1974.
32. Wittrock, “Reading Comprehension”.
33. E.B. Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (New York, 1908), quoted in Kolers, “Reading”.
34. Quoted in Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler.
1. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), V, 12.
2. Donald Attwater, “Ambrose”, in A Dictionary of Saints (London, 1965).
3. W. Ellwood Post, Saints, Signs and Symbols (Harrisburg, Penn., 1962).
4. Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 3.
5. In 1927, in an article titled “Voces Paginarum” (Philologus 82) the Hungarian scholar Josef Balogh tried to prove that silent reading was almost completely unknown in the ancient world. Forty-one years later, in 1968, Bernard M.W. Knox (“Silent Reading in Antiquity”, in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 9/4 [Winter 1968]) argued against Balogh that “ancient books were normally read aloud, but there is nothing to show that silent reading of books was anything extraordinary.” And yet the examples Knox gives (several of which I quote) seem to me too weak to support his thesis, and appear to be exceptions to reading out loud, rather than the rule.
6. Knox, “Silent Reading in Antiquity”.
7. Plutarch, “On the Fortune of Alexander”, Fragment 340a, in Moralia, Vol. IV, ed. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972): “In fact it is recorded that once, when he had broken the seal of a confidential letter from his mother and was reading it silently to himself, Hephaestion quietly put his head beside Alexander’s and read the letter with him; Alexander could not bear to stop him, but took off his ring and placed the seal on Hephaestion’s lips.”
8. Claudius Ptolemy, On the Criterion, discussed in The Criterion of Truth, ed. Pamela Huby & Gordon Neal (Oxford, 1952).
9. Plutarch, “Brutus”, V, in The Parallel Lives, ed. B. Perrin (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970). It doesn’t seem odd that Caesar should have read this note silently. In the first place, he may not have wanted a love-letter overheard; secondly, it may have been part of his plan to irritate his enemy, Cato, and lead him to suspect a conspiracy — which is exactly what happened, according to Plutarch. Caesar was forced to show the note and Cato was ridiculed.
10. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Vol. I, trans. L.P. McCauley & A.A. Stephenson (Washington, 1968).
11. Seneca, Epistulae Morales, ed. R.M. Gummere (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1968), Letter 56.
12. The refrain tolle, lege doesn’t appear in any ancient children’s game known to us today. Pierre Courcelle suggests that the formula is one used in divination and quotes Marc le Diacre’s Life of Porphyrus, in which the formula is uttered by a figure in a dream, to induce consultation of the Bible for divinatory purposes. See Pierre Courcelle, “L’Enfant et les ‘sortes bibliques’ ”, in Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 7 (Nîmes, 1953).
13. Saint Augustine, Confessions, IV, 3.
14. Saint Augustine, “Concerning the Trinity”, XV, 10: 19, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates (London, 1948).
15. Martial, Epigrams, trans. J.A. Pott & F.A. Wright (London, 1924), I. 38.
16. Cf. Henri Jean Martin, “Pour une histoire de la lecture”, Revue française d’histoire du livre 46, Paris, 1977. According to Martin, Sumerian (not Aramaic) and Hebrew lack a specific verb meaning “to read”.
17. Ilse Lichtenstadter, Introduction to Classical Arabic Literature (New York, 1974).
18. Quoted in Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven & London, 1992).
19. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Princeton, 1976).
20. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, ed. J.E. King (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1952), Disputation V.
21. Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (London, 1984).
22. William Shepard Walsh, A Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia, 1892).
23. Quoted in M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1993).
24. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970).
25. T. Birt, Aus dem Leben der Antike (Leipzig, 1922).
26. Gaur, A History of Writing.
27. Pierre Riché, Les Écoles et l’enseignement dans l’Occident chrétien de la fin du Ve siècle au milieu du XIe siècle (Paris, 1979).
28. Parkes, Pause and Effect.
29. Saint Isaac of Syria, “Directions of Spiritual Training”, in Early Fathers from the Philokalia, ed. & trans. E. Kadloubovsky & G.E.H. Palmer (London & Boston, 1954).
30. Isidoro de Sevilla, Libri sententiae, III, 13: 9, quoted in Etimologías, ed. Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz (Madrid, 1982–83).
31. Isidoro de Sevilla, Etimologías, I, 3: 1.
32. David Diringer, The Hand-Produced Book (London, 1953).
33. Parkes, Pause and Effect.
34. Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (London, 1969).
35. Quoted in Wilhelm Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1896).
36. Alan G. Thomas, Great Books and Book Collectors (London, 1975).
37. Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 3.
38. Psalms 91: 6.
39. Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 3.
40. David Christie-Murray, A History of Heresy (Oxford & New York, 1976).
41. Robert I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy (London, 1975).
42. Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Mensch zwischen Gott und Teufel (Berlin, 1982).
43. E.G. Léonard, Histoire générale du protestantisme, Vol. I (Paris, 1961–64).
44. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (New York, 1936).
45. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Cambridge, Mass., 1870).
1. Saint Augustine, “Of the Origin and Nature of the Soul”, IV, 7: 9, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates (London, 1948).
2. Cicero, De oratore, Vol. I, ed. E.W. Sutton & H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.,& London, 1957), II, 86: 354.
3. Louis Racine, Mémoires contenant quelques particularités sur la vie et les ouvrages de Jean Racine, in Jean Racine, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. I, ed. Raymond Picard (Paris, 1950).
4. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton, 1961).
5. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990).
6. Ibid.
7. Eric G. Turner, “I Libri nell’Atene del V e IV secolo A.C.”, in Guglielmo Cavallo, Libri, editori e pubblico nel mondo antico (Rome & Bari, 1992).
8. John, 8:8.
9. Carruthers, The Book of Memory.
10. Ibid.
11. Aline Rousselle, Porneia (Paris, 1983).
12. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966).
13. Petrarch, Secretum meum, II, in Prose, ed. Guido Martellotti et al. (Milan, 1951).
14. Victoria Kahn, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum”, in Petrarch: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York & Philadelphia, 1989).
15. Petrarch, Familiares, 2.8.822, quoted in ibid.
1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955).
2. A. Dorlan, “Casier descriptif et historique des rues & maisons de Sélestat” (1926), in Annuaire de la Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque de Sélestat (Sélestat, 1951).
3. Quoted in Paul Adam, Histoire de l’enseignement secondaire à Sélestat (Sélestat, 1969).
4. Herbert Grundmann, Vom Ursprung der Universität im Mittelalter (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1957).
5. Ibid.
6. Edouard Fick, Introduction to La Vie de Thomas Platter écrite par lui-même (Geneva, 1862).
7. Paul Adam, L’Humanisme à Sélestat: L’École, les humanistes, la bibliothèque (Sélestat, 1962).
8. Thomas Platter, La Vie de Thomas Platter écrite par lui-même, trans. Edouard Fick (Geneva, 1862).
9. Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1896).
10. I am grateful to Professor Roy Porter for this caveat.
11. Mateo Palmieri, Della vita civile (Bologna, 1944).
12. Leon Battista Alberti, I Libri della famiglia, ed. R. Romano & A. Tenenti (Turin, 1969).
13. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler (Oxford, 1920–22), I i 12.
14. Quoted in Pierre Riche & Daniele Alexandre-Bidon, L’Enfance au Moyen Age. Catalogue of exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Oct. 26, 1994—Jan. 15, 1995 (Paris, 1995).
15. Ibid.
16. M.D. Chenu, La Théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1969).
17. Dominique Sourdel & Janine Sourdel-Thomine, eds., Medieval Education in Islam and the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
18. Alfonso el Sabio, Las Siete Partidas, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1955), 2 31 IV.
19. We have a letter, from about the same time, from a student requesting that his mother obtain some books for him, without concern about the cost: “I also want Paul to buy the Orationes Demosthenis Olynthiacae, have it bound and send it to me.” Steven Ozment, Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany (New Haven & London, 1990).
20. Adam, Histoire de l’enseignement secondaire à Sélestat.
21. Jakob Wimpfeling, Isidoneus, XXI, in J. Freudgen, Jakob Wimphelings pädagogische Schriften (Paderborn, 1892).
22. Isabel Suzeau, “Un Écolier de la fin du XVe siècle: À propos d’un cahier inédit de l’école latine de Sélestat sous Crato Hofman”, in Annuaire de la Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque de Sélestat (Sélestat, 1991).
23. Jacques Le Goff, Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age, rev. ed. (Paris, 1985).
24. Letter from L. Guidetti to B. Massari dated Oct. 25, 1465, in La critica del Landino, ed. R. Cardini (Florence, 1973). Quoted in Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
25. Wimpfeling, Isidoneus, XXI.
26. Adam, L’Humanisme à Sélestat.
27. Ibid.
28. In the end, Dringenberg’s preference became prevalent: in the early years of the sixteenth century, as a reaction to the Reformation, the teachers at the Latin school eliminated all pagan writers deemed “suspect”, i.e., not “canonized” by authorities such as Saint Augustine, and insisted on a strict Catholic education.
29. Jakob Spiegel, “Scholia in Reuchlin Scaenica progymnasmata”, in G. Knod, Jakob Spiegel aus Schlettstadt: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Humanismus (Strasbourg, 1884).
30. Jakob Wimpfeling, “Diatriba” IV, in G. Knod, Aus der Bibliothek des Beatus Rhenanus: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus (Sélestat, 1889).
31. Jerôme Gebwiler, quoted in Schlettstadter Chronik des Schulmeisters Hieronymus Gebwiler, ed. J. Geny (Sélestat, 1890).
32. Nicolas Adam, “Vraie manière d’apprendre une langue quelconque”, in Dictionnaire pédagogique (Paris, 1787).
33. Keller, Helen, The Story of My Life, 3rd ed. (London, 1903).
34. Quoted in E.P. Goldschmidt, Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print, suppl. to Biographical Society Transactions 16 (Oxford, 1943).
35. The Catholic Church did not revoke the ban on Copernicus’s writings until 1758.
1. Franz Kafka, Erzählungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967).
2. Cf. Goethe (quoted in Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation [Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1990]): “Symbolism transforms the experience into an idea and an idea into an image, so that the idea expressed through the image remains always active and unattainable and, even though expressed in all languages, remains inexpressible. Allegory transforms experience into a concept and a concept into an image, but so that the concept remains always defined and expressible by the image.”
3. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, 1979).
4. Dante, Le Opere di Dante. Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Milan, 1921–22).
5. Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York, 1984).
6. Franz Kafka, Brief an den Vater (New York, 1953).
7. Quoted in Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.
8. Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (New York, 1971).
9. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, 2 vols., trans. Olga Marx (New York, 1947).
10. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Le Livre brûlé: Philosophie du Talmud (Paris, 1986).
11. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.
12. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka.
13. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968).
14. Ibid.
15. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David Magarshack, Vol. I (London, 1958).
16. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka.
17. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation.
18. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.
19. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka.
20. Quoted in Gershom Sholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1981).
21. Marthe Robert, La Tyrannie de l’imprimé (Paris, 1984).
22. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka y sus precursores”, in Otras Inquisitions (Buenos Aires, 1952).
23. Robert, La Tyrannie de l’imprimé.
24. Vladimir Nabokov, “Metamorphosis”, in Lectures on Literature (New York, 1980).
25. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.
1. Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus, intr. by Italo Calvino (Milan, 1981).
2. John Atwatter, The Penguin Book of Saints (London, 1965).
3. K. Heussi, “Untersuchungen zu Nilus dem Asketem”, in Texte und Untersuchungen, Vol. XLII, Fasc. 2 (Leipzig, 1917).
4. Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles, Vol. XIV (Paris, 1693–1712).
5. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Paris, 1903–50).
6. Saint Nilus, Epistula LXI: “Ad Olympidoro Eparcho”, in Patrologia Graeca, LXXIX, 1857–66.
7. Quoted in F. Piper, Über den christlichen Biderkreis (Berlin, 1852).
8. Quoted in Claude Dagens, Saint Grégoire le Grand: Culture et experience chrétienne (Paris, 1977).
9. Synod of Arras, Chapter 14, in Sacrorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, ed. J.D. Mansi (Paris & Leipzig, 1901–27), quoted in Umberto Eco, Il problema estetico di Tommaso d’Aquino (Milan, 1970).
10. Exodus 20: 4; Deuteronomy 5: 8.
11. I Kings 6–7.
12. André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (Princeton, 1968).
13. Matthew 1: 22; also Matthew 2: 5; 2: 15; 4: 14; 8: 17; 13: 35; 21: 4; 27: 35.
14. Luke 24: 44.
15. A Cyclopedic Bible Concordance (Oxford, 1952).
16. Saint Augustine, “In Exodum” 73, in Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, II, Patrologia Latina, XXXIV, Chapter 625, 1844–55.
17. Eusebius of Caesare, Demostratio evangelium, IV, 15, Patrologia Graeca, XXII, Chapter 296, 1857–66.
18. Cf. “For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ”, I Corinthians 10: 4.
19. Grabar, Christian Iconography.
20. Quoted in Piper, Über den christlichen Bilderkreis.
21. Allan Stevenson, The Problem of the Missale Speciale (London, 1967).
22. Cf. Maurus Berve, Die Armenbibel (Beuron, 1989). The Biblia Pauperum is catalogued as Ms. 148 at the Heidelberg University Library.
23. Gerhard Schmidt, Die Armenbibeln des XIV Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1959).
24. Karl Gotthelf Lessing, G.E. Lessings Leben (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1793–95).
25. G.E. Lessing, “Ehemalige Fenstergemälde im Kloster Hirschau”, in Zur Geschichte und Literatur aus der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel (Braunschweig, 1773).
26. G. Heider, “Beitrage zur christlichen Typologie”, in Jahrbuch der K.K. Central-Comission zur Erforschung der Baudenkmale, Vol. V (Vienna, 1861).
27. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964).
28. François Villon, Oeuvres complètes, ed. P.L. Jacob (Paris, 1854).
29. Ibid., “Ballade que Villon fit à la requeste de sa mère pour prier Nostre-Dame”, in Le Grand Testament:
Femme je suis povrette et ancienne,
Ne rien ne scay; oncques lettre ne leuz;
Au monstier voy, dont suis parroissienne,
Paradis painct, ou sont harpes et luz,
Et ung enfer ou damnez sont boulluz:
30. Berve, Die Armenbibel.
31. Schmidt, Die Armenbibeln des XIV Jahrhunderts; also Elizabeth L. Einsenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983).
1. Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United States, Vol. II (New York, 1963).
2. José Antonio Portuondo, ‘La Aurora’ y los comienzos de la prensa y de la organización en Cuba (Havana, 1961).
3. Ibid.
4. Foner, A History of Cuba.
5. Ibid.
6. Hugh Thomas, Cuba; the Pursuit of Freedom (London, 1971).
7. L. Glenn Westfall, Key West: Cigar City U.S.A. (Key West, 1984).
8. Manuel Deulofeu y Lleonart, Martí, Cayo Hueso y Tampa: La emigración (Cienfuegos, 1905).
9. Kathryn Hall Proby, Mario Sánchez: Painter of Key West Memories (Key West, 1981). Also personal interview, Nov. 20, 1991.
10. T.F. Lindsay, St Benedict, His Life and Work (London, 1949).
11. Borges’s story “The Aleph”, in El Aleph (Buenos Aires, 1949), from which this description is taken, centres around one such universal vision.
12. Garcia Colombas & Inaki Aranguren, La regla de San Benito (Madrid, 1979).
13. “Thus there are two Books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all.” Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1642), I: 16.
14. “The Rule of S. Benedict”, in Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson (Oxford, 1963).
15. John de Ford, in his Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, compares this “love of silence” to the Bride’s entreaties for the quiet in the Song of Songs 2: 7. In Pauline Matarasso, ed., The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (London, 1993).
16. “I tell you brothers, no misfortune can touch us, no situation so galling or distressing can arise that does not, as soon as Holy Writ seizes hold of us, either fade into nothingness or become bearable.” Aelred of Rievaulx, “The Mirror of Charity”, in Matarasso, ibid.
17. Cedric E. Pickford, “Fiction and the Reading Public in the Fifteenth Century”, in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol. 45 II, Manchester, Mar. 1963.
18. Gaston Paris, La Littérature française au Moyen Age (Paris, 1890).
19. Quoted in Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., Daily Living in the Twelfth Century (Madison, Wisc., 1952).
20. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I–IX, ed. A.M. Guillemin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927–28), IX: 36.
21. J.M. Richard, Mahaut, comtesse d’Artois et de Bourgogne (Paris, 1887).
22. Iris Cutting Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini (New York, 1957).
23. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris, 1978).
24. Madeleine Jeay, ed., Les Évangiles des quenouilles (Montreal, 1985). The distaff, the cleft stick that holds wool or flax for spinning, symbolizes the female sex. In English, “the distaff side of the family” means “the female branch”.
25. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1605), I: 34.
26. Fourteen chapters earlier, Don Quixote himself has reproved Sancho for telling a story “full of interruptions and digressions”, instead of the linear narration that the bookish knight expects. Sancho’s defence is that “this is how they tell tales in my part of the country; I don’t know any other way and it isn’t fair of Your Grace to ask me to undertake new manners.” Ibid., I: 20.
27. William Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers with Autobiographic Reminiscences, 10th ed. (Edinburgh, 1880). This wonderful anecdote was given to me by Larry Pfaff, reference librarian at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
28. Ibid.
29. Jean Pierre Pinies, “Du choc culturel á l’ethnocide: La Pénétration du livre dans les campagnes languedociennes du XVIIe au XIXe siècles”, in Folklore 44/3 (1981), quoted in Martyn Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre (Paris, 1987).
30. Quoted in Amy Cruse, The Englishman and His Books in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1930).
31. Denis Diderot, “Lettre à sa fille Angélique”, July 28, 1781, in Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, ed. Maurice Tourneux; trans. P.N. Furbank (Paris, 1877–82), XV: 253–54.
32. Benito Pérez Galdós, “O’Donnell”, in Episodios Nacionales, Obras Completas (Madrid, 1952).
33. Jane Austen, Letters, ed. R.W. Chapman (London, 1952).
34. Denis Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, ed. Gita May (Paris, 1984).
1. David Diringer, The Hand-Produced Book (London, 1953).
2. Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, ed. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1968), XIII, 11.
3. The earliest extant Greek codex on vellum is an Iliad from the third century AD (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan).
4. Martial, Epigrammata, XIV: 184, in Works, 2 vols., ed. W.C.A. Ker (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1919–20).
5. François I, Lettres de François Ier au Pape (Paris, 1527).
6. John Power, A Handy-Book about Books (London, 1870).
7. Quoted in Geo. Haven Putnam, Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages, Vol. I (New York, 1896–97).
8. Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London, 1985).
9. John Harthan, Books of Hours and Their Owners (London, 1977).
10. Now in the Municipal Library of Sémur-en-Auxois, France.
11. Johannes Duft, Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen: Geschichte, Barocksaal, Manuskripte (St. Gall, 1990). The antiphonary is catalogued as Codex 541, Antiphonarium officii (parchment, 618 pp.), Abbey Library, St. Gall, Switzerland.
12. D.J. Gillies, “Engineering Manuals of Coffee-Table Books: The Machine Books of the Renaissance”, in Descant 13, Toronto, Winter 1975.
13. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of B.F. (New York, 1818).
14. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983).
15. Victor Scholderer, Johann Gutenberg (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1963).
16. Quoted in Guy Bechtel, Gutenberg et l’invention de l’imprimerie (Paris, 1992).
17. Paul Needham, director of the Books and Manuscripts Dept. at Sotheby’s, New York, has suggested two other possible reactions from Gutenberg’s public: surprise that the new method used metallurgical technology to produce letters, instead of quill or reed, and also that this “holy art” came from the backwaters of barbaric Germany instead of from learned Italy. Paul Needham, “Haec sancta ars: Gutenberg’s Invention As a Divine Gift”, in Gazette of the Grolier Club, Number 42, 1990, New York, 1991.
18. Svend Dahl, Historia del libro, trans. Albert Adell; rev. Fernando Huarte Morton (Madrid, 1972).
19. Konrad Haebler, The Study of Incunabula (London, 1953).
20. Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word (New York, 1970).
21. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston & London, 1994).
22. Catalogue: Il Libro della Bibbia, Esposizione di manoscritti e di edizioni a stampa della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana dal Secolo III al Secolo XVI (Vatican City, 1972).
23. Alan G. Thomas, Great Books and Book Collectors (London, 1975).
24. Lucien Febvre & Henri-Jean Martin, L’Apparition du livre (Paris, 1958).
25. Marino Zorzi, introduction to Aldo Manuzio e l’ambiente veneziano 1494–1515, ed. Susy Marcon & Marino Zorzi (Venice, 1994). Also: Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, Oxford, 1979.
26. Anthony Grafton, “The Strange Deaths of Hermes and the Sibyls”, in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1991).
27. A sign of their popularity can be seen in the 1536 Price List of the Whores of Venice, a catalogue of the city’s best and worst professional ladies, in which the traveller is warned of a certain Lucrezia Squarcia “who pretends to love poetry” and “carries about her person a pocketbook Petrarch, a Virgil, and sometimes even Homer”. Tarifa delle putane di Venezia (Venice, 1535).
28. Quoted in Alan G. Thomas, Fine Books (London, 1967).
29. Quoted in Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. (No source given.)
30. Febvre & Martin, L’Apparition du livre.
31. William Shenstone, The Schoolmistress (London, 1742).
32. In the exhibition “Into the Heart of Africa”, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 1992.
33. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Scene 4.
34. The word apparently derives from the journeymen or “chapmen” who sold these books, “chapel” being the collective term for the journeymen attached to a particular printing house. See John Feather, ed., A Dictionary of Book History (New York, 1986).
35. John Ashton, Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1882).
36. Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield, “Letter of Feb. 22 1748”, Letters to His Son, Philip Stanhope, Together with Several Other Pieces on Various Subjects (London, 1774).
37. John Sutherland, “Modes of Production”, in The Times Literary Supplement, London, Nov. 19, 1993.
38. Hans Schmoller, “The Paperback Revolution”, in Essays in the History of Publishing in Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the House of Longman 1724–1974, ed. Asa Briggs (London, 1974).
39. Ibid.
40. J.E. Morpurgo, Allen Lane, King Penguin (London, 1979).
41. Quoted in Schmoller, “The Paperback Revolution”.
42. Anthony J. Mills, “A Penguin in the Sahara”, in Archeological Newsletter of the Royal Ontario Museum, II: 37, Toronto, March 1990.
1. Colette, La Maison de Claudine (Paris, 1922).
2. Claude & Vincenette Pichois (with Alain Brunet), Album Colette (Paris, 1984).
3. Colette, La Maison de Claudine.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. W.H. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron”, in Collected Longer Poems (London, 1968).
7. André Gide, Voyage au Congo (Paris, 1927).
8. Colette, Claudine à l’École (Paris, 1900).
9. Quoted in Gerald Donaldson, Books: Their History, Art, Power, Glory, Infamy and Suffering According to Their Creators, Friends and Enemies (New York, 1981).
10. Bookmarks, edited and introduced by Frederic Raphael (London, 1975).
11. Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500 (London, 1990).
12. Quoted in Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., Daily Living in the Twelfth Century (Madison, Wisc., 1952).
13. Henry Miller, The Books in My Life (New York, 1952).
14. Marcel Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann (Paris, 1913).
15. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Critiques et portraits littéraires (Paris, 1836–39).
16. Quoted in N.I. White, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. (London, 1947).
17. Marguerite Duras, interview in Le Magazine littéraire 158, Paris, March 1980.
18. Marcel Proust, Journées de lecture, ed. Alain Coelho (Paris, 1993).
19. Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (Paris, 1927).
20. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Proem”, The Book of the Duchesse, 44–51, in Chaucer: Complete Works, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford, 1973).
21. Josef Skvorecky, “The Pleasures of the Freedom to Read”, in Anteus, No. 59, Tangier, London & New York, Autumn 1987.
22. Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York, 1987).
23. Hollis S. Barker, Furniture in the Ancient World (London, 1966).
24. Jerôme Carcopino, La Vie quotidienne à Rome à l’apogée de l’empire (Paris, 1939).
25. Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor, 1959).
26. Byzantine Books and Bookmen (Washington, 1975).
27. Pascal Dibie, Ethnologie de la chambre à coucher (Paris, 1987).
28. C. Gray & M. Gray, The Bed (Philadelphia, 1946).
29. Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages.
30. Margaret Wade Labarge, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life (London, 1986).
31. Eileen Harris, Going to Bed (London, 1981).
32. G. Ecke, Chinese Domestic Furniture (London, 1963).
33. Jean-Baptiste De la Salle, Les Régles de la bienséance de la civilité chrétienne (Paris, 1703).
34. Jonathan Swift, Directions to Servants (Dublin, 1746).
35. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (New York, 1936).
36. Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau Traité de la civilité qui se pratique en France parmi les honnestes gens (Paris, 1672).
37. Mrs. Haweis, The Art of Housekeeping (London, 1889), quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago, 1988).
38. Leigh Hunt, Men, Women and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs (London, 1891).
39. Cynthia Ozick, “Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton”, in Art & Ardor (New York, 1983).
40. R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York, 1975), quoted ibid.
41. Colette, Lettres à Marguerite Moreno (Paris, 1959).
42. Pichois & Vincenette, Album Colette.
43. Germaine Beaumont & André Parinaud, Colette par elle-même (Paris, 1960).
1. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass, 1856, in The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London, 1975).
2. Ibid.
3. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass, 1860, ibid.
4. Goethe, “Sendscreiben”, quoted in E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Berne, 1948).
5. Walt Whitman, “Shakespeare-Bacon’s Cipher”, in Leaves of Grass, 1892, in The Complete Poems.
6. Ezra Pound, Personae (New York, 1926).
7. Walt Whitman, “Inscriptions”, in Leaves of Grass, 1881, in The Complete Poems.
8. Quoted in Philip Callow, Walt Whitman: From Noon to Starry Night (London, 1992).
9. Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”, introduction to November Boughs, 1888, in The Complete Poems.
10. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass, 1856, in ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in Thomas L. Brasher, Whitman As Editor of the Brooklyn “Daily Eagle” (Detroit, 1970).
13. Quoted in William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley, Voice of the People (Boston, 1942).
14. Quoted in Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1948).
15. Quoted in Arthur W. Brown, Margaret Fuller (New York, 1951).
16. Walt Whitman, “My Canary Bird”, in November Boughs, 1888, in The Complete Poems.
17. Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1979).
18. Fray Luis de Granada, Introducción al símbolo de la fe (Salamanca, 1583).
19. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1928–31), I: 16.
20. George Santayana, Realms of Being, Vol. II (New York, 1940).
21. Quoted in Henri de Lubac, Augustinisme et théologie moderne (Paris, 1965). Pierre Bersuire, in the Repertorium morale, extended the image to the Son: “For Christ is a sort of book written upon the skin of the virgin.… That book was spoken in the disposition of the Father, written in the conception of the mother, exposited in the clarification of the nativity, corrected in the passion, erased in the flagellation, punctuated in the imprint of the wounds, adorned in the crucifixion above the pulpit, illuminated in the outpouring of blood, bound in the resurrection, and examined in the ascension.” Quoted in Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca & London, 1985).
22. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene 5.
23. Henry King, “An Exequy to His Matchlesse Never to Be Forgotten Friend”, in Baroque Poetry, ed. J.P. Hill & E. Caracciolo-Trejo (London, 1975).
24. Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, 1959).
25. Francis Bacon, “Of Studies”, in The Essayes or Counsels (London, 1625).
26. Joel Rosenberg, “Jeremiah and Ezekiel”, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter & Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
27. Ezekiel 2: 9–10.
28. Revelation, 10: 9–11.
29. Elizabeth I, A Book of Devotions: Composed by Her Majesty Elizabeth R., ed. Adam Fox (London, 1970).
30. William Congreve, Love for Love, Act I, Scene 1, in The Complete Works, 4 vols., ed. Montague Summers (Oxford, 1923).
31. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. John Wain (London, 1973).
32. Walt Whitman, “Shut Not Your Doors”, in Leaves of Grass, 1867, in The Complete Poems.
1. Joan Oates, Babylon (London, 1986).
2. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London, 1964).
3. Ibid.
4. Mark Jones, ed., Fake? The Art of Deception (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1990).
5. Alan G. Thomas, Great Books and Book Collectors (London, 1975).
6. A. Parrot, Mission archéologique à Mari (Paris, 1958–59).
7. C.J. Gadd, Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools (London, 1956).
8. C.B.F. Walker, Cuneiform (London, 1987).
9. Ibid.
10. William W. Hallo & J.J.A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna (New Haven, 1968).
11. Catalogue of the exhibition Naissance de l’écriture, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1982.
12. M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, 1973–76).
13. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, 1976).
14. Roland Barthes, “Écrivains et écrivants”, in Essais critiques (Paris, 1971).
15. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), XIII, 29.
16. Richard Wilbur, “To the Etruscan Poets”, in The Mind Reader (New York, 1988), and New and Collected Poems (London, 1975).
1. Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, ed. & trans. John Yardley (London, 1984), 4.8.1–6.
2. Menander, Sententiae 657, in Works, ed. W.G. Arnott (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1969).
3. M.I. Rostovtzeff, A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century B.C. (Madison, 1922), quoted in William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
4. P.Col.Zen. 3.4, plus P.Cair.Zen. 4.59687, in Harris, ibid.
5. I take a certain pride in the fact that, until our time, the only city in the world to have been founded with a library was Buenos Aires. In 1580, after a first unsuccessful attempt to found on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, a second city was erected. The books of the Adelantado Pedro de Mendoza became the new city’s first library, and those in the crew who were literate (including Saint Teresa’s younger brother, Rodrigo de Ahumada) were able to read Erasmus and Virgil under the southern cross. See Enrique de Gandia’s Introduction to Ruy Diaz de Guzmán’s La Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1990).
6. Plutarch, “Life of Alexander”, in The Parallel Lives, ed. B. Perrin (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970).
7. Ibid.
8. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai, Vol. I, quoted in Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa (Palermo, 1987).
9. Canfora, ibid.
10. Anthony Hobson, Great Libraries (London, 1970). Hobson notes that in 1968 the annual intake of the British Museum Library was 128,706 volumes.
11. Howard A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library: Glory of the Hellenic World (New York, 1967).
12. Ausonius, Opuscules, 113, quoted in Guglielmo Cavallo, “Libro e pubblico alla fine del mondo antico”, in Libri, editori e pubblico nel mondo antico (Rome & Bari, 1992).
13. James W. Thompson, Ancient Libraries (Hamden, Conn., 1940).
14. P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972).
15. David Diringer, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, 2 vols. (London, 1968).
16. Christian Jacob, “La Leçon d’Alexandrie”, in Autrement, No. 121, Paris, Apr. 1993.
17. Prosper Alfaric, L’Évolution intellectuelle de Saint Augustin (Tours, 1918).
18. Sidonius, Epistolae, II: 9.4, quoted in Cavallo, “Libro e pubblico alla fine del mondo antico”.
19. Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (London, 1902–24).
20. Alain Besson, Medieval Classification and Cataloguing: Classification Practices and Cataloguing Methods in France from the 12th to 15th Centuries (Biggleswade, Beds., 1980).
21. Ibid.
22. Almost fifteen centuries later, the American librarian Melvil Dewey augmented the number of categories by three, dividing all knowledge into ten groups and assigning to each group a hundred numbers whereby any given book might be classified.
23. Titus Burckhardt, Die maurische Kultur in Spanien (Munich, 1970).
24. Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French (Princeton, 1984). Pedersen notes that al-Ma’mun was not the first to establish a library of translations; the son of an Umayyad caliph, Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Mu’awiya, is said to have preceded him.
25. Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, 1992).
26. Burckhardt, Die maurische Kultur in Spanien.
27. Hobson, Great Libraries.
28. Colette, Mes apprentissages (Paris, 1936).
29. Jorge Luis Borges, “La Biblioteca de Babel”, in Ficciones (Buenos Aires, 1944).
1. Michel Lemoine, “L’Oeuvre encyclopédique de Vincent de Beauvais”, in Maurice de Gandillac et al., La Pensée encyclopédique au Moyen Age (Paris, 1966).
2. Voluspa, ed. Sigurdur Nordal, trans. Ommo Wilts (Oxford, 1980).
3. Virgil, Aeneid, ed. H.R. Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass., & London), VI: 48–49.
4. Petronius, Satyricon, ed. M. Heseltine (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1967), XV. 48.
5. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1952).
6. Pausanias, Description of Greece, ed. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1948), X. 12–1; Euripides, prologue to Lamia, ed. A.S. Way (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1965).
7. In The Greek Myths (London, 1955), II. 132.5, Robert Graves notes that “the whereabouts of Erytheia, also called Erythrea or Erythria, is disputed.” According to Graves, it might be an island beyond the ocean, or off the coast of Lusitania, or it might be a name given to the island of Leon on which the earliest city of Gades was built.
8. Pausanias, Description of Greece, X. 12.4–8.
9. Aurelian, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, 25, 4–6, quoted in John Ferguson, Utopias of the Classical World (London, 1975).
10. Eusebius Pamphilis, Ecclesiastical History: The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, in Four Books (London, 1845), Ch. XVIII.
11. Ferguson, Utopias of the Classical World.
12. Bernard Botte, Les Origines de la Noël et de l’Épiphanie (Paris, 1932). Despite a reference in the Liber pontificalis indicating that Pope Telesphorus initiated the celebration of Christmas in Rome between 127 and 136, the first certain mention of December 25 as the date of Christ’s birthday is in the Deposito martyrum of the Philocalian Calendar of 354.
13. The Edict of Milan, in Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1943).
14. The English novelist Charles Kingsley made the Neoplatonic philosopher the heroine of his now neglected novel Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face (London, 1853).
15. Jacques Lacarrière, Les Hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris, 1975).
16. C. Baur, Der heilige Johannes Chrysostomus und seine Zeit, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1929–30).
17. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993). Also, see the remarkable Jacques Giès & Monique Cohen, Sérinde, Terre de Bouddha. Dix siècles d’art sur la Route de la Soie. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, 1996.
18. J. Daniélou & H.I. Marrou, The Christian Centuries, Vol. I (London, 1964).
19. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History.
20. Cicero, De Divinatione, ed. W.A. Falconer (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972), II. 54.
21. Saint Augustine, The City of God, Vol. VI, ed. W.C. Greene (London & Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
22. Lucien Broche, La Cathédrale de Laon (Paris, 1926).
23. Virgil, “Eclogue IV”, as quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History.
24. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, British Film Institute Film Classics (London, 1992).
25. Anita Desai, “A Reading Rat on the Moors”, in Soho Square III, ed. Alberto Manguel (London, 1990).
26. Aelius Lampridius, Vita Severi Alexandri, 4.6, 14.5, quoted in L.P. Wilkinson, The Roman Experience (London, 1975).
27. Cf. Helen A. Loane, “The Sortes Vergilianae”, in The Classical Weekly 21/24, New York, Apr. 30, 1928. Loane quotes De Quincey, according to whom tradition held that the name of Virgil’s maternal grandfather was Magus. The people of Naples, says De Quincey, mistook the name for a profession and held that Virgil “had stepped by mere succession and right of inheritance into his wicked old grandpapa’s infernal powers and knowledge, both of which he exercised for centuries without blame, and for the benefit of the faithful.” Thomas De Quincey, Collected Writings (London, 1896), III. 251–269.
28. Aelius Spartianus, Vita Hadriani, 2.8, in Scriptores Historiae Augustae, quoted in Loane, “The Sortes Vergilianae”. Not only Virgil was consulted in this manner. Cicero, writing in the first century BC (De Natura Deorum, II. 2) tells of the augur Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who in 162 BC “caused the resignation of the consuls at whose election he had presided in the previous year, basing his decision on a fault in the auspices, of which he became aware ‘when reading the books’.”
29. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, 1989).
30. “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.…” Deuteronomy 18: 10–12.
31. Gaspar Peucer, Les Devins ou Commentaire des principales sortes de devinations, trans. Simon Goulard (?) (Sens [?], 1434).
32. Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, 10–12.
33. Manuel Mujica Láinez, Bomarzo (Buenos Aires, 1979), Ch. II.
34. William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, A.D. 1598 to A.D. 1867 (London, 1868).
35. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ed. J.D. Crowley (London & Oxford, 1976).
36. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London, 1874).
37. Robert Louis Stevenson (with Lloyd Osbourne), The Ebb Tide (London, 1894).
1. André Kertész, On Reading (New York, 1971).
2. Michael Olmert, The Smithsonian Book of Books (Washington, 1992).
3. Beverley Smith, “Homes of the 1990s to stress substance”, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Jan. 13, 1990.
4. Andrew Martindale, Gothic Art from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1967).
5. Quoted in Réau, Louis, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, Vol. II (Paris, 1957).
6. Marienbild in Rheinland und Westfalen, catalogue of an exhibition at Villa Hugel, Essen, 1968.
7. George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford, 1954).
8. De Madonna in de Kunst, catalogue of an exhibition, Antwerp, 1954.
9. The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden, intr. by Frank Crane (New York, 1974).
10. Protoevangelion, ibid., IX, 1–9.
11. Mary at the well and Mary at the spinning-wheel are the most common images of the Annunciation in early Christian art, especially in Byzantine depictions from the fifth century onwards. Before that time, portrayals of the Annunciation are scarce and schematic. The earliest extant depiction of Mary and the angel precedes Martini’s Annunciation by ten centuries. Painted in grubby colours on one wall of the Catacomb of St. Priscilla, in the outskirts of Rome, it shows a featureless seated Virgin listening to a standing man — an angel wingless and uncrowned.
12. John 1: 14.
13. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1986).
14. The Letters of Peter Abelard, ed. Betty Radice (London, 1974).
15. Hildegard of Bingen, Opera omnia, in Patrologia Latina, Vol. LXXII (Paris, 1844–55).
16. Quoted in Carol Ochs, Behind the Sex of God: Toward a New Consciousness—Transcending Matriarchy and Patriarchy (Boston, 1977).
17. San Bernardino, Prediche volgari, in Creighton E. Gilbert, Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents (Evanston, 1980).
18. Victor Cousin, ed., Petri Abaelardi Opera, 2 vols. (London, 1849–59).
19. Five centuries later not much seemed to have changed, as witness the sermon delivered by the learned J.W. Burgon in 1884, on the occasion of a proposal made at Oxford to admit women to the university: “Will none of you have the generosity or the candour to tell [Woman] what a very disagreeable creature, in Man’s account, she will inevitably become? If she is to compete successfully with men for ‘honours’, you must needs put the classic writers of antiquity unreservedly into her hands — in other words, must introduce her to the obscenities of Greek and Roman literature. Can you seriously intend it? … I take leave of the subject with a short Allocution addressed to the other sex.… Inferior to us God made you: and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain.” Quoted in Jan Morris, ed., The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford, 1978).
20. S. Harksen, Women in the Middle Ages (New York, 1976).
21. Margaret Wade Labarge, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life (London, 1986).
22. Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London, 1985).
23. Paul J. Achtemeier, ed., Harper’s Bible Dictionary (San Francisco, 1985).
24. Isaiah 7: 14.
25. Anna Jameson, Legends of the Madonna (Boston & New York, 1898).
26. Proverbs 9: 1, 9: 3–5.
27. Martin Buber, Erzählungen der Chassidim (Berlin, 1947).
28. E.P. Spencer, “L’Horloge de Sapience” (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, Ms. IV 111), in Scriptorium, 1963, XVII.
29. C.G. Jung, “Answer to Job”, in Psychology and Religion, West and East (New York, 1960).
30. Merlin Stone, The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women’s Rites (New York, 1976).
31. Carolyne Walker Bynum, Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley & London, 1982).
32. St. Gregoire de Tours, L’Histoire des Rois Francs, ed. J.J.E. Roy, pref. by Erich Aurebach (Paris, 1990).
33. Heinz Kahlen & Cyril Mango, Hagia Sophia (Berlin, 1967).
34. In “The Fourteenth-Century Common Reader”, an unpublished paper delivered at the Kalamazoo Conference of 1992, referring to the image of the reading Mary in the fourteenth-century Book of Hours, Daniel Willi man suggests that “without apology, the Book of Hours embodies women’s appropriation of an opus Dei and of literacy”.
35. Ferdinando Bologna, Gli affreschi di Simone Martini ad Assisi (Milan, 1965).
36. Giovanni Paccagnini, Simone Martini (Milan, 1957).
37. Colyn de Coter, Virgin and Child Crowned by Angels, 1490–1510, in the Chicago Art Institute; the anonymous Madonna auf der Rasenbank, Upper Rhine, circa 1470–80, in the Augustinermuseum, Freiburg; and many others.
38. Plutarch, “On the Fortune of Alexander”, 327: 4, in Moralia, Vol. IV, ed. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972). Also Plutarch, “Life of Alexander”, VIII and XXVI, in The Parallel Lives, ed. B. Perrin (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970).
39. Act II, scene ii. George Steiner has suggested that the book is Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais (“Le trope du livre-monde dans Shakespeare”, conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Mar. 23, 1995).
40. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, ed. Celina S. de Cortázar & Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires, 1969), I: 6.
41. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s Table Talk, intr. by Hugh Trevor-Roper (London, 1953).
1. Thomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, English ed. (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1983).
2. Plato, Laws, ed. Rev. R.G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1949), VII, 804 c–e.
3. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
4. Ibid.
5. Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels.
6. C. Ruiz Montero, “Una observación para la cronología de Caritón de Afrodisias”, in Estudios Clásicos 24 (Madrid, 1980).
7. Santa Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la Vida, II:1, in Obras Completas, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos (Madrid, 1967).
8. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993).
9. Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (Oxford, 1964).
10. “The vast majority of women in Murasaki’s day toiled arduously in the fields, were subject to harsh treatment by their men, bred young and frequently, and died at an early age, without having given any more thought to material independence or cultural enjoyments than to the possibility of visiting the moon.” Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted ibid.
13. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968).
14. Ivan Morris, introduction to Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (Oxford and London, 1967).
15. Quoted in Morris, The World of the Shining Prince.
16. Lady Sarashina, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, edited by Ivan Morris (London, 1971).
17. Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, trans. Ivan Morris (Oxford and London, 1967).
18. Quoted in Morris, The World of the Shining Prince.
19. George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford, 1992).
20. Rose Hempel, Japan zur Heian-Zeit: Kunst und Kultur (Freiburg, 1983).
21. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York, 1989).
22. Edmund White, Foreword to The Faber Book of Gay Short Stories (London, 1991).
23. Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Act II, in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G.F. Mayne (London & Glasgow, 1948).
1. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978).
2. François-René Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Paris, 1849–50).
3. Jean Viardot, “Livres rares et pratiques bibliophiliques”, in Histoire de l’édition française, Vol. II (Paris, 1984).
4. Michael Olmert, The Smithsonian Book of Books (Washington, 1992).
5. Geo. Haven Putnam, Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages, Vol. I (New York, 1896–97).
6. Ibid.
7. P. Riberette, Les Bibliothèques françaises pendant la Révolution (Paris, 1970).
8. Bibliothèque Nationale, Le Livre dans la vie quotidienne (Paris, 1975).
9. Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneva, 1988).
10. Madeleine B. Stern & Leona Rostenberg, “A Study in ‘Bibliokleptomania’ ”, in Bookman’s Weekly, No. 67, New York, June 22, 1981.
11. Quoted in A.N.L. Munby, “The Earl and the Thief: Lord Ashburnham and Count Libri”, in Harvard Literary Bulletin, Vol. XVII, Cambridge, Mass., 1969.
12. Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes (Paris, 1834).
13. Albert Cim, Amateurs et Voleurs de Livres (Paris, 1903).
14. Ibid.
15. Léopold Delisle, Les Manuscrits des Fonds Libri et Barrois (Paris, 1888).
16. Marcel Proust, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris, 1896).
17. Munby, “The Earl and the Thief”.
18. Philippe Vigier, “Paris pendant la monarchie de juillet 1830–1848”, in Nouvelle Histoire de Paris (Paris, 1991).
19. Jean Freustié, Prosper Mérimée, 1803–1870 (Paris, 1982).
20. Prosper Mérimée, Correspondance, établie et annotée par Maurice Parturier Vol. V: 1847–1849 (Paris, 1946).
21. Prosper Mérimée, “Le Procès de M. Libri”, in Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, Apr. 15, 1852.
22. Delisle, Les Manuscrits des Fonds Libri et Barrois.
23. Cim, Amateurs et voleurs de livres.
24. Lawrence S. Thompson, “Notes on Bibliokleptomania”, in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, New York, Sept. 1944.
25. Rudolf Buchner, Bücher und Menschen (Berlin, 1976).
26. Thompson, “Notes on Bibliokleptomania”.
27. Cim, Amateurs et voleurs de livres.
28. Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, second series (London, 1833).
1. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I–IX, ed. A.M. Guillemin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927–28), VI: 17.
2. Even the Emperor Augustus attended these readings “with both goodwill and patience”: Suetonius, “Augustus”, 89: 3, in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1948).
3. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I–IX, V: 12, VII: 17.
4. Ibid., I: 13.
5. Ibid., VIII: 12.
6. Juvenal, VII: 39–47, in Juvenal and Persius: Works, ed. G.G. Ramsay (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1952).
7. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I—IX, II: 19.
8. Ibid., V: 17.
9. Ibid., IV: 27.
10. Horace, “A Letter to Augustus”, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D.A. Russell & M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1989).
11. Martial, Epigrammata, III: 44, in Works, ed. W.C.A. Ker (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1919–20).
12. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I—IX, I: 13.
13. Ibid., IX: 3.
14. Ibid., IX: 23.
15. Ibid., IX: 11.
16. Ibid., VI: 21.
17. According to the poet Louis MacNeice, after one of Thomas’s readings “an actor who had been standing dazzled in the wings said to him with amazement, ‘Mr Thomas, one of your pauses was fifty seconds!’ Dylan drew himself up, injured (a thing he was good at): ‘Read as fast as I could’, he said haughtily.” John Berryman, “After Many A Summer: Memories of Dylan Thomas”, in The Times Literary Supplement, London, Sept. 3, 1993.
18. Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Berne, 1958).
19. Dante, De vulgare eloquentia, trans. & ed. Vittorio Coletti (Milan, 1991).
20. Jean de Joinville, Histoire de saint Louis, ed. Noël Corbett (Paris, 1977).
21. William Nelson, “From ‘Listen Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader’ ”, in University of Toronto Quarterly 47/2 (Winter 1976–77).
22. Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid, 1969).
23. María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística de La Celestina (Buenos Aires, 1967).
24. Ludovico Ariosto, Tutte le opere, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan, 1964), I: XXXVIII, quoted in Nelson, “From ‘Listen Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader’ ”.
25. Ruth Crosby, “Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery”, in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 13, Cambridge, Mass., 1938.
26. Quoted in M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1993).
27. Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (London, 1818).
28. Samuel Butler, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (London, 1921).
29. P.N. Furbank, Diderot (London, 1992).
30. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London, 1991).
31. Paul Turner, Tennyson (London, 1976).
32. Charles R. Saunders, “Carlyle and Tennyson”, PMLA 76 (March 1961), London.
33. Ralph Wilson Rader, Tennyson’s Maud: The Biographical Genesis (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1963).
34. Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London, 1950).
35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Topical Notebooks, ed. Ronald A. Bosco (New York & London, 1993).
36. Kevin Jackson, review of Peter Ackroyd’s lecture “London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in The Independent, London, Dec. 9, 1993.
37. Ackroyd, Dickens.
38. Richard Ellman, James Joyce, rev. ed. (London, 1982).
39. Dámaso Alonso, “Las conferencias”, in Insula 75, Mar. 15, 1952, Madrid.
40. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb (New York, 1989).
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Mimi Romanelli, May 11, 1911, in Briefe 1907–1914 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1933).
2. Louise Labé, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Françoise Charpentier (Paris, 1983).
3. Carl Jacob Burckhardt, Ein Vormittag beim Buchhandler (Basel, 1944).
4. Racine’s poem, a translation of only the second half of Psalm 36, begins, “Grand Dieu, qui vis les cieux se former sans matière”.
5. Quoted in Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (Oxford, 1986).
6. Alta Lind Cook, Sonnets of Louise Labé (Toronto, 1950).
7. Labé, Oeuvres poétiques.
8. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Narcissus”, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Rilke-Archiv (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1955–57).
9. Quoted in Prater, A Ringing Glass.
10. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Le Monde de l’imprimerie humaniste: Lyon”, in Histoire de l’édition française, I (Paris, 1982).
11. George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford, 1973).
12. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven & London, 1979).
13. D.E. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard: The Influence of Abelard’s Thought in the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge, 1969).
14. Quoted in Olga S. Opfell, The King James Bible Translators (Jefferson, N.C., 1982).
15. Ibid.
16. Quoted ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Rudyard Kipling, “Proofs of Holy Writ”, in The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling, “Uncollected Items”, Vol. XXX, Sussex Edition (London, 1939).
19. Alexander von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlischen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, quoted in Umberto Eco, La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta (Rome & Bari, 1993).
20. De Man, Allegories of Reading.
1. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. John Wain (London, 1973).
2. T.B. Macaulay, The History of England, 5 vols. (London, 1849–61).
3. Charles was nevertheless viewed as a worthy king by most of his subjects, who believed that his small vices corrected his greater ones. John Aubrey tells of a certain Arise Evans who “had a fungous Nose, and said it was revealed to him, that the King’s Hand would Cure him: And at the first coming of King Charles II into St. James’s Park, he kiss’d the King’s Hand, and rubbed his Nose with it; which disturbed the King, but Cured him”: John Aubrey, Miscellanies, in Three Prose Works, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (Oxford, 1972).
4. Antonia Fraser, Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration (London, 1979).
5. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1991).
6. Quoted ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn., 1881).
11. Quoted in Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear.
12. Peter Handke, Kaspar (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967).
13. Voltaire, “De l’Horrible Danger de la Lecture”, in Mémoires, Suivis de Mélanges divers et precédés de “Voltaire Démiurge” par Paul Souday (Paris, 1927).
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Stuttgart, 1986), IV: I.
15. Margaret Horsfield, “The Burning Books” on “Ideas”, CBC Radio Toronto, broadcast Apr. 23, 1990.
16. Quoted in Heywood Broun & Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York, 1927).
17. Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, Fighter (New York, 1913).
18. Quoted in Broun & Leech, Anthony Comstock.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism as a Literary Force”, in A Book of Prefaces (New York, 1917).
23. Jacques Dars, Introduction to En Mouchant la chandelle (Paris, 1986).
24. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, II, 7 (Paris, 1857).
25. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (London, 1907).
26. Ibid.
27. Joan DelFattore, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America (New Haven & London, 1992).
28. Quoted from The Times of London, Jan. 4, 1978, reprinted in Nick Caistor’s Foreword to Nunca Más: A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People (London, 1986).
29. In Nunca Más.
1. Patrick Trevor-Roper, The World through Blunted Sight (London, 1988).
2. Jorge Luis Borges, “Poema de los dones”, in El Hacedor (Buenos Aires, 1960).
3. Royal Ontario Museum, Books of the Middle Ages (Toronto, 1950).
4. Trevor-Roper, The World through Blunted Sight.
5. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, ed. D.E. Eichholz (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972), Book XXXVII: 16.
6. A. Bourgeois, Les Bésicles de nos ancêtres (Paris, 1923) (Bourgeois gives no day or month, and the wrong year). See also Edward Rosen, “The Invention of Eyeglasses”, in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 11 (1956).
7. Redi, Lettera sopra l’invenzione degli occhiali di nazo (Florence, 1648).
8. Rosen, “The Invention of Eyeglasses”.
9. Rudyard Kipling, “The Eye of Allah”, in Debits and Credits (London, 1926).
10. Roger Bacon, Opus maius, ed. S. Jebb (London, 1750).
11. René Descartes, Traité des passions (Paris, 1649).
12. W. Poulet, Atlas on the History of Spectacles, Vol. II (Godesberg, 1980).
13. Hugh Orr, An Illustrated History of Early Antique Spectacles (Kent, 1985).
14. E.R. Curtius, quoting F. Messerschmidt, Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft (Berlin, 1931), notes that the Etruscans did, however, represent several of their gods as scribes or readers.
15. Charles Schmidt, Histoire littéraire de l’ Alsace (Strasbourg, 1879).
16. Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, ed. Friedrich Zarncke (Leipzig, 1854).
17. Geiler von Kaysersberg, Nauicula siue speculum fatuorum (Strasbourg, 1510).
18. Seneca, “De tranquillitate”, in Moral Essays, ed. R.M. Gummere (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1955).
19. Ibid.
20. John Donne, “The Extasie”, in The Complete English Poems, ed. C.A. Patrides (New York, 1985).
21. Gérard de Nerval, “Sylvie, souvenirs du Valois”, in Autres chimères (Paris, 1854).
22. Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero As Man of Letters”, in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (London, 1971).
23. Jorge Manrique, “Coplas a la muerte de su padre”, in Poesías, ed. F. Benelcarría (Madrid, 1952).
24. Seneca, “De vita beata”, in Moral Essays.
25. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London, 1992).
26. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1932). To be fair to Arnold, his argument continues: “but we are for the transformation of each and all of these according to the law of perfection.”
27. Aldous Huxley, “On the Charms of History”, in Music at Night (London, 1931).
28. Thomas Hardy, writing in 1887, quoted in Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.
29. Sigmund Freud, “Writers and Day-Dreaming”, in Art and Literature, Vol. 14 of the Pelican Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (London, 1985).
30. And even Don Quixote is not entirely lost in fiction. When he and Sancho mount the wooden horse, convinced that it is the flying steed Clavileño, and the incredulous Sancho wants to take off the kerchief that covers his eyes in order to see if they are really up in the air and near the sun, Don Quixote orders him not to do so. Fiction would be destroyed by prosaic proof. (Don Quixote, II, 41.) The suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge rightly pointed out, must be willing; beyond that willingness lies madness.
31. Rebecca West, “The Strange Necessity”, in Rebecca West — A Celebration (New York, 1978).
1. Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (New York, 1927).
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, ed. Erich Heller (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1986).
3. Richard de Bury, The Philobiblon, ed. & trans. Ernest C. Thomas (London, 1888).
4. Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”, in The Common Reader, second series (London, 1932).
5. Gerontius, Vita Melaniae Janioris, trans. & ed. Elizabeth A. Clark (New York & Toronto, 1984).
6. Jonathan Rose, “Rereading the English Common Reader: A preface to a History of Audiences”, in the Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992.
7. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 1994).
8. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols., ed. Celina S. de Cortázar & Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires, 1969).
9. Marcel Proust, Journées de lecture, ed. Alain Coelho (Paris, 1993).
10. Michel Butor, La Modification (Paris, 1957).
11. Wolfgang Kayser, Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk (Leipzig, 1948).
12. Quoted in Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York, 1989).
13. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London, 1818), XXV.
14. Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 vols. (London, 1901).
15. “Perhaps improperly so,” comments Professor Simone Vauthier, of the University of Strasbourg, in a review of the book. “One would rather have expected the ‘King Shahryar Syndrome’ or if, following American novelist John Barth, we pay attention to Sheherazade’s other listener, her younger sister, ‘The Dunyazade Syndrome’.”
16. John Wells, Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library (London, 1991).
17. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Bibliothérapie: Lire, c’est guérir (Paris, 1994).
18. Robert Coover, “The End of Books”, in The New York Times, June 21, 1992.