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).
THE SHAPE OF THE BOOK
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.
PRIVATE READING
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).
METAPHORS OF READING
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.
BEGINNINGS
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).
ORDAINERS OF THE UNIVERSE
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 Librar
y: 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).
A History of Reading Page 35
