To my editors, Rosellina Arquinto, Hans-Jurgen Balmes, Valeria Ciompi, Carmen Criado, Haye Konings- veld, Luiz Schwarcz, Marie-Catherine Vacher and, first and foremost, overriding the laws of the alphabet, Louise Dennys.
328
Finally, I'm deeply grateful to the S. Fischer Stiftung in Berlin and to the Simon Guggenheim Foundation in New York for their financial assistance over the past years, without which this book would no doubt be still languishing in the future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Notes
foreword
Robert Louis Stevenson, "Pulvis et Umbra," II, in Across the Plains (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892).
Northrop Frye, Notebook 3:128, in Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by Robert D. Denham (Toronto: Anansi, 2004).
Francesco Petrarca, "On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others," in Invectives, ed. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003).
the library as myth
M. le Comte de Mondion, "Mondion, le chateau—la paroisse, 1096—1908," in Bulletins de la Societe des Antiquaires de I'Ouest (Poitiers, second quarter of 1909).
R.L. Stevenson (in collaboration with Mrs. Stevenson), "The Dynamiter," in More New Arabian Nights (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885).
Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968).
Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia), ed. J.D. Duff, IX:973 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1988).
Essais de Montaigne, ed. Amaury-Duval (Paris: Chasseriau, 1820).
Ibid.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains, II:2o6, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (New York: Harper, 1853).
Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library," in The Essays ofVirginia Woolf, Volume ii, 1912-1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987).
Genesis 11:5-7.
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. I (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Strabo, Geography, Book XIII, quoted by Luciano Canfora, "Aristote, 'fondateur' de la Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie," in La nou- velle Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie, ed. Fabrice Pataut (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2003).
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, translated by and with an introduction by John Healy (London: Penguin, 1991); Book XII, 69-70.
Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa (Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1987).
Charles A. Goodrum & Helen W. Dalrymple, Guide to the Library of Congress, rev. edition (Washington: Library of Congress, 1988).
Christoph Kapeller, "L'architecture de la nouvelle Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie," in Pataut, La nouvelle Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie.
Hipolito Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandria (Madrid: Gredos, 2001).
Mustafa El-Abbadi, La antigua biblioteca de Alejandna: Viday destino, trans. Jose Luis Garda-Villalba Sotos (Madrid: unesco, 1994).
Strabo, Geography, Book XVII.
Franz Kafka, Die Er^ahlungen: Originalfassung (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2000).
See Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, Book XXI:9 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984).
Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandna.
Quoted in Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa.
Geo. Haven Putnam, A.M., Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages, Vol. I (reprint) (New York: Hillary House, 1962).
"Le monde est fait pour aboutir a un beau livre," Stephane Mallarme, in "Reponses a des enquetes, Sur l'evolution litteraire," in Proses diverses (Paris: Gallimard, 1869).
Joseph Brodsky, "In a Room and a Half," in Less Than One (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986).
I discuss this project in my chapter "Peter Eisenman: The Image As Memory," in Reading Pictures (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
Quoted in Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandna.
Quoted in Roberto Calasso, I quarantanove gradini (Milano: Adelphi, 1991).
These references are from Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa.
"Polvo seran, mas polvo enamorado," Francisco de Quevedo, in "Amor constante meas alla de la muerte," in Antolog^a poetica (selected by, and with a prologue by, Jorge Luis Borges) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982).
the library as order
Pepys bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, exactly three thousand numbered volumes, beginning with the smallest and ending with the largest.
Pliny the Younger, Letters I-X, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, II:i7:8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
"Sa chambre de douleur etait un arc-en-ciel. . . reservant a l'oeil et au souvenir des surprises et des bonheurs attendus," Michel Melot, in La sagesse du bibliothecaire (Paris: L'oeil neuf editions, 2004).
Georges Perec, in Penser/Classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985).
Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library."
John Wells, Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library (Macmillan: London, i99i).
Terry Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 1985).
G.K. Chesterton, "Lunacy and Letters," in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, selected by Alberto Manguel (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000).
Jean-Pierre Drege, Les bibliotheques en Chine au temps des manu- scrits (Paris: Ecole fran^aise d'Extreme-Orient, 1991).
W.F. Mayers, "Bibliography of the Chinese Imperial Collection of Literature," China Review, Vol. VI, no. 4 (London, 1879).
Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Foucault considers this kind of eclectic list a "distortion of classification that prevents us from conceiving it [the classification]" ("cette distorsion du classement qui nous empeche de lepenser").
Wolfgang Bauer, "The Encyclopaedia in China," Cahiers d'his- toire mondiale, Vol. IX, no. 3 (Paris, 1966).
Sergei A. Shuiskii, "Khallikan," in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, Vol. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, i986).
El-Abbadi, La Antigua biblioteca de Alexandria.
Dorothy May Norris, A History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing Methods: iioo-i85o, with an Introductory Survey of Ancient Times (London: Grafton & Co., 1939).
Houari Touati, L'armoire a sagesse: Bibliotheques et collections en Islam (Paris: Aubier, 2003).
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D.
Hicks, Vol. 1:57 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1972).
Youssef Eche, Less bibliotheques arabespubliques et semi-publiques en Mesopotamie, en Syrie et en Egypte au Moyen-age (Damascus: Institut fran^ais de Damas, 1967).