The
Love of Books, or THE PHILOBIBLON of
Richard De Bury, written 1345. One the first liberal appreciations of the
codex book as a) an
outstanding
information technology, b) an exquisite
aesthetic object, and c) a conveyor of
wisdom through space and time, all reasonably set to
page at a time when
paper was just replacing
parchment in Europe and the invention of
movable type and industrial
printing by
Gutenberg was
still a century away. Chapter Seven,
The Complaint of Books Against Wars, a lament against the folly of conflict and the frequent destruction of
learning in war, is one of the most compelling tirades against brutality and ignorance ever written. Here are some snippets :
"...we must tearfully recount
the dreadful ruin which was caused in Egypt by the auxiliaries in the
Alexandrian war, when seven hundred thousand volumes were consumed by fire. These volumes had been collected by the
royal
Ptolemy through long periods of time, as Aulus Gellius relates. What an Atlantean progeny must be supposed to have
then perished: including
the motions of the spheres,
all the conjunctions of the planets,
the nature of the galaxy,
and the prognostic generations of comets, and all that exists in the heavens or in the
ether!
Who would not shudder at such a hapless
holocaust, where ink is offered up instead of blood, where the glowing ashes of crackling
parchment were encarnadined with
blood, where the devouring flames consumed so many thousands of innocents in whose mouth was no guile, where the
unsparing fire turned into stinking ashes so many shrines of eternal
truth!"
"In books,
I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I
foresee things to come; in books
warlike affairs are
set forth; from books come forth the
laws of peace. All things are
corrupted and decay in time;
Saturn ceases not to devour the
children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in
oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of
books...the book well made renders its author this service in return, that so long as the book survives its author remains
immortal and cannot die, as
Ptolemy declares in the Prologue to his Almagest:
He is not dead, who has given life to writing."
"For the meaning of the
voice perishes with the sound; truth latent in the mind is
wisdom that is hid and treasure that is
not seen; but truth which shines forth in books desires to manifest itself to every impressionable sense. It commends itself to the
sight when it is read, to the
hearing when it is heard, and moreover in a manner to the
touch, when it suffers itself to be
transcribed, bound, corrected, and preserved."
Sources:
Translation incl. here from
Carrousel for Bibliophiles (Duschnes : NY, 1947), trans. W. Targ. p 297-302. Full e-text available at The University
of Virginia Electronic Text Center http://etext.lib.virginia.edu.