The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers Guide Through Curiosities of History
by Oliver Tearle
(Michael O'Mara, London, 2016)
The oldest book comprising multiples pages (that is, not simply a big scroll) is often said to be the Etruscan Gold Book, which was produced around 2,500 years ago. It comprises six large sheets of 24-carat gold which have been bound together with rings, thus forming a unified objet that might be labelled a ‘book’.
Page 12.
While the Trojan War lasted for ten years, Homer’s Iliad covers only a few weeks in the final stage of the war - and twenty-two of the twenty-four books which make up the poem cover the events of just a few days.
Page 14.
‘Lesbian’ is a relatively modern term: the earliest known instance of the word being used to describe homosexual women is in a 1925 letter by Aldous Huxley (who later wrote Brave New World), with ‘Lesbianism’ being attested from 1870 in the diary of the dirty Victorian poet Arthur Munby. Before the late nineteenth century, ‘tribade’ and ‘tribadism’ were the usual terms (from the Greek for ‘to rub’). The arrival of ‘lesbianism’ on the scene coincides with growing interest in the work of Sappho.
Page 20.
Euclid’s great talent was in bringing together the theorems arrived at by other mathematicians and presenting the whole field of geometry and trigonometry in a clear and accessible style.
Page 23.
Going to the theatre in ancient Greece was, socially speaking, closer to attending a football match than a modern day theatre.
Page 23.
Tragedy … was designed to have a sort of purging effect upon the community.
Page 24.
The main ‘moral’ of Greek tragedy … seems to be: life isn’t fair.
Page 25.
What made Pliny’s Natural History so influential on later works of science and history was its structure as much as its scope: containing an index as well as references to the original authors for relevant information, it would become a model for subsequent scholarly publications. It was also one of the first books t include a table of contents.
Pages 32-33.
Philogelos proves that the ancients had a ssense of humournot all that different from our own.
Page 36.
A bibliophile, a bibliomaniac, a bibliognost (one who knows books), a bibliophagist (a devourer of books), or a bibliosmiac (a book-sniffer).
Page 37.
The great epic poem Beowulf was virtually unknown and forgotten about for nearly a thousand years.
Page 38.
Although it is often thought of as the first great work of English literature (and often taught on English Literature courses as such), Beowulf, in many ways, has little to do with England. It is a tale about Scandinavians set in Denmark, and told by Germans (the Angles from north-west Germany), although it was written in England after the Angles’ and Saxons’ invasion (they first began to settle in Britain from the fifth century).
Page 39.
Since the word ‘English’ stems from the very Germanic peoples - the Angles - who brought the idea of Beowulf to Britain in the first place, perhaps it might be more appropriate to see Beowulf as the most ‘English’ work of literature there is.
Page 39.
All of the Anglo-Saxon poetry we have, we have because of four manuscripts that survived: the Cotton manuscript (which includes Beowulf), the Exeter Book, the Vercelli book, and the manuscripts of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Page 40.
Now it is hard to imagine the story of English literature without Beowulf, but the poem has only attracted the attention it deserves in the last century or two.
Page 41.
It wasn’t named The Divine Comedy by Dante himself, who referred to it simply as the Commedia. His fellow Italian poet Boccaccio called it the Divina, but it wasn’t given the title Divina Commedia until 1555, two and a half centuries after it was written.
Page 46.
Dante is undoubtedly more known about than he is avidly read these days.
Page 47.
Revelations of Divine Love … became the first book written by a woman in the English language.
Page 53.
The most that anyone has ever actually paid for a single book is just under $31 million, when Bill Gates bought the Codex Leicester, better known as Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
Page 61.
It takes a certain kind of writer to get their own adjective. Shakespearean, Dickensian, Orwellian: it helps if your work comes to typify, even define, a particular style or theme.
Page 62.
Although the English form of the poem is commonly known as the Shakespearean sonnet, Shakespeare didn’t invent it.
Page 75.
The 1580s were really the first great decade of English theatre. Throughout the Middle Ages, plays had been Catholic entertainments put on in town squares on holy feast days and other special occasions, dramatizing - usually in rather flat, functional dialogue - key events from the Bible such as the Crucifixion and Nativity. It was thanks to the Reformation that things changed. These old Popish displays were deemed unsuitable and offensive, and in their place arose the new phenomenon of the London playhouses.
Page 80.
Elizabethan plays were circulated in manuscript, but few people would possess a copy of an entire play, unless they were published. … Actors in plays would instead receive copies of only those scenes in which they had lines. These lines would be given to the actors on rolls of paper,, which is why we now refer to an actor’s part as a ‘role.’
Pages 80-81.
Don Quixote is actually not one book, but two: the original adventure and its sequel, written a decade after the original book.
Page 85.
In 1697 … an act of parliament ordered signposts to be displayed at key crossroads to reduce the chances of travellers getting lost.
Page 102.
In Margery Kempe’s time, you generally needed special permission to wander the country, otherwise you ran the risk of being arrested as a vagrant.
Page 102.
The imposition of theatre censorship would be just about the best thing that could happen to English literature and the nation’s print culture. Press freedoms were not similarly restricted, and the eighteenth century was truly the age of the newspaper: a new periodical seemed to spring up somewhere in the metropolis every day.
Page 109.
Johnson’s wasn’t the first English dictionary: before his there had been several such works. … But none of these was on the same scale as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. A far greater size and scope would be what Johnson, in 1755, brought to the table.
Page 111.
It is Johnson’s dictionary that is remembered o the annals of book history. Why? For one, it was also the first dictionary to use citations for the words it listed, with quotations from Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and countless other literary sources.
Page 111.
Where Enlightenment championed order and reason, Romanticism sought revolution, emotion, imagination and a return to the natural world. Romantics let their hearts, rather than their minds, govern their decisions.
Page 114.
Romanticism developed the values of the Enlightenment as much as it challenged its emphasis on rationalism and orderliness.
Pages 114-115.
‘Serendipity’ has been called one of the most difficult words to translate.
Page 118.
Paine’s language … was attacked by many for its ‘vulgarity’ - that is, for writing in a way that would appeal to both the middle and working classes. But this was very deliberate on his part, an aspect of his egalitarian nature and his desire to reach out to ‘the common man’.
Page 121.
One of the most persistent ‘charges’ laid against Paine is that he was an atheist In fact, as he makes repeatedly clear in The Age of Reason, he was a deist (that is, one who believes in a Creator but not an intervening God) whose aim was to defend God against the (mis)representations of him in the \old and New Testaments.
Page 122.
But what is Frankenstein really about? … the creation of the monster - or, more accurately, the Creature - is not what makes the Creature turn against his creator. It is Frankenstein’ subsequent rejection of the creature he has made which leads to the creature’s violent and destructive behaviour. The novel is not about bad science, but bad parenting.
Page 128.
Polidori’s vital gift to vampire fiction was to turn the vampire into a sexy Byronic hero: brooding, attractive, and above all, dangerous.
Page 130.
The 1820s were the decade of the vampire craze: suddenly everyone was sinking their teeth into the genre.
Page 131.
A great deal of what is commonly believed about Victorian society and culture is, at best, only partly true. For one thing, they weren’t as prudish about sex as it’s often assumed. It’s true their literature was fairly tight-lipped about goings-on in the trouser area, but this was partly due to the way that Victorian literature was circulated: many people didn’t buy the latest novels but instead borrowed them from their local library. These libraries were generally rather strict about the sort of thing they’d tolerate in the novels they stocked: no sex or swearing, for starters. As a writer, if your novel wouldn’t be stocked by a library such as the mighty Mudie’s circulating library, your readership, and therefore your earnings, would be dramatically diminished.
Pages 132-133.
If you’ve ever wondered why so many Victorian novels are such whopping doorstoppers, it’s partly a canny publishing venture: libraries could effectively lend a copy of the same novel out to three separate borrowers at once, thus tripling their profits. The downside to all this, of course, was that most Victorian fiction is full of children but has nothing to say about how those children got into the world.
Page 133.
It was actually the Victorians who scoffed at the Americans for being so prudish.
Page 133.
A Christmas Carol wasn’t actually the first Christmas story Dickens wrote. It wasn’t even the first Christmas ghost story Dickens wrote.
Page 135.
The term ‘Scrooge’ has entered the language as shorthand for a tight-fisted and miserable person. ‘Bah! Humbug!’ has become a universally recognized catchphrase, although Scrooge only uses it twice in the book.
Page 135.
Despite its phenomenal success, A Christmas Carol didn’t actually make Dickens much money at first. This was largely down to the high production costs of the book, which resulted in Dickens colleting a mere £230 in profits, less than a quarter of what he’d been expecting.
Page 136.
Dickens himself acknowledged the influence of the American writer Washington Irving on his Christmas writings. But Dickens’s book was part of a wider culture which helped to form the modern conception of the Christmas holiday.
Page 137.
Carroll was a shy man who suffered from a stammer throughout his life and was deaf in one ear, the result of a fever he suffered in childhood.
Page 149.
The modern police force and the notion of official crime investigation only came into being in the Victorian era - so it was only then that the detective novel properly arrived on the (crime) scene.
Page 152.
The railways … transformed people’s reading habits.
Page 155.
The mid-Victorian era was the age in which people went in search of a secular bible: a single book that would tell them how to negotiate the bewildering and fast-moving world they found developing around them.
Page 156.
The arrival of the railways changed the way the Victorians went about their lives in the most fundamental manner possible: it changed their very conception of time. Before the age of steam, different towns and cities around Britain ran on their own local time; the railways changed all that for ever. The introduction of standardized time - which was necessary to ensure smooth running of the trains according to the railway timetable - has even been credited with inspiring a greater degree of punctuality among the population. Railway tine became a byword for regularity and precision. The whole country had been brought in line with Greenwich Mean Time by 1880; the Victorian railways had literally invented our modern way of timekeeping.
Page 156.
The man who, after Conan Doyle, probably did more than anyone else to create our idea of the great detective got the job illustrating the Sherlock Holmes stories by accident: Sidney Paget only became the illustrator because of a clerical error. The publishers had meant to hire his younger brother, Walter, but they inadvertently addressed the letter to the wrong brother. It turned out to be one of the most serendipitous mistakes in the world of literary illustration.
Page 161.
Wilde first came to the world’s notice by being effectively one of the first modern celebrities - famous for being, rather than for doing anything in particular.
Page 161.
Dracula and the Sherlock Holmes stories also tap into: the notion of London as a foggy den of vice, crime, and unspeakable horrors. This view of London had also become entrenched in the London consciousness in 1888 by the Jack the Ripper murders, but it was there already, in books such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1886.
Page 164.
Life on the Mississippi has a curious claim to fame which is that it was the first book - at least the first one by a high-profile author - to have been ‘written’ on a typewriter. … Twain himself didn’t prepare the typescript for the book, since the typewriter he purchased in 1874 made him so angry it generated a string of expletives (as Twain himself said, ‘When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear’) and he was compelled to give the machine away. So he dictated Life on the Mississippi instead.
Pages 185-186.
Girls’ stories tended to be overly moralistic in their tone and marred by effusive sentimentality. Alcott’s novel changed all that, instead depicting ordinary girls’ lives in a way that real little women could relate to.
Page 187.
Emily Dickinson was far better known as a gardener than as a poet in her own lifetime.
Page 190.
After Ben-Hur and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it’s estimated that Looking Backward was the biggest-selling American novel published in the entire nineteenth century.
Page 191.
Ben-Hur is often seen as the greatest Christian novel of the entire nineteenth century, which is odd given that the book’s author was self-confessedly ignorant of Christianity, was not a Christian and never belonged to any of its many sects.
Page 194.
Both of the previous film adaptations were silent movies, made in 1907 and 1925. There are rumours that some of the extras involved in the pivotal chariot-racing scene died during the making of the 1959 version, but this is untrue - though one unfortunate stuntman did die during the filming of the chariot-race scene for the 1925 movie.
Pages 193-194.
There was something distinctive about European literature. For one … that perennial literary genre the fairy tale came of age on the Continent, being transferred from an oral tradition to the pages of a book with great ease and, it must be said, staggering popularity. For another, numerous European novelists, especially Russians like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, seemed to be one step ahead of their Anglophone contemporaries in lifting the lid on the human mind and examining all of the distasteful or nasty bits that lurked within.
Pages 195-196.
Rousseau may be one of the greatest memoirists the world has seen, but as a human being he had more than his fair share of flaws.
Page 202.
Rousseau is sometimes viewed as an early Romantic figure: his writing exhibits an interest in the self and in the primacy of personal experience which we will later find enthusiastically endorsed in the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, and a host of other figures.
Page 202.
We may think that our concern over sitting down at our desks all day is a modern phenomenon the product of our middle-class white-collar jobs, but Tissot was addressing it some 250 years ago.
Page 204.
War and Peace isn’t even a novel in the usual sense: Tolstoy considered it more of a historical chronicle. Of course, it’s fiction rather than fact, but Tolstoy grounds the lives of his invented characters in a very real, meticulously researched historical Russia. Indeed, he drops the names of many real historical personages into the novel.
Pages 209-210.
One of Tolstoy’s aims in writing such a vast work was to undermine the popular nineteenth-century idea of history as a series of actions carried out by ‘great men’.
Page 210.
The focus on a man’s duality can partly be attributed t Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had brought home that although we ma behave in a civilized fashion most of the time, underneath we are animals, driven by animal impulses. These competing forces of impulsive pleasure-seeker and responsible conscience-stricken control freak are at war with each other everywhere in writing of the late nineteenth century.
Page 214.
Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth, who became her brother’s executor following his death in 1900, later distorted his work in order to lend credence to her own proto-Nazi leanings. As a result, a narrative has emerged leading straight from Nietzsche’s pen to the crowds at Nuremberg.
Page 214.
The problem is that much of Nietzsche’s satire gets lost in translation or interpretation, and his ironic mockery, unfortunately, makes his attacks on anti-Semitism sound anti-Semitic.
Pages 214-215.
‘Stream of consciousness’, although associated with modernist writing the early twentieth century, was a mid-Victorian coinage rather than a late-Victorian or proto-modernist, metaphor.
Page 221.
The Waste Land is perhaps the most important poem of the twentieth century. It captured the post-war mood in numerous ways: the sense of loss, of despair and alienation, the notion that life had become one long repetitive treadmill of mechanical routine.
Page 229.
It was thanks to Ezra Pound’s friend and fellow American expatriate in Europe, that The Waste Land became the poem we now read. Pound took his red pen to Eliot’s early drafts, halved the poem’s length, and gave it a loose sense of cohesion.
Page 231.
The stronger swear words could not be found in English dictionaries until the 1960s.
Page 235.
A common perception about D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that it was the book’s sexual content that led to its being banned. The descriptions of what Lawrence calls ‘this sex business’ and ‘orgasmic satisfaction’ didn’t help, but it was actually more the use of four-letter words than the erotic descriptions of lovemaking that landed Penguin in court for publishing it in 1960.
Page 236.
The point - as with much of Kafka - is that we are not supposed to know the precise thing into which Gregor has metamorphosed. The vagueness is part of the effect: Gregor is any and every unworthy or downtrodden creature, shunned by those closest to him.
Page 239.
The difference is that androids and cyborgs resemble real human beings, whereas robots don’t.
Page 242.
Along with Samuel Pepys’s diary from nearly three centuries before, Anne’s Diary of a Young Girl is probably the most famous diary ever kept.
Page 243.
The similarities between Crichton and Conan Doyle are curious: both trained in medicine, both wrote novels called The Lost World, both wrote novels set in the fourteen century (The White Company and its prequel Sir Nigel in the case of Conan Doyle, and Timeline in Crichton’s). Jurassic Park, Crichton’s most commercially successful novel, was effectively a clever updating of the premise of Conan Doyle’s 1912 classic.
Page 247.
The way we read, write or buy books: they had brought about a change in the very ways we think, the ways we experience the world.
Page 248.
The physical design of the book may have evolved, but one thing remains constant: books of one kind or another are still a treasure part of our culture.
Page 251.