The joy of books

Jay Vickers on a colourful cornucopia of literary delights

The Madman’s Library

The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and other Literary Curiosities from HIstory

Edward Brooke-Hitching

Simon & Schuster 2020

Hb, 255pp, £25, ISBN 9781471166914

The Madman’s Library is a cabinet of curiosities, a joyful gallimaufry. Dip into at any point, for a page or a chapter; in fact, reading it cover to cover is almost an overload. Beautifully illustrated on every page, this is a fascinating exploration of the weird and wonderful in books. To pick out a few highlights…

Binding books in human skin is called anthropodermic bibliopegy.

The skin of William

Burke (of cadaver suppliers Burke and Hare) made not only a pocketbook but a wallet for “the doorkeeper of an anatomical classroom in Edinburgh” – a fitting fate.

TS Elliot wrote that “the purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink”. A number of books, particularly holy texts, have been written in blood. A Buddhist prince wrote a copy of the Nirvana Sutra in his own blood in AD 579, and Saddam Hussein commissioned a calligrapher to produce a Koran written entirely in his blood, donated over two years. The rock band Kiss had their blood mixed into the red ink used to print a Marvel comic about their own fictional adventures.

Daniel Defoe’s 200 pseudonyms included Count Kidney Face and Sir Fopling TittleTattle, while Jonathan Swift’s included Countess of Fizzlerumpf and Andrew Tripe.

And then we have bestiaries, gloriously illustrated mediæval compendia of weird and wonderful creatures – the cryptozoology of their day.

Later, the 1607 History of Four-Footed Beasts claimed that “weasels give birth from their ears, lemmings graze in the clouds, elephants worship the Sun and Moon, and fall pregnant by chewing on mandrake”. In the 17th century Sir Thomas Browne purged these “superstitions, myths and folklore… with relentless scientific rationale”, and in so doing gave us 700 new words including amphibious, approximate, cadaverous, electricity, hallucination, ruminating and transgressive.

Dictionaries of slang are always fun; Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue contained many sexual references removed from later editions as Britain went “from Georgian bawdiness to Victorian primness”. “A Covent Garden nun” was of course a prostitute, and at the same time Harris’s List of CoventGarden Ladies was a detailed directory of their specialities.

Did you know that mediæval magical grimoires had to be written on virgin parchment, made from animals not yet sexually developed, or even on “unborn” parchment made from the amniotic sac?

Or that books supposedly written by the spirits of Shakespeare or Dickens must be catalogued under those names, not under the name of the medium who “received” them? (The author notes that “their skills invariably prove to have rusted somewhat post mortem.”)

Or that the cells of organisms, seen under a microscope, were called that by Robert Hooke (of the famous flea drawing in Micrographia (1665) because they were reminiscent of the bare cells of monks?

A sheer delight. ★★★★★