Notes

PREFACE

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ll. 584–5. 2. Leo Lowenthal, ‘Caliban’s Legacy’, Cultural Critique 8 (Winter 1987), 7. 3. George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, Horizon 76 (April 1946), 258. 4. This despite the recent interest in censorship, with important works such as Jonathan Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); James Raven (ed.), Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Rebecca Knuth, Libricide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Gerhard Sauder, Die Bücherverbrennung (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1983). 5. Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri: A Memoir (: Virago, 2000), p. 78. 6. Seneca, De tranquillitate animi, quoted in Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 57. 7. Max Brod, ‘Epilogue’ to Franz Kafka, The Trial (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 252–5. 8. Alan Bennett, Kafka’s Dick (London: S. French, 1987), p. 3. 9. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 193.

INTRODUCTION

1. Robert Barnes, ‘Cloistered Bookworms in the Chicken-Coop of the Muses: The Ancient Library of Alexandria’, in Roy McLeod (ed.), The Library of Alexandria (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), p. 74. 2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Methuen, 1911), vol. 5, p. 483. 3. Jon Thiem, ‘The Great Library of Alexandria Burned: Towards the History of a Symbol’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40:4 (October–December, 1979), 507. 4. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Wall and the Books’, Other Inquisitions (London: Souvenir Press, 1973), pp. 3–4. 5. Lois Mai Chan, ‘The Burning of the Books in China, 213 B.C.’, Journal of Library History 7 (April 1972), 106. 6. W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (London: Faber, 1939), p. 143. 7. Rosalind Thomas, ‘Literacy and the City-state in Archaic and Classical Greece’, in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (eds), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 35–6. 8. Frederick H. Cramer, ‘Book Burning and Censorship in Ancient ’, Journal of the History of Ideas 6:2 (April 1945), 157–96.

171 172 Burning Books

9. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of the Affections of Fathers to their Children’, The Essays (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952), p. 192. 10. Cramer, ‘Book Burning and Censorship in Ancient Rome’, 175. 11. Lorne D. Bruce, ‘A Note on Christian Libraries during the “Great Persecution”’, Journal of Library History 15:2 (Spring 1980), 127–37. 12. Charles Maitland, The Church in the Catacombs: A Description of the Primitive Church of Rome (London: Longman, 1847), p. 156. 13. Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger, ‘Introduction’, in William Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books (New York: Ktav, 1969), p. vi. 14. George Haven Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Rome and its Infl uence upon the Production and Distribution of Literature (New York: Putnam, 1906), pp. 176–7. 15. Philip Friedman, ‘The Fate of the Jewish Book During the Nazi Era’, Jewish Book Annual 13:4 (1957–58), 3–13. 16. Kenneth R. Stow, ‘The Burning of the Talmud in 1553’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 34 (1972), 435–59. 17. Rabbi Porto from the second edition of Tur ’Orah Hayim (1564), quoted in Stow, ‘The Burning of the Talmud in 1553’, 440. 18. Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books, pp. 29–62. 19. Pierre van Paassen, A Crown of Fire (London: Hutchinson, 1961), p. 229. 20. Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Rome, vol. 1, p. 207; see also vol. 2, p. 479. 21. Robert Darnton, ‘Censorship, a Comparative View: France, 1789 – East Germany, 1989’, Representations 49 (Winter 1995), 47. 22. Darnton, ‘Censorship, a Comparative View’, 46. 23. Gabriel