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Clarendon Lectures in English

BIBLIOPHOBIA
The End and the Beginning of the Book
B R IA N C UM M I N G S
1
1
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τὰ τῆς γε λήθης φάρμακ᾿ ὀρθώσας μόνος,

ἄφωνα καὶ φωνοῦντα, συλλαβὰς τιθείς,
ἐξηῦρον ἀνθρώποισι γράμματ᾿ εἰδέναι
Euripides, fr. 578 (from the lost play Palamedes)
for eamon duffy

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born
W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’
Preface
I begin with an apology to myself as much as to my readers: books take a long

time to write. At an exhibition in Cambridge in 1983 for the five-hundredth anni-
versary of Martin Luther’s birth the final display was an old charred volume.
Alongside was a description of how Luther burned books in 1520 to defy his own
excommunication, and how his books were burned in turn to mark him as anathema.
How, I wondered, had such an object of horror survived? To my astonishment,
I found out the book was a changeling, some surplus nineteenth-century records
of the Nottinghamshire Water Board, set alight by librarians for the occasion to
provide a visual symbol. This, too, struck me as a strange kind of sacrilege. What
is it, I asked myself, that makes a librarian burn a book? Or what keeps another
safe as holy treasure? The book, it seemed, is sacer, as the Romans would say: both
hallowed and cursed.
This idea has nagged in my mind ever since, like a scruple which will not go
away. I chose book-hating as an appropriate subject for an inaugural professorial
lecture at the University of Sussex in 2008, where I recalled famous instances of
bibliophobia, alongside reflections on my first term as a teacher, long ago, during
which a fatwa was declared against Salman Rushdie. To this day, none of my
seminars has ever been so animated; a colleague knocked on the door to see if we
were all right. To colleagues at Sussex in those years, who talked through my
strange fascination with books and violence, I now offer penitence, especially
Geoff Bennington (who knocked on the door), Homi Bhabha, Maggie Boden,
Adriana Bontea, Peter Burke, Jackie Cassell, Tom Crow, Mat Dimmock, Andrew
Hadfield, Maurice Howard, Rod Kedward, Jeremy Lane, Robin Milner-Gulland,
Ambra Moroncini, Michael Morris, Claudia Nocentini, Michelle O’Malley, John
Röhl, and Martin van Gelderen.
Later, I was asked to give the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford in 2012. It is to this
invitation, and to many acts of friendship that it incurred, that a genesis proper of
this book belongs. Over the course of several weeks, I was able to formulate an
argument, and share ideas, with members of the university and other visitors,
including Sharon Achinstein, Laura Ashe, Colin Burrow, Bart van Es, Kantik Ghosh,
Vincent Gillespie, Anne Hudson, Paulina Kewes, Peter McCullough, Laura
Marcus, Katie Murphy, David Norbrook, Bernard and Heather O’Donoghue,
Seamus Perry, Will Poole, David Rundle, Emma Smith, Adam Smyth, Kathryn
Sutherland, Dan Wakelin, Philip West, and David Womersley. At Christ Church,
where I was a Visiting Fellow, I lingered over wine in company with Kate Bennett,
Mishtooni Bose, Sarah Foot, Peter McDonald, Sara Mortimer, and especially
x Preface
mine host, Brian Young. My warm thanks go to the Faculty of English, and to the
Dean and Students of Christ Church.
An added benefit of the Clarendon Lectures is that they bring with them the
generous patronage of Oxford University Press. Jacqueline Norton and Ellie
Collins have been patient guardians and muses throughout, over lunches in
Berlin, London, and New York, as well as Oxford. They have kept faith with me
and encouraged me, sharing an enormous knowledge of books, along with other
colleagues at the Press such as Andrew McNeillie, Judith Luna, and Paul Luna.
Not least, they also put me in touch with Karen Raith, Vasuki Ravichandran,
Cailen Swain, and Aimee Wright, who have helped with editorial processes and
picture research. Ellie also found me a blessed pair of readers, who not only did
not scorn the project, but who perused it with learned sensitivity, ardour, and wit,
making me laugh out loud and renew my toil. Leofranc Holford-Strevens has
been an incomparable editor.
Over time an idea has grown from book-burning to a broader enquiry into the
history of books as objects, and also the philosophical basis of writing in general.
This research has been partly funded by the generous support of the Leverhulme
Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and library fellowships in
Wolfenbüttel, the Huntington, and the Folger. At an early stage, I realized that
such a study needed to extend over the widest global reach and epochal time. The
book ranges across six continents, seven religions, and five thousand years of
writing, from Sumeria to the smartphone. It contains written examples from each
of the last thirty centuries, and several before. This has challenged and defeated
my expertise at every turn. It also means the book does not claim in any way to be
comprehensive, and indeed I have willingly abandoned chronology and geog-
raphy as structural devices. Instead, I adopt a more personal approach. My
method borrows from the idea of the essay, and the artistic genre of the collage; at
times, it has even strayed into the territory of the travelogue. I have therefore
learned from friends who are masters in these arts, such as Anna Hollstein,
Gabriel Josipovici, Adam Phillips, and Colin Thubron; and from others who have
walked or talked with me round places or things I know too little about, such as
Guillemette Bolens, Euan Cameron, Michele Campopiano, Terence Cave, Roger
Chartier, Jenny Clement, Craig Clunas, Line Cottegnies, Jean Demerliac, Simon
Ditchfield, Milad Douelhi, Eamon Duffy, Kathy Eden, Ziad Elmarsafy, Lukas
Erne, Michael Fend, Kit Fan, Ken Fincham, Helen Fulton, Indira Ghose, Alice
Goodman, Jan Graffius, Margreta de Grazia, Stephen Greenblatt, John Guy, Jon
Haarberg, Tim Harrison, Hugh Haughton, Babette Hellemans, Andreas Höfele,
Hyosik Hwang, Isabel Karremann, David Kastan, Matt Kavaler, Jim Kearney,
Tamara van Kessel, Kevin Killeen, Gerard Kilroy, Stephan Laqué, Ceri Law,
Edward Wilson Lee, Russ Leo, Amanda Lillie, Henk Looijesteijn, Monica Loup,
César Lucas-Nuñez, Julia Lupton, Penny McCarthy, Jon McGovern, Peter Mack,
Lynne Magnusson, Noriko Manabe, Peter Marshall, José Luis Martínez-Dueñas
Preface xi
Espejo, Jean-Christophe Mayer, Charlotte Methuen, Oliver Morgan, Joe Moshenska,

Subha Mukherji, Lalage Neal, Jeanne Nuechterlein, Anne O’Donnell, Natalie
Oeltjen, Claudia Ölk, Roger Pardo-Maurer, José María Pérez Fernández, Lino
Pertile, Jason Peters, Claudia Portela, Burcht Pranger, Sameer Rahim, Jenny
Richards, Claudia Richter, Karis Riley, Thomas Röske, Davide Sala, Regina
Schwartz, Kirsti Sellevold, Bill Sheils, James Simpson, Helen Smith, Nigel Smith,
Peter Stallybrass, Paul Stevens, Alan Stewart, Richard Strier, Céline Surprenant,
Ramie Targoff, Margaret Tudeau, Elizabeth Tyler, Wyger Velema, Stefano Villani,
Alex Walsham, Tamar Wang, Rowan Williams, George Younge, and Antoinina
Bevan Zlatar. Asadour Guzelian shared with me his memories as well as his pho-
tography of the Rushdie book-burning in Bradford. Kit and Hugh in particular
have mulled over the whole thing, read chapters, opened bottles, walked miles.
Alex and I spent three years working closely together which has deepened every-
thing here. To Eamon a special dedication is due, with a nod to his love of poetry
as well as holy relics.
A book about books owes most of all to the people who devote their lives to
them: I here archive my debt to curators at a host of institutions, including the
Bibelmuseum and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the Stadsarchief and Plantin-
Moretus Museum in Antwerp; the Universitätsbibliothek in Basel; the
Staatsbibliothek, Neues Museum, and Jewish Museum in Berlin; the University
Library and the College libraries of Corpus Christi, King’s, Magdalene, Queens’,
and Trinity in Cambridge; the Cathedrals of Canterbury and Chichester; the
Library of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville; of Trinity College, the
National Museum of Ireland, and the Chester Beatty, Dublin; of the Cathedral
and the Old Palace in Durham; the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence;
the Museum of the Alhambra in Granada; the Houghton Library at Harvard
University; the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Kraków; the British Library, the British
Museum, the Institute of Historical Research, Lambeth Palace Library, the
National Archives, St Paul’s Cathedral Library, the Stationers’ Company, the
Warburg Library, and Dr Williams’s Library in London; the Clark Library at
the University of California in Los Angeles; the Musée de l’imprimerie and the
Musée gallo-romain in Lyon; the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Glyptothek in
Munich; the New York Public Library; the Museo Archeologico in Naples; the
Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg; the Bodleian, the Taylorian, and
the College libraries of All Souls, Christ Church, Corpus Christi, Lincoln, Merton,
and New College, Oxford; the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, the Louvre, and the Société de l’histoire
du Protestantisme in Paris; the Rosenbach Library and the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; the epigraphic collection of the Museo Nazionale,
the Vatican Museums, and Vatican Library in Rome; the Huntington Library in
San Marino; the National Museum in Seoul, and the early printing museum in
Cheongju; the Fisher Library, PIMS and CRRS at the University of Toronto; the
xii Preface
Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Freer and Sackler
Galleries, and the Smithsonian, in Washington, DC; the Herzog-August-
Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel; and York Minster Library. Among many companions
of the book in those places and elsewhere I cherish John Barnard, Nicholas Bell,
Peter Blayney, Karen Brayshaw, Hugh Cahill, James Carley, Emily Dourish,
Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Liz Evenden, Guillaume Fau, Mirjam Foot, Alex
Gillespie, Betty Hagerman, Christopher de Hamel, Arnold Hunt, Monika Jaglarz,
Kristen Jensen, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Deidre Lynch, Kathleen Lynch, Scott
McKendrick, David McKitterick, Giles Mandelbrote, Arthur Moratti, Robin Myers,
Eef Overgaauw, Andrew Pettegree, Ed Potten, James Raven, William St Clair,
David Selwyn, Liam Sims, Michael Suarez, Abbie Weinberg, Margaret Willes,
Heather Wolfe, and Georgianna Ziegler. Richard Ovenden and I agreed not to
worry that we were writing similar books. An especially warm hug goes to Sarah
Griffin and Steven Newman at York Minster Library, and to staff and students
there on my long-running Religion and the Book Seminar. Most of all, I have
learned more about books from Henry Woudhuysen than anyone. More than
that, he has been a supportive critic and magus of my strangest ideas about them
for two decades.
While I have ranged far and wide in the writing of the book, I have tried above
all not to be phoney in my interests. As often as not, thoughts have come to me in
travelling, by listening to new languages, and getting to know their strange scripts;
in visiting exhibitions and art galleries. To curators of museums, temples,
mosques, or churches all over Europe and the Americas, Australia, China,
Morocco, Singapore, or South Korea, I make a silent blessing. For the dead who
have left me: especially Margaret Aston, Irena Backus, Jean-François Gilmont,
Eric Griffiths, Geoffrey Hill, Stephen Medcalf, Kevin Sharpe, and Tony Trott; and
above all my parents, who first read to me and who left me their books, I say a
little prayer. Within my family, my steadfast brother David, my marvellous aunt
Melva, as also Archie, Helena, Marzenna, Anna, Cris, Evert, Marian, Molly,
Charlie, Sophie, and Jamie, have humoured me as I burbled on. Above all, three
people will recognize in these pages an odyssey of mind and heart. My children,
Thomas Cummings, who is a molecular biologist, and Daniel Cummings, who is
a musician, have shared their passions with me as well as mine; they will find
their ideas or their favourite artists on almost every page. Finally, Freya Sierhuis
has lived and journeyed every minute, in retrospect and prospect. She has taught
me to feel with something of her intuitive grace, and every word I have written
comes from conversation with her.
CONTENTS
Note On Texts xv
List of Figures xvii
List of Plates xxiii
I . DE AT H OF T H E B O OK
1. Is There a Future for the Book? 3

2. The Library as Computer 24
3. The Message of Ashurbanipal from Antiquity 37
4. Living in the Tower of Babel 48
I I . B O O K S A N D V IO L E N C E
5. The Book-Fires of 1933 67

6. The Making and Unmaking of Libraries 78
7. Incombustible Heresy in the Age of Luther 92
8. The Bondage of the Book 109
I I I . S AC R E D T E X T
9. The Mystery of Arabic Script 129

10. The Unnameable Hebrew God 148
11. How the Alphabet Came to Greece from Africa 164
12. The Characters of Chinese 181
I V. T H E C U LT O F T H E B O O K
13. Words and Images 197

14. Kissing the Book 215
15. Books Under the Razor 236
16. Shakespeare and Bibliofetishism 249
xiv CONTENTS
V. T H E B O DY A N D T H E B O O K
17. The Book Incarnate 265

18. The Hand in the History of the Book 282
19. Written on the Flesh 300
20. Book Burial 316
V I . G HO S T I N T H E B O O K
21. The Book After the French Revolution 333

22. The Smartphone Inside Our Heads 350
23. Heresy and Modernity 370
24. Glyph 387
Endnotes 407
Bibliography 487
Index of Manuscripts 527
Index 529
Note On Texts
Classical Greek and Latin sources, including late-antique authors, whether in the
original languages or English translation, are cited from the Loeb Classical
Library; later Latin texts from Oxford Medieval Texts and the I Tatti Library.
Translations of Hebrew scriptures, the Christian Bible (KJV), the Qur’an, and the
Book of Common Prayer (unless otherwise noted) are from the Oxford World’s
Classics editions. For the Talmud and other Jewish texts, I have used the online
collection at sefaria.org. For Buddhist texts, I have used the resources of the Pali
Canon Online and the Buddhist Digital Resource Centre (BDRC). For Islamic
texts I have used the Islamic Texts Society. Citations of Christian church fathers
(unless otherwise noted) are from J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia
Latina (PG and PL). Shakespeare is quoted from the Oxford Shakespeare. All
other references appear in footnotes. Transliterations from a myriad of world
scripts comply as closely as possible to conventions used in my constant com-
panion: The World’s Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William
Bright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Non-English words in common
use, where diacritics might be distracting, are left as they are. Proper names,
similarly, are given in the source language except where common use prevails.
Some words, sometimes for clarification, sometimes maybe as talismans, appear
in the original scripts.
List of Figures
1. The Cyrus Cylinder, clay cylinder, 6th c. bce. British Museum 90920.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. 16
2. St John the Evangelist, mosaic, 6th c. ce. Ravenna, Basilica of San Vitale.
Museum of Ravenna, Cidm Archive. DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala, Florence. 18
3. British Library Newspaper Building, photograph, 2015. Boston Spa, Yorkshire.
Luke McKernan/flickr. 25
4. Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (London: E. Nutt, J. Roberts,
A. Dodd, and J. Graves, 1722), 40. Bodleian Library. Vet. A4 e.3659 (1). Photo:
© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 36
5. Epic of Gilgamesh, clay tablet, 7th c. bce. British Museum K.3375.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. 40
6. the Library of Ashurbanipal at the British Museum. Photo Dinendra Haria/
Shutterstock. 42
7. Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Paperbacks), plaster and steel, 1997. New York,
MOMA. © 2021. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, NewYork/Scala,
Florence. 44
8. Peter Bruegel, Tower of Babel, oil on panel, c.1565. Rotterdam, Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen. Alamy Stock Photo. 51
9. Cornelis Anthonisz (Teunissen), Fall of the Tower of Babel, etching, 1547.
Photo: Joerg P. Anders. © 2021. Photo Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur für
Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin. 52
10. Philippe de Galle, The Tower of Babel, engraving, 1569. Collection Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Purchase with support of Stichting
Lucas van Leyden/Creditline photographer: Studio Tromp. 53
11. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, ink on vellum, 11th c. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin, 2079. 59
12. Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, oil on canvas, 1605–6. Rome,
Galleria Borghese. 60
13. Opernplatz, photo. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy
of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. 68
14. Micha Ullmann, The Empty Library, wood, plaster, white paint, glass, electric
lighting, air, silence, 1995. Berlin, Bebelplatz. Angela Serena Gilmour/Alamy
Stock Photo. 69
15. Theses wider den undeutschen Geist, poster, 1933. Würzburg, Staatsarchiv,
I 21 C 14/I. Akten der Deutschen Studentenschaft. 76
xviii List of Figures
16. Berruguete, St Dominic and the Albigenses, tempura and oil on wood, c.1495.
Madrid, Museo del Prado. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado. 95
17. Ludwig Rabus, Historien des Heiligen Auserwählten Gottes Zeugen (Straßburg,
1557). Woodcut. The History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo. 101
18. Eustache Le Sueur, St Paul Preaching at Ephesus, oil on wood panel, 1649. Paris,
Musées du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/René-Gabriel Ojeda. 103
19. Hans Holbein the Younger, Luther as Hercules Germanicus, woodcut c.1522.
Zürich, Zentralbibliothek. 107
20. Diebold Lauber, Life and Times of the Emperor Sigismund, manuscript c.1450.
Private collection. Album/Alamy Stock Photo. 120
21. Il Petrarca (Venice: Domenico Giglio, 1552), fos. 214v–215r. Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University. 122
22. the Mezquita in Córdoba, 8th c. ce, photo by the author. 130
23. the mihrab at Córdoba, 10th c. ce, photo by the author. 130
24. fragment of Amajur MS, kufic script, ink and colour on parchment, 9th c.
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, EA 1996.53. © Ashmolean Museum. 136
25. Ibn al-Bawwab Qur’an, naskh and rayhan script, ink and gold pigment on
paper, 1000 ce (391 ah). Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, MS 1431. 137
26. Öljaytü Qur’an (Mosul), muhaqqaq script, ink and gold pigment on paper,
1310–11 (710 ah). British Library MS Or 4595, fos. 2v–3r. © British Library
Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images. 139
27. Comares Palace (‘Hall of the Ambassadors’), Granada, Alhambra, 1333–54.
Photo by the author. 144
28. Mexuar Oratory, Granada, Alhambra, 1363–7. Photo by the author. 146
29. Upper text: piyyut ̣im by Yannai, c.10th c. ce, Under text: Origen’s Hexapla on
Psalms 22, majuscule, 7th c. ce. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection
T-S 12.182. University of Cambridge, University Library. 151
30. The Parma Bible, ink and gold pigment on vellum, Toledo, 1277. Parma,
Biblioteca Palatina, MS Parm 2668, fo. 7v. Biblioteca Palatina/Center for Jewish
Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 153
31. Sefer Torah, 19th c. scroll of the Torah, with wooden rollers, Berlin, Jewish
Museum. PRISMA ARCHIVO/Alamy Stock Photo 158
32. Amulet, silver, 17th c. (?). British Museum 1867,0709.5. © The Trustees of the
British Museum. 159
33. Matthew Paris (illuminator), Socrates and Plato, in a collection of
fortune-telling tracts, ink and pigment on parchment, 13th c. Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Ashmole 304, fol. 31v. Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University
of Oxford. Terms of use: CC-BY-NC 4.0. 167
34. Book of the Dead of Hunefer, painted papyrus, 19th Dynasty (1292–1189 bce).
British Museum, EA9901,3. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 170
List of Figures xix
35. detail of hieroglyphics, Rosetta Stone, stela in grey and pink granodiorite,
Ptolemaic, 196 bce. British Museum EA24. © The Trustees of the British
Museum. 172
36. Hangul script explained in hanja, Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye, printed
paper, 1443. Seoul, Gansong Art Museum, National Treasure No. 70.
CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. 182
37. Jikji, printed ink on paper, 1377. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
MS Coréen 109. 185
38. Diamond Sūtra inscription on Mount Tai, Shandong. Photo Rolf Müller. 190
39. Poster of Mao above Red Guards with Little Red Books. Shawshots/Alamy
Stock Photo. 193
40. René Magritte, ‘Les mots et les images’, printed book, 1929. Brussels,
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2020. © 2021. Photothèque R. Magritte/Adagp Images, Paris,/SCALA,
Florence. 198
41. Rāmāyaṇa, watercolour on paper, 1649–52 CE. British Library Add. MS
15296 (1–2). © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images. 200
42. Frans Hogenberg, Beeldenstorm, engraving, 1566. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.
Hogenberg/Rijksmuseum. 203
43. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Predella, oil on wood panel, 1547. Wittenberg,
Stadtkirche. ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo. 204
44. Georges Braque, Fruit Dish and Glass, charcoal and cut-and-pasted printed
wallpaper with gouache on white laid paper, autumn 1912. New York,
Metropolitan Museum, 2016.237.33. © 2021. Image copyright The Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. 207
45. Khludov Psalter, ink and paint on parchment, 9th c. Moscow, Historical
Museum, MS 129, fo. 67r. 212
46. Lindisfarne Gospels, ink and pigment on parchment, 8th c. London,
British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV, fo. 26v. © British Library Board.
All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images. 221
47. Echternach Gospels, ink and pigment on parchment, 8th c. Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, MS. lat 9389, fo. 18v. Bridgeman Images. 223
48. Codex Amiatinus, ink and pigment on parchment, 8th c. Florence, Biblioteca
Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatino 1, fo. 5r. 224
49. Domhnach Airgid, silver, 8th c. remodelled in 14th. Dublin, National Museum
of Ireland, NMI R.2834. National Museum of Ireland/Matrinvl. 226
50. Albrecht Dürer, Apocalypse: St John the Divine, woodcut, 1498. Washington,
DC, NGA. Albrecht Dürer/National Gallery of Art. 234
51. Missale, hand-painted printed book, 1516. York Minster Library, Stainton 12,
sig. N2v. Kind permission granted by The Chapter of York. 237
xx List of Figures
52. Horae, ink and paint on vellum, Flemish for English use, 15th c. London,
Lambeth Palace Library, MS 496, fo. 54v. Image courtesy of Lambeth Palace
Library/Photographed by The Courtauld Institute of Art. 242
53. Shakespeare, Second Folio, 1632. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare
Library, shelf mark: STC 22274 Fo.2 no. 07, sig. y6v. Used by permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library. 245
54. Huang Yong Ping, The History of Chinese Art and A Concise History of Modern
Painting Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes, 1987/1993, Chinese
teabox, paper pulp, glass, 77 cm. × 48 cm. × 70 cm. overall. Collection Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2001 250
55. Qin Chong, Birthday II, paper, ink, ash, 2002. Venice Biennale. Art Studio Berlin. 254
56. Photograph of Steve Jobs launching the original iPhone, 9 January 2007.
Paul Sakuma/AP/Shutterstock. 258
57. Shakespeare, Second Folio, 1632. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare
Library: STC 22274 Fo. 2 no. 07, title page sig. πA2r. Used by permission
of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 260
58. Prayer-Book, London, Imperial War Museum, K 85/1847, Binding. 276
59. Ragyndrudis Codex, ink on vellum, 8th c. Fulda, Landesbibliothek, Codex
Bonifatianus 2. University and State Library of Fulda. 280
60. Antonello da Messina, Virgin Annunciate, oil on wood panel, 1476. Munich,
Alte Pinakothek. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei
(DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN:
3936122202 286
61. Thomas Patch, Laurence Sterne as Tristram Shandy: ‘And When Death Himself
Knocked at my Door’, etching, 1769. New York, Metropolitan Museum,
2013.939. A. Hyatt Mayor Purchase Fund, Marjorie Phelps Starr Bequest,
2013/Metropolitan Museum of Art. 287
62. Vincenzo Foppa, Young Cicero Reading, fresco mounted on canvas, 15th c, from
Palazzo del Banco Mediceo, Milan. London, Wallace Collection. © Wallace
Collection, London, UK/Bridgeman Images. 296
63. Shirin Neshat, Unveiling, black and white photograph, 1993, detail. New York,
Hemispheric Institute. Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., photograph
by Michael Katchen. 300
64. Sydney Parkinson, Portrait of a New Zealand Man, ink on paper, 1768–70.
From A Collection of Drawings made in the Countries visited by Captain Cook
in his First Voyage. 1768–1771. London, British Library Add. MS 23920. 304
65. Damaged Head of Aphrodite, marble, 1st c. ce. Athens, National Archaeological
Museum. Oleg Kozlov/Alamy Stock Photo. 307
66. The burning of Bucer’s and Fagius’ bones and books, woodcut, John Foxe,
Actes and Monuments (London: John Day, 1570). Retrieved from the Atla
Digital Library. 312
List of Figures xxi
67. Goya, Pr que sabia hacer Ratones, brush, bougainvillea and brown ink wash,
bougainvillea pen ink on paper, 1810–11. Madrid, Museo del Prado, D04055.
© Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado. 314
68. Mitsushige Lotus Sūtra, handscroll, ink, colour, and gold on paper, 1257 ce.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 53.7.3. 317
69. Sūtra container, bronze, 11th–12th c. ce. Pepe’ekeo, Hawaii, Kaikodo Gallery.
© 2020 Kaikodo. 319
70. Cuthbert Gospel, binding, birch boards covered with decorated red goatskin,
8th c. British Library Add. MS 89000. © British Library Board. All Rights
Reserved/Bridgeman Images. 322
71. Qur’an, palimpsest, ink on parchment, upper level 8th c. (?), lower
level 7th c. (?). Yemen, Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt, Ṣanʽā’ 1 or DAM 01-27.1. © Stanford
University. 327
72. Photograph of the Old Public Library, Cincinnati, OH. © Public Library of
Cincinnati. 335
73. J.-B. Louvion, Ce mélange est affreux, mais il est nécessaire, from Journal de
l’autre monde, engraving, 1794. Ville de Paris/Bibliothèque historique. 346
74. Robespierre guillotinant le bourreau, engraving, 1994. Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France. 347
75. Paul Klee, Geist eines Briefes, pigmented paste on newspaper, 1937. New York,
MOMA. © 2021. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala,
Florence. 349
76. Willey Reveley, Elevation, section, and plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon,
1791. London, UCL Special Collections, Bentham Papers Box 119, fos. 119–30.
gibson1Alamy Stock Photo. 366
77. The Satanic Verses in Bradford, January 1989. Photograph: Asadour Guzelian. 371
78. Stefan Zweig, Amok, charred copy. Political installation, ‘Lesen gegen das
Vergessen auf den Berliner Bebelplatz’, 2012. 384
79. Rongorongo; Tablet B (Aruku-Kurenga): verso, rosewood, 43 cm × 16 cm.
Rome, Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Catherine Orliac
and the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. 388
80. Anselm Kiefer, Für Paul Celan: Aschenblume, 2006. Oil, acrylic, emulsion,
shellac, and burned books on canvas, 330 cm × 760 cm. © Anselm Kiefer.
Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg. Photo: Charles Duprat. 403
List of Plates
Plate 1: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Tower of Babel, oil on wood panel, 1563. Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Plate 2: Muhammad ibn Mubādir, illumination facing Q 2, ink (kufic script), coloured pig-
ment and gold on paper, Cairo, c.1306–10. Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, MS Is
1457.1, fo. 1r.
Plate 3: Book of Kells, ink and gold pigment on parchment, ninth century. Dublin, Trinity
College Library, MS A. I. [58], fo. 34r.
Plate 4: Jacques-Louis David, Marat at his Last Breath, oil on canvas, 1793. Brussels,
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. PAINTING/Alamy Stock Photo.
List of Plates

Plate 1 ‘The Library of Babel’, Bruegel the Elder, Tower of Babel, oil on wood panel, 1563. Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Plate 2 ‘Islamic carpet page’; Opening page of illumination facing q 2, by Muhammad

ibn Mubādir, Cairo, c.1306–10; Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, MS Is 1457.1, fo. 1r
Plate 3 ‘Christian carpet page’; Trinity College Library, MS A. I. [58], fo. 34r
Plate 4 ‘Writer as martyr’; Jacques-Louis David, Marat at his Last Breath, 1793.
Brussels, Musées Royaux
DE AT H OF T H E B O OK
tota enim philosophorum vita, ut ait Socrates, commentatio mortis est

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (45 bce)
1
Is There a Future for the Book?
Wonder is never far from terror. At first the internet presaged utopia, a brave new
world of freedom. Of a sudden, chains on human knowledge evaporated into thin
air. ‘We cannot eliminate inequality or abuse of power, but through technological
inclusion we can help transfer power into the hands of individual people and
trust that they will take it from there’, says The New Digital Age (2013), with
clunky optimism, co-authored by Google’s humanitarian Chairman.1 As digital
books coincided with a new millennium, iconoclasm met prognosis in latent
triumphalism. The first-ever issue of Wired in 1993 boasted: ‘Books once hoarded
in subterranean stacks will be scanned into computers and made available to
anyone, anywhere, almost instantly.’2 In July 2010, Amazon declared Kindle digital
books outsold print (hardcover and paperback combined). Paper and moving
type, it appeared, would turn into memories, as if antiquarian pastimes, like codi-
cology or calligraphy. Books in postmodernity are outdated. Most people gain
most information from digital sources, from smartphones or social media even
more than laptops. Young people especially, literate, sophisticated, and intelligent,
may never have bought a newspaper, or rarely read a physical book all the way
through. Information is gained, or constituted, by other means. Meanwhile in
October 2004, ironically at the Frankfurt Book Fair (which dates back to 1454,
just after Johannes Gutenberg built his press), Wired’s prophecy came to life in
Google Books. The ambitions of this project are totalitarian: nothing less than a
database of all the books in the world.
Today, the project appears less utopia than dystopia, as it shatters through
copyright and property law, threatens public libraries with destruction, and
reproduces error upon error in merciless transcription. Now we tell ourselves we
live in an age of the death of the book. An early prophet of doom was Margaret
Atwood, speaking in 2007 to the theme ‘Digitize or Die’. She advocated damage
limitation toward new technology.3 An elegy for her beloved personal library met
deterministic fatalism about the future. In the decades since Atwood, that minimal
hope offered by the word ‘or’ has diminished: we are all digitized, and we are still
dying. Even as Atwood promoted the need to digitize, digitization was sucking
our souls. In that year, Shoshona Zuboff conducted research into Google now
present in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).4 If the book is a machine,
Google owns the rights, and also the machine that reads it. We are deluded to call
ourselves its readers. Artificial intelligence drives each end of the process.
4 Bibliophobia
Already by 2007, algorithms supposedly designed to search knowledge

mirrored back onto our selves. Facebook reads us, not the other way around. It is
difficult not to feel apocalyptic: fear of obsolescence fights hand in hand with fear
of oblivion. Which will come first? Such sentiments are not new to the twenty-
first century: they feature in early twentieth-century modernism. Filippo Marinetti
prophesied that books were fated to disappear, along with cathedrals and museums;
in a Futurist manifesto of 1913, he called for ‘a typographic revolution directed
against the idiotic and nauseating concepts of the outdated and conventional
book’.5 Marinetti’s rebellion against the standard typeset page also beset Gertrude
Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. In an opposite plane, tradition regrouped.
F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1936 bemoaned the consequences of cinema for literary
authors: ‘the power of the written word subordinated to another power, a more
glittering, grosser power’.6 It is possible to feel, four generations later, that the pre-
dictions look antiquated, like ‘the death of the novel’ that Walter Benjamin pro-
claimed in his 1930 essay Krisis des Romans; or ‘the death of the author’, in Roland
Barthes’s enduring sally of 1967.7 In comparison to climate change or surveillance
capitalism, the survival of books in printed form appears perhaps a trivial matter.
Report of the death of the book is exaggerated. We should have known: the
Torah foretold the false prophet as ‘the dreamer of dreams’.8 Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī,
in the ninth-century Treatise of the Intellect, said prophecy is not about fact but
imagination.9 The front cover of The Future of the Book in the Digital Age, pub-
lished in 2006, depicts a machine on top of a pile of hardbacks, in victory.10 The
machine is an iPod, a device nobody now uses. I first heard bloomsdoom proph-
esied as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, by the City Librarian of Birmingham:
strange how common bibliophobia is among librarians. Yet the technology she
predicted would destroy the age of paper—the microfiche—is a thing of the past.
Most people today have never seen the monstrous contraption of the microfiche
reader. Such is the irony of technological change and desuetude. In the 1990s, in
an early case of memes going viral, a spoof email went the rounds proposing a
new device for storing and retrieving information, called BOOK 1.0.11 The device,
it was said, was environmentally friendly, requiring no power source other than a
human hand. The email also advertised a new device PENCIL 2.0, a ‘manual
input device’, now in development, with which a user could make notes into
BOOK 1.0. The joke may yet be reversed, as digital technologies fight against
newer technologies in the ever-expanding Matrix. Paper may be old-fashioned
but its capacity to last is well proven. Indeed, twentieth-century paper is the least
well-lasting; older books survive better than new ones; manuscripts on vellum
better still. How email will be archived in the libraries of the future, including the
one about BOOK 1.0, no one yet knows.
This book is not about the e-book. The Kindle is a passing phase, a parasitic
substitute for existing formats. If a new technology is central to my argument it is
the smartphone. It might be said that it is a not a ‘book’ at all, yet in addition to
Is There a Future for the Book? 5
other functions it takes the place of a personal library of physical books. The
Kindle War and Peace is not different in kind from an Oxford World’s Classics
paperback; but literature is not the only model for a book. Twenty-five years ago,
any house in London, however indifferent to Tolstoy, would have contained a
number of paperbacks: an A to Z, to navigate the local streets; a Yellow Pages to
find a plumber or a new restaurant; a few cookbooks and travel guides.
Somewhere would be a pile of newspapers and magazines. If you ran out of infor-
mation you took a bus to a public library. Now all such things cohabit a smart-
phone inside the library of the World Wide Web. Everything about a smartphone
is new-fangled, yet it performs functions forever old: a storage device for infor-
mation. Like books, smartphones promise access to ideas: objects of desire, or a
passage to free agency.
Prevailing argument in the last decades assumes the digital book is completely
new, conceptualizing the relation of digital to physical as one of replacement. Yet
this is not what has happened. So far, most people choose to use the two alongside
each other. The same happens in music, where streaming coincides with a revival
of vinyl, and new interaction between live and recorded performance. All the arts
react to the energies of digital media. Yet alongside this is a curious fear, or para-
noia. Digital media combine strange forms of intimacy and exchangeability, with
almost unimaginable distance or loss. Where is your text? It is on my phone, but
then again, it is not. I received it from you, but then, you are not there. I was
reminded of this when I had the necessity of clearing my parents’ home, a while
ago. Loss combined with consolation, as I found my parents’ and grandparents’
letters and notes. The question struck: what will survive of me? For much of my life
the telephone was the place where I spoke to my parents. Many significant
moments of life are recorded on SMS or Skype, but I don’t know where that is kept;
some of my most important emails I can no longer access, even if the US govern-
ment can. Anxiety of estrangement from the archive of daily life is pervasive.
As the digital age came into being it aroused euphoria and hostility, mixed with
panic and experimentation. Many people reacted as if human beings had never
felt this way before. Being a historian of the early printed book, I felt a sense of
familiarity. On 12 March 1455, Eneo Silvio Piccolomini, secretary to the Holy
Roman Emperor (and soon Pope Pius II) wrote that the previous October he had
seen five folded sheets from a Bible, ‘executed in extremely clean and correct let-
tering’.12 Almost as Gutenberg printed his second book, people said print had
changed the world. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Papal Legate in Germany from
1446, was an early enthusiast. Martin Luther in his Table Talk called it God’s last
and greatest gift, with a sting in the tail heralding the end of the world.13 Print, like
digital books, offered non-finite freedom, the potential omnipresence of writing.
This was not true: early printed books had small print runs. When Luther’s
95 Theses appeared, only a few thousand people saw a copy of the original
broadsheet. Yet the authorities feared it was impossible to get rid of it. Indeed,
6 Bibliophobia
Protestants regretted that the infernal machine had replaced the viva vox of
preaching.14 I sensed a synergy between overpowering feelings of five hundred
years ago, and those of my generation. I wanted to understand why the book per
se creates phenomena of fear, or violence.
Captain Henry Bell, agent in Germany for the Stuart kings James I and Charles
I, translated Luther’s Table Talk into English and had it printed in 1652.15 The
frontispiece shows Luther with a small book in his massive hands, a battering ram
of a Bible at his feet. In the preface Bell tells a very strange story. Pope Gregory
XIII, hearing of the ‘last divine discourses’ of the heretic, asked Rudolph II to
make an Edict throughout the Holy Roman Empire, burning all printed copies of
it in existence, and sentencing to death anyone keeping it at home. Years later in
1626, a German acquaintance of Bell, Casparus van Sparr, doing some building
works in his grandfather’s old house, dug some deep foundations. Lo and behold,
a last lost copy of Luther’s book happily turned up, in an obscure hole, wrapped in
linen cloth, covered with beeswax. Europe now was gripped by a ferocious war of
religion, the Thirty Years War, so the book went to Bell in England for safekeep-
ing. Having perfect German, Bell begins to translate; he is slow at the work, but a
ghost appears in a dream to hurry him up; he goes to prison for debt, which gives
him opportunity for writing. Finally, he gives the text to Archbishop William
Laud, who calls it a work of ‘eternal memory’, and Parliament grants it a licence.
Even now, Lady Luck intervenes: the English Civil War erupts, and Laud is
imprisoned and beheaded for treason in 1645. No wonder Bell calls his book,
after this fabulous farrago of tall talk, a ‘miraculous preservation’. If only a tenth of
it is true, it is an allegory of the life of books.
I have called my book Bibliophobia in reference to the long history, as old as
books, of their destruction, literal and metaphorical. It captures a dark side of the
book, too easily idealized. Gutenberg’s print revolution gets equated with enlight-
enment and progress. Bibliophiles hopefully outnumber bibliophobes. My subject
is not only hostility, but a not unrelated history of bibliomania or what I will call
bibliofetishism. We need not be students of Freud to recognise desire and anxiety
in the same object. In Freud’s case of Little Hans in 1909, a five-year-old boy has a
phobia for horses and will not leave the house.16 ‘Bibliophobia’ is not in any clin-
ical list of phobias or psychoanalytic study of the Oedipus Complex. However,
Freud’s vocabulary of repression or aversion helps to analyse the medium of
letters. Of special interest are ways in which material books invest embodiment
and personality—or by obverse, fears of destruction or invasion of identity. The
final act of Hamlet begins with a prince and some gravediggers; it ends with a litany
over his corpse. In the graveyard Hamlet muses on a skull: ‘That skull had a
tongue in it, and could sing once’. No written record remains, but if it did, writing
matter is dead skin: ‘Is not parchment made of sheepskins?’17 Vitam mortuo reddo
(‘I give life to the dead’) is the motto in a famous early woodcut of the printing
press in action; in French is added below ‘I delight the dead’.18 Laurence Sterne,
rewriting Hamlet in Tristram Shandy, has Tristram cry ‘Alas, Poor YORICK!’, then
leaves two pages printed solid black in mourning.19 In the life of Yukio Mishima
in Tokyo in November 1970, this assumed ritual form. Shortly after finishing The
Decay of the Angel, the fourth novel in Sea of Fertility, he recited death poems
before performing seppuku.20
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu begins with the narrator as a
child trying to get to sleep while reading a book. ‘Je voulais poser le volume’: he
wants to put away the book, but it has become merged with his consciousness.21
‘I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read.’22 In
the course of completing the novel between 1909 and 1922, writing merges in
Proust’s world with the experience of dying. In Ulysses, Joyce begins the chapter
‘Calypso’ with Leopold Bloom eating and ends with him shitting. In Jeri Johnson’s
words, Bloom is ‘a bodied text, a corpus’.23 When he enters the jakes, Bloom picks
up a book of stories to read; Joyce’s brother Stanislaus thought it a joking self-
reference to a scrap of fictional juvenilia.24 Having finished his business, Bloom
recycles the pages on his own body: ‘He tore away half the prize story sharply and
wiped himself with it’.25 The book incorporates his identity. This is not a modern
idea: Aristotle compares literary form with a well-shaped body in the Poetics.26
Horace begins his Ars Poetica with a metaphor of an ill-formed book mixing up a
human head and foot.27
The internet, connoting the social projection of personality on a global scale,
with corresponding anxiety of identity theft, is again germane. Desire to eliminate
the book feeds off the power it contains. ‘Knowledge is power’ is a phrase mis-
attributed to Michel Foucault: it made him laugh, he said, ‘since studying their
relation is precisely my problem’.28 The first systematic bibliocaust took place in
the name of Qin Shi Huang, First Emperor of China (Ying Zheng). An edict of
213 bce, composed by Li Si, himself an author and noted calligrapher, ordered
the destruction of historical records, philosophy, and literature, including key
Confucian texts.29 Li Si thought all texts dealing even tangentially with politics
should be possessed only by the state. Free-thinking is the enemy of progress.
The event came to be known as ‘the burning of books and burying of scholars’
(焚書坑儒). The story, as told in the Records of the Grand Historian a hundred
years later, may not be accurate in detail. It is disputed whether the burying alive
of 460 Confucian scholars is a mistranslation; medicine and agriculture and
prophecy may have escaped the ban. However, many books certainly were
destroyed, while (in a nice touch, reminiscent of modern copyright libraries) two
copies of each text were simultaneously deposited in the Imperial Library, the one
place able to keep them.30 Li Si’s place in the history of censorship is secure. It is
my argument that the nexus recorded in the Records of the Grand Historian of fire
and burial, and of book and body, is also no accident.
To make this case I shall range across a whole history of written artefacts, and a
broad global range of books. I therefore begin with an apology, that as a scholar
8 Bibliophobia
largely of literature and of the printed book, I will describe many things in which
I am no expert. However, at the heart of Bibliophobia is not so much a scientific
history as a pathology of the symptoms of knowledge and oblivion, or past and
future, invested in ideas of writing, books, and libraries. Literature runs like a
river through it. It works as a palimpsest of similar things, rather than by linear
chronology or comprehensive study.
Benjamin and Barthes both saw mortality inscribed in symbolic systems. The
French title chosen by Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, puns on Le morte d’Arthur by
Sir Thomas Malory, one of the first books printed by William Caxton. The death
of Arthur, like that of Achilles, or Jing of Jin (or for that matter the death of Jesus),
is not only a famous narrative but a figure for a principle of narrative. In the mod-
ernist novel (in Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick, Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, or
Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies) a physical book is a trope for how reading pro-
cesses imitate a life’s course. Mrs Ramsay ‘turned the page; there were only a few
lines more, so that she would finish the story, though it was past bed-time’.31
While Proust is admired for transcending time, his book accepts mortality.32
‘Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men’, Proust writes in
Le Temps retrouvé.33 The book embodies us: in consuming it we die.
In 1935, in exile in Paris, against a background of Nazi tyranny in Germany
and imminent collapse in liberal values, Benjamin wrote a first draft of Das
Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. It marked, Eric
Hobsbawm says, a transformation in modern experience of the arts.34 A mani-
festo for modernism, it critiqued fascist culture by asserting art’s revolutionary
status ‘in an age of mechanical reproduction’. A Latin motto used by Futurists,
Fiat ars, pereat mundus (‘Let art be made, though the world perishes’) forms an
epigraph: it exposes with equanimity ‘the Führer cult’ of his own nation and the
spurious fetishes of Marinetti. While acknowledging the effect of mass media,
Benjamin argues for emancipation through challenge rather than decline and fall.
Revised in French in 1936, and in German in 1939, his work proposed photog-
raphy and film as a release from ‘genuineness’ (Echtheit) in art.35 In the process,
art found social function: no longer imprisoned by ‘ritual’, it entered the domain
of the political.
‘In principle’, Benjamin says, ‘the work of art has always been reproducible.
What man has made, man has always been able to make again.’36 However, the
concept of the artwork has been characterized up to now by its existence in ‘the
here and now’ (das Hier und Jetzt des Kunstwerks): ‘its unique existence in the
place where it is at this moment’ (p. 5). Presence defines art, the inviolability of
which is threatened by reproduction. Art has been reproduced throughout history:
the ancient Greeks cast or embossed bronzes, terracottas and coins; engraving
and lithography (from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century) speeded such
processes up. Yet something new is afoot. Photographs and moving images
radicalize meaning, by making the eye work without mediation, no longer subject
to the hand. Something different results:
We can encapsulate what stands out here by using the term ‘aura’. We can say:
what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by technological
means is its aura. (p. 7)
Here, Benjamin digresses into a history of Western art before modernity. The pat-
ina of a bronze, or provenance of a fifteenth-century manuscript, establishes
authenticity. This embeds artworks in tradition, though understanding changes
over time. A classical statue of Venus, an object of worship to its original Athenian
audience, in the Middle Ages could be seen as a dangerous idol. However, in both
cases, what is at stake is ‘singularity (Einzigkeit) or, to use another word, its aura
(Aura)’.37 While the oldest art was magical or religious, ‘aura’ did not disappear
with secularization in the Renaissance. Ritual function transferred to a different
form of Einzigkeit, such as a theory of beauty or sublimity. Indeed, Benjamin sees
art taking on religion’s mantle at the Enlightenment. Here he cites G. W. F. Hegel in
his Lectures on Aesthetics: ‘art stands on one and the same ground as religion’.38
Only as revolutions in reproductive processes arose did art feel a crisis. The sign of
this was the vogue of l’art pour art (a term Benjamin cites in French, ‘art for art’s
sake’). This can be called a ‘theology of art’, or even a negative theology, in which
the ‘pure’ art form is felt to be beyond social context or even subjective origin.
What concerns me here is how Benjamin’s extraordinary theory of mechanical
reproduction relates to the idea of the book. In one sense it seems irrelevant: one of
the clichés of cultural history is that mechanization of the book occurred more than
500 years ago, in the invention of a printing press in the German Rhineland.39
Indeed, even this is a fabrication of Western vanity: paper was invented in China in
the year 105 ce; wood block printing appeared there in the sixth century; book
binding in about 1000 ce; and moveable type was invented by Bi Sheng in 1041
ce.40 Of the book, even more than the work of art, it can be said that it has ‘always
been reproducible’. Indeed, it is of its nature technological. Long before print, books
were manufactured, on a quasi-industrial scale, producing identical ‘copies’ of one
thing. Francesco di Ser Nardo in the fourteenth century promised to make a hun-
dred copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy in a single order, a similar magnitude to
seventeenth-century print runs.41 One copy of Dante is (in ideal terms) no different
from any other. That is what makes it a book. Michael Suarez and Henry
Woudhuysen in The Book: A Global History argue that the term ‘book’ implies ‘great
diversity of textual forms’.42 These embrace rolls as well as bound books, using pixels
as well as ink; they include newspapers or wax tablets, sheet music or maps.
A book is never bound by material existence as an object: it can be copied a
billion times and remain the same. Such is the true sense of Barthes on ‘the death
10 Bibliophobia
of the author’, however traduced (by friends and enemies) to mean something
more sinister or banal. As we read words on a page, ‘the voice loses its origin, the
author enters his own death, writing begins’.43 Writing, to be writing, must be
legible to any reader, regardless of origin or creation. Whereas speech escapes a
bodily mouth to be heard by the ear, writing is an information system belonging
to no one, a medium of its own making. It is abstract to producer and receiver;
and equally meaningful to both. I can, of course, know who wrote a writing, or
infer from it a ‘tone of voice’ or style, but I can also (in principle) follow it without
such context. Indeed, much writing survives anonymously, with no sign of where
or when it arose. Provided a relevant linguistic system has been deciphered, there
is no bar to interpreting. The first poet whose name is recorded is Enhedduana of
Ur in Sumeria, priestess of the goddess Inanna.44 Yet we could read her poems, or
those of Sappho, without knowing anything about her, beyond a grammar of gen-
der or proper name.
Writing is so ubiquitous in human societies, we often forget to ask what it is.
The most extended theoretical model is De la grammatologie by Jacques Derrida
(1967). The opening chapter is ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of
Writing’. What does he mean by ‘la fin du livre’?45 Derrida is not inclined to state-
ments of fact, alluding instead to a mood of Armageddon (long before the digital
book) in Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). McLuhan heralded
an end to print, a new age of television and computer. It was cause for celebration:
print suffocated the oral and aural. Print’s hegemony reduces life to linearity, like a
galley of type, so ‘All experience is segmented and must be processed sequentially’.46
McLuhan maker of zeitgeist was pessimistic: ‘The world has become a computer’;
or ‘an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction’.47 He felt
triumph at the doom of print. Derrida treats talk of ‘cette mort du livre’ (p. 18)
with heavy irony: ‘this death of the civilization of the book, about which so much
is said, and which manifests itself particularly through a convulsive proliferation of
libraries’ (p. 8). What Derrida analyses is not the book’s extinction but ‘exhaustion’.
Underlying this is not desire for a return to pure speech, unencumbered by print
or writing, but the opposite. At the centre of Derrida’s argument is a reversal of
what he sees as a perennial philosophical bias in favour of speech at the expense
of writing.
To summarize this bias he adopts two brief epigraphs: one, a eulogy from
Friedrich Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy, to ‘Socrates, he who does not write’;
and the other a definition of the nature of writing from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Essai sur l’origine des langues: writing is nothing more than ‘le supplément à la
parole’.48 Philosophy, Derrida argues, has made language synonymous with
speech, since speech can be taken as an uncomplicated carrier of thought, con-
sciousness, identity, experience, subjectivity and so on. Above all, speech signifies
la présence, the presence of the speaker who is thereby endorsed and authorized
as a human subject. This ‘metaphysics of presence’ he famously dubbed
‘logocentrism’. It has served as a tool of oppression for ‘at least some twenty centu-
ries’: at the very foundation of patriarchalism, colonialism, and capitalism.
The pronouncements of Derrida on such questions are often received as a form
of holy writ, a preposterous result since it repeats the structural bias Derrida
means to lay bare. Here I am interested not in what Derrida says about ‘logocen-
trism’ but rather ‘grammatology’. By this he means neither a history nor a philoso-
phy of writing. He takes the word from I. J. Gelb’s classic, A Study of Writing: The
Foundations of Grammatology (1952). Gelb eschewed traditional approaches
written from a ‘descriptive-historical point of view’. Instead, he revealed funda-
mental principles in writing as an idea.
Gelb argues for a science of writing, to be called ‘grammatology’, independent
of other linguistic sciences. Writing is a system of signs in its own right. Derrida
turns this into a philosophical principle, making writing an emancipatory value
in language. Shorn of identification with the authority of the voice, writing stands
for freedom. Within this, features of writing traditionally taken as part of its
inferiority to speech—exteriority, embodiment, equivocation—are revealed as a
commitment to risk, energy, or creativity. Here, writing’s ‘iterable’ function—a
precondition for Derrida of all communication—becomes its latent power. Far
from voice being the origin of language’s potential, it is only as the link with voice
is broken that language comes into play.49 The term Derrida consistently uses for
this is différance, a neologism to suggest how ‘presence’ within language is never
perfectly represented, but instead is prone to decay and erasure.50
What connection can be made between this and Benjamin’s manifesto on
works of art? Derrida’s ‘iterability’ shares with Benjamin’s Reproduzierbarkeit an
iconoclastic attitude towards the primacy of identity, presence, authority, inten-
tion, meaning, in accounts of literary or artistic valuation. In this context,
Benjamin’s metaphor of die Aura invites investigation. The word Aura in German,
as in English, is an ineffable residue of a Greek root carelessly left in a Latin
equivalent. Greek α ρα means ‘breath’, or ‘breeze’, passing to Italian (such as
Francesco Petrarca’s Rime Sparse).51 In philosophical fourteenth-century English,
‘aura’ was used by John Trevisa for a gentle wind. From here it dropped from the
language, never used by Shakespeare, and by Milton only in Latin.52 Revived in
the eighteenth century, it expresses a sensory perception almost impossible to
verbalize: the aroma of blood, the respiration of flowers, the touch of the wind.
From thence it diverges, on the one hand to suggest the spirit of something non-
physical (like ether); on the other, the physical character of something illusory or
even imaginary (the emanation of living things; or the mystical electricity or
‘mesmer’ given off by a dead body). The entry in the Oxford English Dictionary
frankly admits it is somewhere between word and pure metaphor, ‘a subtle eman-
ation or exhalation from any substance’ (OED, 2.a.).
Benjamin’s Aura is metaphorical, since plastic art can hardly hold ‘breath’. The
word connotes metaphysical quintessence, a quality by which a thing is known.
12 Bibliophobia
He shares Derrida’s antipathy toward the presence of a sovereign author, suggesting

a spectral stain of the holy inside artworks even after secularization. A Renaissance
madonna, transferred from an altar to the Galleria degli Ufizzi in Florence or
Musées du Louvre in Paris, keeps its halo. It is venerated by a crowd in a big
exhibition even though deconsecrated from its liturgical or devotional purpose.
‘Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in
cult’, Benjamin says. Yet ‘the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura
is never entirely separated from its ritual function’. It retains the feel of an ‘instru-
ment of magic (Zauberinstrument)’.53 Benjamin borrows from the resonant word
Max Weber used to explain religion in modernity: Entzauberung (‘disenchant-
ment’).54 Art in Benjamin retains its spell. In a footnote, Benjamin described its axis
of space/time as a paradox. Distance is the opposite of closeness: ‘the essence of
remoteness in an object is that it cannot be approached. Unapproachability is one
of the chief qualities of the cultic image’.55
A work of art yields to damage over time, or changes in use or context, or
transfers ownership, yet retains an essential ‘aura’. For this process, Benjamin
chooses a second metaphor: die Spur (‘the trace’). This attaches itself to an object
which once had an ‘aura’. Chemical or physical analysis reveal such ‘traces’, which
never attach to a reproduction, which lacks patina or residual pigmentation: its
physicality is brute fact, denuded of ‘aura’. It is significant to recall that ‘la trace’ is
Derrida’s term for the least possible residue of presence left in the written mark.
In characteristic fashion, Derrida reduces even this irreducible minimum to less
than nothing, not a presence but ‘. . . rather a simulacrum of a presence that dis-
locates, displaces, and refers beyond itself ’.56 The ‘trace’ (or Spur, in German
translations of Derrida) is the terminus of writing.
Modernity, Benjamin says, is the era of der Verfall der Aura (‘the decline of
aura’).57 In one view, books never possessed ‘aura’ as art does. However, even a
manuscript is not an ‘original’ like a work of plastic art. We refer to an authorial
copy as a ‘holograph’, but the handwriting of the author is still a ‘copy’, not the
work itself. The written work is inherently ‘iterable’. Benjamin creates a rigid
break between modern and pre-modern. Idealization of the past consigns to it a
presence that has been lost. Yet medieval art, in its time, suffered decay. A
madonna did not embody the Virgin Mary in a literal sense. It was a simulacrum,
only a transferred relic of the saint. Devotion was made to a person, not the
image. Alexander Nagel shows unexpected affinity between medieval art (serial
production, the ready-made) and modern.58 Conversely, post-Renaissance paint-
ing partakes of the relic: a piece by ‘the circle of Velázquez’ or ‘workshop of
Rembrandt’ increases in value ninety-fold if reattributed to the hand of a master.
Perhaps this will be taken as proof of Benjamin’s thesis. The equivalent to medi-
eval trade in bones is modern art’s capacity to treat everyday objects as totems of
a cult: Kazimir Malevich’s black square; Marcel Duchamp’s pissoir; Damien Hirst’s
dismembered shark. Andy Warhol meanwhile pastiches the reliquary in endless
‘genuine’ fakes for museums.
Artists’ stuff always costs money, but never in proportion to ‘market price’.59
There is no commercial reason for raw materials in a Duchamp to affect its valu-
ation more than a Giotto. Still, art’s failure to ratify Benjamin’s theory is relevant.
Photography and cinema have not replaced other art forms, no more than the
digital book erased the printed.60 In conceptual art, video is not treated as cin-
ema, but translated relic. Art is resaturated with ‘aura’, and fantasies of violence
cling to its making. Whether painted, literary, musical or architectural, art works
have in common a physical form attuned to metaphysical content, yet the rela-
tionship is at some level opaque to explanation or interpretation. Music, more
than the visual arts, has undergone modern transformation through reproduci-
bility. From the gramophone (patented in 1887) to the MP3 (in 1993), technolo-
gies once things of wonder are now superseded. Music metamorphosed from a
medium defined by performance to one defined by dissemination. However,
change was not so absolute: musical notation and printed music were revolution-
ary inventions in their day. Meanwhile, in an age of digital music, live perform-
ance has not lost its aura.
Theodor Adorno called form ‘sedimented content’, in order to express the
impossibility of more finite or less metaphorical assimilation.61 With the visual
arts or music, perhaps the mystery of relationship is apparent at some level.
Writing makes the exchange invisible. Language, as Derrida averred, only seems
to promise direct access to what it, too, cannot foreclose. Writing is an enigma:
blank letters shimmer forth meaning that is only explained by more blank letters.
Speech, out of the mouth of one person directly into the ear of another, enacts
presence more fully. But speech, too, at some level, is a confidence trick. What
gives vocalized sound guarantee of exact communication?
We get by, of course: we converse, read, make sense as we can. However,
Benjamin, Derrida, and Adorno, in different ways, suggest the sheer improbabil-
ity of human inter-communication or intersubjectivity. At the heart of this is a
doubt about subjectivity. Speech and writing imperfectly represent us, we fear, but
what model do we have for identity? Sigmund Freud in a beautifully speculative
essay of 1925 compared memory function to a recently invented device called Der
Wunderblock (‘the magic notepad’). He makes a two-way connection between
writing and the mind. When I mistrust memory, he says, I write something on a
piece of paper. The surface on which the note is preserved becomes as it were the
material part of my memory, the rest of which I carry with me invisibly. I can
reproduce this portion when I like, in the certainty it remains unaltered.62 Yet this
does not correspond to how memory works. ‘The sheet is filled with writing,
there is no room on it for any more notes.’63 However, in the mind, capacity for
new memories is not used up by existing memories: it receives unlimited supply
of new, even as it retains the old, permanently (if not reliably or unalterably).
In the century since this remarkable essay was published technologies have in
some way replicated Freud’s model, suggesting Freud as a wild prophet of the
digital. The iPad, it is said, is the Wunderblock made flesh. This misunderstands
14 Bibliophobia
Freud’s project. The technology for a Wunderblock is neither here nor there for
Freud, whatever his fascination that capitalism followed the tenets of psycho-
analysis. The Wunderblock is a metaphor, and must be, because human conscious-
ness (never mind the unconscious) is non-physical. Derrida in an essay on Freud
argued that writing is thus the perfect metaphor for psychic existence.64 This is as
much the case today, even with a far more complete neuroscientific explanation
of how physical neurones produce mental affects. Memory is an ideal example
since, for Freud, memory is an invisible trace of things once visible. Human
memory reveals the ‘magical’ capacity of mental apparatus for unlimited receptiv-
ity and preservation of durable traces. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding makes a similar metaphor for mind: a ‘white Paper, void of all
characters, without any Ideas’.65 The vast store of ideas comes only with experi-
ence. Paper books uncover a mystic connection between the mind’s void and the
brute fact of experience.
Writing is now around 5,000 years old. Ancient scripts can be divided into
seven different types, all of which appear to have independent origins: Sumerian
in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq); proto-Elamite in Elam (in modern Iran); proto-
Indic in the Indus valley (covering modern Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as
north-west India); Chinese in China; Egyptian in Egypt; Cretan in Crete and
Greece; and Hittite in Anatolia and Syria. To these can arguably be added an
eighth, Mesoamerican, although this writing is much later. At its heart, all writing
is a technology for the reproduction of language. The digital revolution currently
carries everything before it, but we have been there before, in a series of media
revolutions of which only the most obvious is the one called printing. Irnerio in
Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979) teaches himself how ‘not to
read’. It is a difficult task: ‘they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our
lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us’.66 What
would human history look like without the invention of writing? The secret,
Irnerio says, is not to refuse to look at the words on the page, but to stare so
intently that they disappear.
The book shows little sign of dying. Yet fear of books is as explicable as love.
Between a physical book and its ideal lies essential anxiety. Fantasies of destruc-
tion and rebirth revert, as we will see, to the beginnings of the book. Oblivion is
fundamental to writing, coming into focus, perhaps, at the advent of new media.
Our era is not the end of the book, but rather one in which the life of the book is
more apparent and therefore fragile and dangerous. It seems that media revolu-
tions produce both dreams of knowledge, and paranoia about oblivion. As cor-
onavirus threatens social relations, just as climate emergency threatens the planet
in which human beings dwell, information technology is at the centre of both,
whether in terms of solutions or else potential apocalypse.
Information technology is a new word—the Oxford English Dictionary gives
1952 as its first use—but it is not a new concept. The first media revolution was of
clay tablets, reed, and stylus, in the thirty-second century bce. Cuneiform is the
world’s first writing system. More than a dozen languages came to be written
using this system. Its name comes from Latin cuneus (‘wedge’), referring to a
characteristic shape made by a stylus when applied to clay by a scribe. Cuneiform
is not alphabetic and has no ‘letters’: it used between 600 and 1,000 characters to
write whole words, or parts of them; or syllables (or parts of them).67 The main
two languages in cuneiform were Sumerian and Akkadian. Sumerian has no known
relations, while Akkadian (existing in two dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian) is
related to Arabic and Hebrew. Hittite, written in a simplified cuneiform, is related
to Indian and European languages. Something of cuneiform’s versatility and suc-
cess is shown by its use into the first century ce: it lasted longer than the period
separating us from Christ. In a word in Arabic we see a glimmer of the old-
est past.68
A connection between writing and violence occurs in one of the earliest myths
of the origins of writing. Enmerkar, king of Uruk, invents cuneiform to send mes-
sages to other kings. The Lord of Aratta, in receipt, knowing that he cannot
understand it, submits.69 Writing spells potency before it is read. In another
Sumerian myth, Sargon, cupbearer of Ur-Zababa, king of Kish, tells a dream that
frightens the king. He sends Sargon to Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk, bearing a clay
tablet, concealed inside the first envelope. The message is his own death sentence
but is not conveyed.70 Sargon survives to become king of Akkad and father of
Enheduanna. Similar stories survive in Homer’s Iliad about Bellerophon, or the
Bible about Uriah.71 In this way writing comes to signify power itself.
Old as these myths are, they were written a thousand or more years after the
invention of writing. The earliest examples of writing to survive are more mun-
dane: expense accounts for temples, records of sheep and goats, bills for beer or
bread. Yet a connection between information and power is inscribed in many
copies of cuneiform. This text (Fig. 1) was written on a cylinder in the reign of
Cyrus the Great in the sixth century bce. Its technology is modernist in feel. The
kings of Babylon buried cylinders in the foundations of buildings. These are mes-
sages to posterity: in finest script, listing royal achievements. As such they fulfil
their objective: sometimes this is the only record we have left of the king in ques-
tion. But the cylindrical shape was also symbolic: it gave the idea of endless writ-
ing, knowledge without limits, power reaching into eternity. The cylinders
sometimes contained bleak prophecies of the ends of time and of knowledge.
‘The internet is not a tool. It is an alien life form’, David Bowie declared in an
interview with Jeremy Paxman for the BBC’s Newsnight in 1999. In 1996 he was
already the first mainstream artist to distribute a song (called Telling Lies, perhaps
without irony) as an online exclusive, selling over 300,000 downloads; in 1998 he
launched his own ISP, called BowieNet. While Paxman scoffed at the internet as
little more than a portable vehicle for Reuters news agency, his interviewee looked
into the future with awe:
16 Bibliophobia
Fig. 1. ‘The eternal book’; The Cyrus Cylinder, clay, 6th c. bce. British Museum
I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think that the potential of
what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.
I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.72
Ziggy the Prophet uncannily foresaw that the internet is far more than a medium
for information. It is a metaphor for the illimitable ideal of perfect knowledge. As
such it is also a symbol of the possibility of knowledge’s imminent destruction, of
the end of culture. Politicians show a manic-depressive attitude to the World
Wide Web: the solution to their problems and yet the key to our fears. The
Millennium Bug was meant to erase every bank and health record from the
planet. Now we are told cyberterrorism holds the greatest threat to mankind.
Meanwhile, in Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival (2016), contact with aliens depends
on interpreting a written language completely different in form and system from
anything previously encountered among humans. Linguists and codicologists are
called in to save the world. Do the strange visitors bring a ‘weapon’, or a ‘tool’? It is
an old joke: the Greek word pharmakon meant either ‘medicine’ or ‘poison’.
Philosophers from Plato to Erasmus to Derrida have made the pharmakon the
emblem of writing.73 The answer, the future of human existence, lies in decipher-
ing an alien script, one which will either save us or kill us—or possibly both.
In 2017, an object from outer space passed through the solar system: it was
named ‘oumuamua, Hawaiian for ‘first messenger’.74 Within the world of the
interstellar probe, it is legitimate to ask if we know any more what a book is, or
what a library is for. For many people, a concept of the book is encapsulated by a
codex, bound by stacking the pages and fixing one edge, using a cover thicker
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and their right to local self-government, and (3) because it has not
been ratified by three fourths of the several States since it has not
been submitted to the electorate of the States in which the initiative,
or the referendum, or both, prevail (assignment of errors Nos. 1-5).
These questions are discussed in points II, III, and IV, respectively. In
point I the prior amendments to the Constitution are considered with
reference to these contentions, and in point V the justiciability of the
contentions is maintained.”
Its first challenge is itself the admission that all constitutional
ability to change our Constitution is ability “granted” in the Fifth
Article. Moreover, it is the flat denial of any constitutional mode of
procedure in which the citizens of America, by a “Yes” from three
fourths of their assembled “conventions,” can enact the legislation
which is Section One of the supposed Eighteenth Amendment.
Its second challenge is wholly on behalf of the political entities,
which are the states. It not only makes no claim for the rights of
American citizens, but it denies any constitutional ability in the
American citizens to interfere, by changing the American
Constitution, with what the American citizens reserved to each state
and its citizens.
The third challenge again fails to assert any claim on behalf of the
rights of the American citizens. It is the challenge negatived by the
third conclusion of the Supreme Court. It is the challenge that the
citizens of the State, in some of the states, are part of the state
legislature.
If we want further confirmation of our knowledge that this brief
does not make the real challenge, namely, that the Fifth Article is no
grant to the supposed grantors and the state governments, we find it
in the fact that the brief itself refers over fifty times to the Fifth Article
as a “grant” of limited ability to make Articles.
If we need further confirmation, we find it in this fact. After the
Supreme Court had negatived every proposition in that brief, its
writers made application for a reargument. The application was
based on one ground as far as concerned the validity of the
Amendment. That one ground was that the Court had written no
opinion. From this one fact, the claim was made that the Court could
not have considered the potency of the three challenges which had
been urged in the brief. Educated with the earlier Americans, we
believe that each of these three challenges, in its very statement,
shows why it is unsound, and that no opinion was needed to explain
its refutation. But the nature of the application shows the continued
concept of the Fifth Article as a “grant.”
If we look at the other briefs against validity, we will find all
arguments based on the same monumental error that the Fifth
Article is a “grant” and that the state legislatures are therein named
the attorneys for the citizens of America, although the latter, as
citizens of America, never elect a single member in those
legislatures and the Tenth Amendment expressly declares that the
Constitution gives no power of any kind to the states or their
legislatures. On the impossible hypothesis of this monumental error
are budded the most extraordinary arguments.
In more than one brief, it is urged that, in the Fifth Article, the
whole people of America made a certain number of state legislatures
their own attorneys in fact to amend the American Constitution. But,
urges the brief, the American people have no power to change the
state constitutions, and “therefore, the grantees,” the state
legislatures, “cannot exceed the powers of their principal, the people
of the United States.” And, the brief goes on, as the people of
America cannot change a state constitution, neither can the
attorneys in fact of that whole American people, the state
legislatures, change it. The ability of the people or citizens of
America and of “their” attorneys in fact, the state legislatures, is only
competent to change the Constitution of the citizens of America. But
this Eighteenth Amendment changes the Constitution of each state.
Ergo, that change is clearly beyond the power of the citizens of
America and “their” attorneys in fact, the state legislatures!
It will serve no useful purpose for us to dwell further upon the
briefs against validity. They all show the universal conviction that the
Fifth Article is a “grant” and makes the state legislatures attorneys in
fact for ourselves, the citizens of America, who elect not a single
member in the state legislatures. Naturally, as this fundamental error
is the invincible conviction of all counsel against validity before any
brief is written, none of those briefs mentions such simple facts as
the fact decided by the Supreme Court in Barron v. City of Baltimore,
7 Pet. 243. That decision, by John Marshall, decisively settled the
legal fact that the Fifth Article grants no power to the state
legislatures to make the Eighteenth Amendment. And, as it also
decisively settled that the Fifth Article does not give the state
legislatures any power whatever, it destroys the absurd concept that
the Fifth Article makes the state legislatures attorneys in fact for
those who made the Fifth Article, the citizens of America, the
“conventions” of the Fifth Article and the Seventh Article. But
lawyers, who start to write briefs with the certain (although false)
“knowledge” that the Fifth Article does make the state legislatures
attorneys in fact for the citizens of America, neither know the
meaning of that decision nor state the decision and its meaning and
its effect upon the Eighteenth Amendment in the briefs which they
write. The decision is very clear. We have met it earlier in our
education herein. It will bear repetition right now, when we find fifty-
seven lawyers all “knowing” that the Fifth Article (despite the
declaration of the Tenth Amendment) does give power to the state
governments and, by giving it, makes these governments attorneys
in fact for the citizens of America.
Barron claimed that a state statute was void because it came in
conflict with the restriction imposed by the Article which is the Fifth
Amendment to the American Constitution. If the restriction applied to
the state legislatures and their powers, the statute was clearly void.
Therefore, as Marshall pointed out, the Court had but one question
to solve, whether the American Constitution (in which is the Fifth
Article) granted any power to the state governments. If it did, then
general restrictions in that Constitution, as they clearly applied to all
powers granted in that Constitution, applied to the state
governments. On the contrary, if the Constitution granted no power
to the state governments, general restrictions in the Constitution
would not apply to the state governments. For which reason, the
decision of the case itself was to depend on one thing alone,
whether there was any power granted in the entire Constitution to
the state governments. If there was not, the decision would be
against Barron.
The question thus presented is, we think, of great
importance, but not of much difficulty. The Constitution was
ordained and established by the people of the United States
for themselves, for their own government, and not for the
government of the individual states. Each state established a
constitution for itself, and in that constitution provided such
limitations and restrictions on the powers of its particular
government as its judgment dictated. The people of the
United States framed such a government for the United
States as they supposed best adapted to their situation, and
best calculated to promote their interests. The powers they
conferred on this government were to be exercised by itself;
and the limitations on power, if expressed in general terms,
are naturally, and, we think, necessarily, applicable to the
government created by the instrument. They are limitations of
power granted in the instrument itself; not of distinct
governments, framed by different persons and for different
purposes.
It would have been impossible for Marshall to have stated more
plainly that the “instrument,” the Constitution (which contains the
Fifth Article), grants no powers whatever to the state governments.
On that fact, the fact being the simple answer to the question “of
great importance but not of much difficulty,” Marshall decided that the
general restrictions (applying only to powers granted in the
Constitution) did not apply at all to the state governments, to whom
the Constitution granted no power whatever.
And so we Americans, trying to find the “when” and “how”
(between, 1907 and 1917) we became subjects, cannot find the
supposed answer anywhere in the briefs against validity. All that we
do find of interest to us, in those briefs, is that the briefers, either with
or without knowledge of the fact, are meeting a claim that there
never was an American citizen and that the American people
became “subjects” when they made the Fifth Article on June 21st,
1788.
By reason of our education in the making of the Fifth Article, we
know the answer to the absurd claim. The answer is one that cannot
be denied unless there are facts which we have not learned in our
education. Therefore, we go quickly to the briefs of those who make
the claim, those who upheld the existence of the Eighteenth
Amendment, to ascertain what are the new facts on which they base
their claim that there never was an American citizen and that the
Fifth Article made the American people “subjects.”
These opponents were led by Hughes. In this litigation, he should
not have forgotten that there are limits to the powers of every
government in America. In the following January, he appeared in the
same Court, to prove that there is limit to the power of the supreme
legislature in America, the Congress.
That Congress had passed a statute, known as the “Corrupt
Practices Act.” In it, certain practices, at federal primary and other
elections, were prohibited and made criminal offenses. His client had
been tried and convicted by a jury as guilty of one of these practices
in a primary election for the nomination to the Senate of America. On
the appeal to the Supreme Court, Hughes urged that, as our
American government is a government of enumerated powers,
incidentally a fact which his claim for the state governments in the
National Prohibition Cases flatly denies. Congress could not validly
pass the statute, under which his client had been convicted, unless
the power to pass a statute in that particular matter was found in
some enumerated power in the Constitution. The Constitution clearly
gave Congress power to pass laws concerning “elections” for federal
officers. But, urged Hughes, the Americans of 1788, the
“conventions” in the Fifth and Seventh Articles, did not know
anything about “primary” elections. Therefore, urged Hughes,
Congress has not the power to make the same thing a penal offense
at “primary” elections, which Congress can make a penal offense at
the regular elections. By a divided Court, this argument, based on
the claim of limited power in the supreme legislature to prohibit what
a candidate for Senator may do, was sustained and the conviction
was reversed.
It is amazing, therefore, to turn to the Eighteenth Amendment brief
of the same briefer, a few months earlier, and to find him contending
for his clients therein, twenty-four governments of state citizens, an
absolute omnipotence to interfere with individual freedom of
American citizens on every subject. And it is startling to find, in this
brief, audacious denial of any right in the Supreme Court even to
consider whether these governments of state citizens have that
omnipotence over the American citizen.
In the case of the candidate for Senator, it was his concept and his
claim that the Supreme Court can decide that the supreme
legislature in America had not the power to make a certain command
to candidates for seats in the American Senate. This is the doctrine
that the only government of the American citizens is a government of
enumerated powers. In the Eighteenth Amendment litigation, the
following is his contention, that thirty-six governments of state
citizens (the inferior legislatures in America) have unlimited power,
without any constitutional restraint, to make commands to the
American citizens on any matter whatsoever:
“We submit that the conception involved in the bill of complaint,
that an amendment duly submitted by Congress on the vote of two
thirds of each House, and duly ratified by the legislatures of three
fourths of the States, is still subject to judicial review, and may be
held for naught through judicial action by virtue of a process of
implied restrictions upon the amending power—restrictions which
thus set up by judicial decree would be unalterable by any
constitutional process—is a conception of the most extravagant
character and opposed to the fundamental principles of our
government. No principle of judicial action can possibly be invoked
for sustaining such an authority. The propriety and advisability of
amendments, which are not prohibited by the express exceptions in
Article V, are necessarily confided to those through whose action the
amendments are to be made.”
We are quite accustomed to have men like Anderson maintain that
governments of state citizens have outlawed for the citizens of
America a traffic which Madison hoped would take deep root
everywhere in America, a rightful traffic by human beings “so
recognized by the usages of the commercial world, the laws of
Congress, and the decisions of courts.” (Leisy v. Harden, 135 U.S.
100.)
When Americans were fighting on the battlefields of the Revolution
for human liberty, Walter Butler stirred up the House of the Six
Nations to make a home attack. It was natural, therefore, when
Americans in 1918 were fighting on the battlefields of Europe for
human liberty, that Anderson and men of his type should stir up the
Houses of thirty-six nations to make a similar home attack.
Americans will probably always have Butlers and Andersons to stir
up home attacks, when Americans are away on the battlefields.
But it is a grave matter when one who has sat on the Bench of the
Supreme Court later contends that the Court has no ability even to
review an attempted effort of the legislatures of state citizens to
command the citizens of America on a matter not enumerated in the
First Article.
From the “conventions” of the early American citizens, we bring
the knowledge that it is the bounden duty of the Supreme Court to
determine that the governments of state citizens have no power
whatever to interfere with the individual freedom of American citizens
in any matter whatsoever. From those “conventions,” we bring the
certain knowledge that the main purpose of the establishment of the
Supreme Court, as one department of the only and limited
government of American citizens, was that the Supreme Court might
protect every individual liberty of the American citizen from
usurpation of power by all governments in America.
Any concept to the contrary is the most Tory doctrine ever stated
as American law since July 4, 1776. It is blind to the fact that, by the
Constitution, the whole American people, “in their aggregate
capacity,” created a new nation of men and set it above the existing
and continued federation of states; to the fact that the whole
American people made that Constitution one with national Articles,
relating to the government of men, and with federal Articles, relating
to the government of states; and to the fact that the whole American
people knew and settled that only “conventions” of themselves could
make national Articles, although state legislatures, as attorneys in
fact for their respective states, could make federal Articles; and to
the fact that the Tenth Amendment names two distinct reservees of
existing power, “the states respectively,” who are the members of the
subordinate federation, and “the people,” who are the members of
the supreme nation of men; and to the fact that the Fifth Article
grants no power whatever but mentions the “state legislatures,” who
act for the members of the federation, and the “conventions,” who
alone can ever act for the members of the supreme nation, when the
latter are to make a change in their part of the Constitution, the
national part.
But we find the brief of Hughes, like the briefs of his associates,
actually challenging any right of review by the Supreme Court, when
the attorneys in fact for the states and state citizens, although the
states have nothing whatever to do with that part of the dual
Constitution which relates to the nation of men, actually attempt to
change the quantum of power (to interfere with their own individual
freedom) granted by the nation of men to their only government. His
challenge even goes to the extreme of boldly asserting that the
“propriety and advisability of amendments,” even though they
infringe upon the individual freedom of the members of the nation of
men, must be finally determined by the governments of state
citizens, which have nothing to do with the nation of men which is
America. His challenge is that the Supreme Court is powerless to
protect the liberty of the American citizens if thirty-six governments of
state citizens decide to interfere with that liberty in matters not
enumerated in the First Article.
The challenge is exactly the challenge of Lord North to the
Americans in 1775. It is exactly the challenge which the British
Parliament would make, if we were still its “subjects.” As basic
American law, it is sheer nonsense.
When we remember the doctrine of this briefer, that there is a limit
to the right of our supreme legislature to prohibit what a candidate for
Senator may do, and compare it with this new Tory concept that
three fourths of the inferior state governments can validly interfere
with every personal liberty of ourselves, we have one or two
questions to ask the briefer. Is it his thought that the supposed
citizens of America made their Constitution with the sole intent that
the personal rights of candidates for Senators should be secure and
that the number of Senators from each state should remain the
same? Is it his thought that the American citizens, from whose
“conventions” we have just come, having settled these amazingly
important things about Senators, then voluntarily granted
omnipotence over every individual freedom in America to a fractional
part of the inferior state governments, twenty-four of whom he
represented in the litigation of 1920? Is it his thought that the whole
American people have two governments, one the government of
enumerated powers constituted in the First Article and the other the
government of unlimited power constituted in the Fifth Article? Is it
his thought that his inferior state governments, although all members
of all the state governments collectively could not enact a statute
interfering in the slightest degree with the American citizen, can
issue any command whatever to the American citizen, and that the
citizens of America must obey that command so long as the state
governments call it an Amendment of the American Constitution?
It is our own certain knowledge that, when governments issue any
command to the citizens of America and the command interferes
with individual freedom, the maker of the command must show the
grant of power to make that particular command. It is the Alpha and
Omega of American law that no government has any just power to
make any command to the citizens of America, except in a matter on
which those citizens themselves have given that government the
power to make that particular command. It is in the primer of
American constitutional law, that there is no government of the
citizens of America, except the government at Washington, and that
it has no power to command the American citizen, interfering with his
individual freedom, except in the matters named in the First Article. It
is admitted by all, even by the writer of that brief and his colleagues,
that the power to make the command which is the First Section of
the Eighteenth Amendment, is not enumerated in that First Article.
When, therefore, this counsel for twenty-four of the governments
which made that command tells us that, after his client governments
(at the suggestion of our government which could not make the
command) have passed upon the propriety and advisability of the
command, we cannot have the Supreme Court even consider the
ability of his client governments to make the command, our
indignation is mingled with our mirth.
Our indignation need not be explained. Our mirth comes when we
think of our needless fear that something might have happened
between 1907 and 1917 by which we became “subjects” instead of
the citizens we had been. Throughout our education we have always
known that, if the Eighteenth Amendment (a national article made
entirely by governments) is in the Constitution, we are “subjects.”
We have known that no legislative governments, before 1787 and
after 1776, could have made this general command to the citizens of
America, because, during those eleven years, there was no citizen of
America and there were no governments in the world who could
make any general command to the American people, interfering with
their individual freedom on any subject. We have known, with
certainty, that, if the Americans in the “conventions” (where we have
sat) knew what they were doing and the Supreme Court, for a
century, has known what they did, there were no governments in the
world, up to the year 1907, who could make that command to the
American citizens. We have gone everywhere to find what
happened, between 1907 and 1917, to change the American citizens
into “subjects” of the governments for whom this counsel appears.
Now, after the fruitless search elsewhere, we are reading his brief to
find out what did happen between 1907 and 1917. His plain answer,
as we have already sensed, is—“nothing.”
Our mirth entirely dispels our indignation, when we sense his full
concept of the nature of that absurd Fifth Article “grant” to his
government clients. That we may not mistake his concept, the most
Tory concept ever stated as law in America since 1776, he explains it
again and again in his briefs. It is his concept that the absurd
supposed “grant” gives to his client governments, not one member of
which is ever elected by the citizens of America, unlimited and
constitutionally unrestrained power to interfere with the individual
freedom of the American citizen on every matter or, as the
Declaration of ’76 put it, in its complaint against the English King and
his legislature, to legislate for us on all matters whatsoever.
And our mirth is not lessened when we read, in this brief, John
Marshall’s full statement of the making of the Constitution (with the
Fifth Article in it) and John Marshall’s clear decision that it was all
made by the citizens of America, the “conventions” of the Seventh
and the Fifth Articles.
No statement of facts could ever be written, which more absolutely
destroys the concept that the state governments have the
omnipotence denied to the English Parliament, than the quotation
from John Marshall which we read in this brief to support that
concept.
Throughout the quotation, with which we are all very familiar,
Marshall points out that there is a vital distinction, amazingly
important to individual freedom, between the ability of the
“conventions” (named by exactly the same name in the Fifth as well
as the Seventh Article) and the limited ability of the same
“legislatures” for which this counsel appeared in 1920. In the
quotation Marshall points out that, when the American citizens are to
make a national Article, like the First Article and the Eighteenth
Amendment, there is but one way in which they can make it “safely,
effectively and wisely,” “by assembling in convention.” That all of
us, including that counsel of 1920, may not find any excuse for an
assumption that state governments can ever make Articles of that
kind, Marshall dwells at length upon the inability of state
governments or any governments to make them or any Article like
them. He tells us that, when the American people make Articles of
that kind, in the only way in which they can ever effectively make
Articles of that kind, by assembling in “conventions,” “they act in their
states. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease
to be the measures of the people themselves or become the
measures of the state governments.” “From these conventions the
Constitution derives its whole authority.” “It required not the
affirmance, and could not be negatived, by the state governments.
The Constitution, when thus adopted, was of complete obligation
and bound the state sovereignties.”
Up to the last short sentence we have just quoted from the
decision so familiar to us, Hughes quotes at length and without
omission. Hughes is in Court for those “state legislatures” and state
sovereignties, which Marshall’s decision finds to be legislatures and
sovereignties wholly inferior in ability to the “conventions” of the
American people, named in the Fifth and Seventh Articles by exactly
the same name—“conventions.” How does the great lawyer of 1920
find, in this Marshall decision, support for the unique idea that these
state, governments are omnipotent over every right of the American
citizens who sit in those “conventions”? His remarkable claim is that
the state governments he represents have omnipotent ability to
command or interfere with anything in America, except one thing. It
is his claim that these governments have omnipotent ability to
interfere with the citizens of America, with the Constitution of
America, with the government of America, with anything in America,
except that they cannot interfere with that one thing for which the
Revolution was fought, the Statute of ’76 enacted and the
Constitution established. In the view of Hughes, that one thing
apparently is the right of every state to have the same number of
Senators. Our indignation is entirely dispelled when we realize that
he sincerely believes this nonsense. Our mirth is merely increased
when we find him quoting, at some length, this decision of Marshall,
evidently under the impression that the decision supports the
nonsense.
But, we wonder why, at the particular point which we have reached
in the Hughes quotation from Marshall, the former puts “stars”
instead of the next paragraph in the Marshall decision? Certainly,
when the great lawyer of 1920 has such faith in the omnipotence of
his government clients over us their “subjects,” it cannot be that
there is anything in the missing Marshall paragraph to disturb that
faith! Yet, as we read the missing paragraph, with which we are quite
familiar, doubt assails us. Is the great lawyer of 1920 sincere or does
he know that the position of his clients in relation to the Eighteenth
Amendment is nonsense?
What is the missing Marshall paragraph with which we are so
familiar? Lo and behold! it is our constant companion throughout our
education in the days of the early Americans. It is the paragraph in
which the Supreme Court, by Marshall, points out why the
Philadelphia Convention of 1787 found themselves compelled to
send their First Article, with its grant of national power like the grant
in the Eighteenth Amendment, to the “conventions,” named in the
Seventh and the Fifth Articles, because the state governments, the
clients of Hughes, were known and recognized by everybody to be
without ability to make national Articles. In other words, it is the
paragraph in which Marshall announces what we have learned so
clearly ourselves, that “to the formation of a league, such as was the
Confederation [to the making of federal Articles] the state
sovereignties were certainly competent. But when ‘in order to form a
more perfect Union,’ it was deemed necessary to change this
alliance into an effective government, possessing great and
sovereign powers and acting directly on the people, the necessity of
referring it to the people [the conventions of the Fifth and the
Seventh Articles] and of deriving its powers directly from them was
felt and acknowledged by all.”
We know this paragraph of Marshall’s, omitted from the Hughes
brief, to be the epitome of everything that we have heard in the
“conventions” which made the Fifth Article. We remember that even
Henry, from the very fact that the “conventions” of the American
citizens were assembled, knew that the then proposed Articles did
grant power to interfere with human freedom. And we remember
(because he knew the inability of state governments ever to make
such grants) that, on the fact that “conventions” were assembled, he
based his charge that the proposed Articles were national and not
federal. We remember that the Tenth Amendment declares that the
entire Constitution, including the Fifth Article, gave no power of any
kind to those state governments. And so we know, what Henry knew,
that the state governments did not have, and that the Fifth Article did
not give them, any ability to make national Articles, like the First
Article and the Eighteenth Amendment.
For which reason, we cannot (looking at the matter purely from the
standpoint of lawyer’s attitude to his government clients) blame
Hughes for putting the stars in his quotation from Marshall.
Eager to remain free citizens, eager to have all governments
recognize that we are not “subjects,” we ourselves commend, to the
writer of that brief and to all who uphold the Eighteenth Amendment,
the entire decision of Marshall in M’Culloch v. Maryland. For
instance, we commend this clear statement of basic American law:
If any one proposition could command the universal assent
of mankind [except those for the validity of the Eighteenth
Amendment], we might expect it would be this:—That the
government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is
supreme within its sphere of action. This would seem to result
necessarily from its nature. It is the government of all; its
powers are delegated by all; it represents all, and acts for all.
Though any one state may be willing to control its operations,
no state is willing to allow others to control them. The nation,
on those subjects on which it can act, must necessarily bind
its component parts.
Among other things, this statement, itself but a repetition of
everything that we have learned by our experience with early
Americans, emphasizes the important fact that the nation, which is
ourselves, has but one government, the government “limited in its
power.” Which fact clearly demonstrates that the state governments,
not being that one government of “limited powers,” are not the
attorneys in fact for the citizens of America, in any matter
whatsoever, and cannot command us, as they attempt to do in the
First Section, or grant power to command us, as they attempt to do
in the Second Section of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Again this same decision of Marshall holds clearly: “In America,
the powers of sovereignty are divided between the governments of
the Union and those of the State.” The claimed ability of the Hughes
government clients, their claimed ability to make the national new
Article in our Constitution, rests entirely upon the absurd doctrine
that, above the two sovereignties which Marshall names, there is an
omnipotent legislative sovereignty, without any constitutional
restraint, the sovereignty of three fourths of the very state
governments which Marshall mentions.
In the same M’Culloch v. Maryland, Marshall pays a tribute to an
accurate knowledge, which we have acquired in our education with
the early Americans. It is the knowledge that everything in the
Constitution denies any ability in even all the states as such, or in all
the state governments, each of which is never anything but a
government of the citizens of one state and their attorney in fact as
state citizens, to alter in any way the national part of our
Constitution (which Constitution is both national and federal)
because the national part relates to direct interference with the
individual freedom of the American citizens. This is his tribute to the
truth of the knowledge which we have acquired. He says that there is
“a principle which so entirely pervades the Constitution, is so
intermixed with the materials which compose it, so interwoven with
its web, so blended with its texture, as to be incapable of being
separated from it without rending it into shreds. This great principle
is, that the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are
supreme; that they control the Constitution and laws of the
respective states and cannot be controlled by them.”
And so we average Americans find naught but encouragement in
the brief of Hughes. From its quotations, from its every statement,
we learn that we have known all the facts, before we read it, and that
we are free citizens and not “subjects.” In that brief of the champion
of champions of the governments that “made” the new national
Article, we learn that there are no new facts on which to base the
claim that we, the whole people of America, have another
government besides the government of enumerated powers, the
claim that we are “subjects” and that our new omnipotent Parliament
wears the aspect of thirty-six inferior governments, each elected by
the citizens of a nation which is not America.
In the brief of this champion, we find no pretense that there is any
support for this weird claim. On the contrary we find the whole claim
depending entirely upon the sheer assumption—asserted as if to
state it was to state an axiom—that the Fifth Article is a “grant,”
wherein the “conventions” grant to the grantors and to the state
governments ability to exercise omnipotence over the American
citizens, ability to interfere with their individual freedom, in any matter
whatsoever.
In his brief, Hughes emphatically asserts the truth that “the people
never become a legislature.” Yet, the basis of his whole argument is
that what “the people” of the Tenth Amendment expressly reserved
to themselves may be given away by the “legislatures” of the states,
although the “states” are an entirely different reservee in the Tenth
Amendment. He does not know, what all knew when the Fifth Article
was made, that the “conventions,” who made it and who are named
in it, meant “the people” themselves. He does not know the tribute of
Madison, in the Virginia convention which ratified the Fifth Article, to
the American “conventions” in which the people themselves directly
constituted new government of men; “Mr. Chairman: Nothing has
excited more admiration in the world than the manner in which free
governments have been established in America; for it was the first
instance, from the creation of the world to the American Revolution,
that free inhabitants have been seen deliberating on a form of
government, and selecting such of their citizens as possessed their
confidence, to determine upon and give effect to it.” (3 Ell. Deb. p.
616.)
Hughes does not know, as Story did, that the drafter and the
makers of the Fifth Article put into it the lessons of their own
experience in the making of national Articles, by the “conventions” of
1776, and in the making of federal Articles by the state “legislatures”
between 1777 and 1781. “It is wise, therefore, in every government,
and especially in a Republic, to provide means for altering and
improving the fabric of government as time and experience or the
new phases of human affairs may render proper to promote the
happiness and safety of the people. The great principle to be sought
is to make the changes practicable, but not too easy; to secure due
deliberation and caution; and to follow experience, rather than to
open a way for experiment suggested by mere speculation or
theory.” (2 Story on the Constitution, Sec. 1827.)
For all of which reasons, Hughes and his associates, although
they might be certain that the people never became the legislature,
were not aware that, to the Americans who made the Fifth Article, its
“conventions” were “the people” of the Tenth Amendment.
Naturally, we are not surprised to find a briefer who ignores this
fact, possibly the legal fact in America most important to individual
liberty, also indulging in the monumental error of the thought that
these “conventions,” in their Fifth Article, made a grant, to
themselves and to his clients, of equal omnipotence over
themselves, the citizens of America. We recognize that, if the Article
was such a grant to his clients, the grant would have been the
greatest grant ever made in the history of mankind. We recognize
that it would have been a grant by three million free men, four years
after the war by which they had become free men, surrendering to
governments absolute control of every individual liberty and making
themselves absolute “subjects.”
We know that Hughes did maintain that the one government
created by or given any power in the Constitution, in which is the
Fifth Article, had not power to forbid a candidate for Senator to do
what he did. It is interesting and instructive to know that the same
lawyer holds, as an axiom which needs no proof, that the same
Constitution gave unlimited ability to his client governments to
interfere with every individual liberty of the Americans who are not
candidates for a Senatorship.
We have the word of the man who wrote the language of that Fifth
Article that it is merely “a mode of procedure” in which may be
exercised either the existing unlimited ability of ourselves in
“conventions” or the limited ability of the state governments to make
federal Articles. We recognize, no one who reads it could recognize
otherwise, that the Fifth Article, outside of two exceptions to
constitutional exercise of existing abilities to make Articles,
contains nothing but procedural provisions. This knowledge we
brought to the reading of the Hughes brief, after we had acquired the
certainty in our education with the Americans who made the Fifth
Article. Then we read this brief of the champion of champions for the
validity of the supposed new Article and found therein the sheer
assumption, as an axiom which needed no proof, that the Fifth
Article, with nothing but its procedural provisions, was a grant of
omnipotence to his government clients over ourselves!
Imagine, therefore, our amazement and our amusement, in the
same brief, to find this clear echo of the statement of Madison and of
our own knowledge, this accurate and complete statement of exactly
what the Fifth Article contains: “Article V, apart from procedural
provisions, contains two limitations of the power to amend, as
follows: ‘Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior,
etc.’”
If, “apart from procedural provisions,” the Article has nothing but
“two limitations” of existing abilities to make Articles, where does he
or anyone find in it the greatest “grant” known to the history of
mankind?
When this briefer made his argument for his client who had been a
candidate for Senator, he had no attack to make upon the procedure
in which Congress had passed the Corrupt Practices Act. When he
went to ascertain whether Congress had the power to make that
command, about “elections,” he did not look for the power in any
“procedural provisions,” which prescribe how Congress should
exercise its ability to make commands.
If this briefer or any lawyer were asked, on behalf of a client, to
accept a bill of sale from an alleged attorney in fact of the owner of a
cow, he would not seek, in any procedural provisions which
prescribed how an attorney in fact can execute an instrument for his
principal, to find the authority of the alleged attorney to sell the cow.
Why then, in an Article with naught but procedural provisions and
two limitations on power to make Articles, do he and all his
associates seek to find, and assert that they do find, grant of
authority to the inferior governments of state citizens to give away
every liberty which the citizens of America hold most dear?
CHAPTER XXV
CITIZEN OR “EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT”?
It is our invincible knowledge that the Fifth Article is not a power of

attorney to any one to act for us, the citizens of America, in regard to
any individual right which the American citizen has. In our capacity
as American citizens and in “conventions” of the very kind named in
that Fifth Article, we gave the only power of attorney, which we have
ever given to any government to act for us in making commands to
interfere with any of our individual rights. That power of attorney is
the First Article. We made it in the same “conventions.” In it, we gave
to our Congress our only power of attorney of that kind. In it, with
futile effort to keep modern “constitutional thinkers” from monumental
error, we said, at the very beginning of the one Article which is our
only power of attorney, that to our Congress alone the Constitution
gives any powers to make commands that interfere with our
individual rights. “All legislative powers herein granted shall be
vested in a Congress, etc.” (Art. I, Section i. U.S. Cons.)
In those same “conventions” (named in the Fifth Article) we
insisted, again in futile effort to keep modern “constitutional thinkers”
from monumental error, that there be written the exact declaratory
statement that the entire Constitution gave no power (to act for us,
the citizens of America, in any matter) to any donee except our new
general government, the government of the First Article enumerated
powers. And, in those “conventions,” we insisted that there be written
into that Constitution the accurate declaratory statement that all
powers to act for us in any matter, except the powers of that kind we
gave to that one limited general government, we retained exclusively
to ourselves, the citizens of America, that they might be exercised
only by ourselves or upon further grant from ourselves. Those two
important declaratory statements were written into that Constitution
in the shape of the Tenth Amendment.
That we ourselves might have a constitutional mode of
procedure in which constitutionally we could make that future
exercise or further grant of those powers which we reserved to
ourselves, we named ourselves—the “conventions” of the kind in
which we sat—in the Fifth Article and provided therein the
constitutional mode in which we could again do exactly what we
were then doing in the same kind of “conventions.” It was impossible
for us in those conventions, “being a people better acquainted with
the science of government than any other people in the world,” to
anticipate that modern “constitutional thinkers” should make the
ludicrous mistake of inferring, from that mention, that we—the
“conventions”—granted to ourselves—the “conventions”—all or
some of the very power we were then exercising in those
“conventions.” Nor did we anticipate, inasmuch as we (in those
“conventions”) never forgot that this new Constitution was to be
federal as well as national, that modern “constitutional thinkers”
would make another monumental error in assuming that a similar
mention of the existing ability of state legislatures (the ability to make
federal or declaratory Articles) was a grant to those governments of
our own power to make national ones. Even if we had possessed (in
those “conventions”) the vision to see the future that was 1920, we
would have felt that the Statute of ’76, the opening words of the First
Article and the explicit declarations of the Tenth Amendment made
any such error impossible for modern “constitutional thinkers.”
Yet, one or more of such errors are the basis of every argument in
every brief of the fifty-seven lawyers of 1920.
They are the basis of the Root briefs and the other briefs against,
as they are the basis of the Hughes briefs and the other briefs for,
the validity of the supposed new Amendment. Not a single one of the
briefs fails to assume, without the slightest foundation, that the state
governments, not a member of which is elected by the citizens of
America, are attorneys in fact for the citizens of America. Wherever
one brief differs from another in this respect, it is only in urging some
difference in the extent of the power of attorney made to those
governments by the citizens of America in the Fifth Article.

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Bibliophobia: The End and the

Beginning of the Book Brian Cummings

Clarendon Lectures in English

τὰ τῆς γε λήθης φάρμακ᾿ ὀρθώσας μόνος,

for eamon duffy

I begin with an apology to myself as much as to my readers: books take a long

Espejo, Jean-Christophe Mayer, Charlotte Methuen, Oliver Morgan, Joe Moshenska,

1. Is There a Future for the Book? 3

5. The Book-Fires of 1933 67

9. The Mystery of Arabic Script 129

13. Words and Images 197

17. The Book Incarnate 265

21. The Book After the French Revolution 333

xviii List of Figures

List of Figures xix

List of Figures xxi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/11/21, SPi

Plate 2 ‘Islamic carpet page’; Opening page of illumination facing q 2, by Muhammad

tota enim philosophorum vita, ut ait Socrates, commentatio mortis est

Already by 2007, algorithms supposedly designed to search knowledge

Is There a Future for the Book? 5

Is There a Future for the Book? 7

Is There a Future for the Book? 9

Is There a Future for the Book? 11

He shares Derrida’s antipathy toward the presence of a sovereign author, suggesting

Is There a Future for the Book? 13

Is There a Future for the Book? 15

It is our invincible knowledge that the Fifth Article is not a power of

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