Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

The Complete Poems.
10. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass, 1856, in ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in Thomas L. Brasher, Whitman As Editor of the Brooklyn “Daily Eagle” (Detroit, 1970).
13. Quoted in William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley, Voice of the People (Boston, 1942).
14. Quoted in Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1948).
15. Quoted in Arthur W. Brown, Margaret Fuller (New York, 1951).
16. Walt Whitman, “My Canary Bird”, in November Boughs, 1888, in The Complete Poems.
17. Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1979).
18. Fray Luis de Granada, Introducción al símbolo de la fe (Salamanca, 1583).
19. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1928–31), I: 16.
20. George Santayana, Realms of Being, Vol. II (New York, 1940).
21. Quoted in Henri de Lubac, Augustinisme et théologie moderne (Paris, 1965). Pierre Bersuire, in the
Repertorium morale, extended the image to the Son: “For Christ is a sort of book written upon the skin of
the virgin.… That book was spoken in the disposition of the Father, written in the conception of the
mother, exposited in the clarification of the nativity, corrected in the passion, erased in the flagellation,
punctuated in the imprint of the wounds, adorned in the crucifixion above the pulpit, illuminated in the
outpouring of blood, bound in the resurrection, and examined in the ascension.” Quoted in Jesse M.
Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca &
London, 1985).
22. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene 5.
23. Henry King, “An Exequy to His Matchlesse Never to Be Forgotten Friend”, in Baroque Poetry, ed. J.P.
Hill & E. Caracciolo-Trejo (London, 1975).

---

24. Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, 1959).
25. Francis Bacon, “Of Studies”, in The Essayes or Counsels (London, 1625).
26. Joel Rosenberg, “Jeremiah and Ezekiel”, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter & Frank
Kermode (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
27. Ezekiel 2: 9–10.
28. Revelation, 10: 9–11.
29. Elizabeth I, A Book of Devotions: Composed by Her Majesty Elizabeth R., ed. Adam Fox (London,
1970).
30. William Congreve, Love for Love, Act I, Scene 1, in The Complete Works, 4 vols., ed. Montague
Summers (Oxford, 1923).
31. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. John Wain (London, 1973).
32. Walt Whitman, “Shut Not Your Doors”, in Leaves of Grass, 1867, in The Complete Poems.
BEGINNINGS
1. Joan Oates, Babylon (London, 1986).
2. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London, 1964).
3. Ibid.
4. Mark Jones, ed., Fake? The Art of Deception (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1990).
5. Alan G. Thomas, Great Books and Book Collectors (London, 1975).
6. A. Parrot, Mission archéologique à Mari (Paris, 1958–59).
7. C.J. Gadd, Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools (London, 1956).
8. C.B.F. Walker, Cuneiform (London, 1987).
9. Ibid.
10. William W. Hallo & J.J.A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna (New Haven, 1968).
11. Catalogue of the exhibition Naissance de l’écriture, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1982.
12. M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, 1973–76).
13. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, 1976).
14. Roland Barthes, “Écrivains et écrivants”, in Essais critiques (Paris, 1971).
15. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), XIII, 29.
16. Richard Wilbur, “To the Etruscan Poets”, in The Mind Reader (New York, 1988), and New and