Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Scholastic Period (Cambridge, 1969).
14. Quoted in Olga S. Opfell, The King James Bible Translators (Jefferson, N.C., 1982).
15. Ibid.
16. Quoted ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Rudyard Kipling, “Proofs of Holy Writ”, in The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling, “Uncollected
Items”, Vol. XXX, Sussex Edition (London, 1939).
19. Alexander von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlischen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß
auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, quoted in Umberto Eco, La Ricerca della Lingua
Perfetta (Rome & Bari, 1993).
20. De Man, Allegories of Reading.
FORBIDDEN READING
1. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. John Wain (London, 1973).
2. T.B. Macaulay, The History of England, 5 vols. (London, 1849–61).
3. Charles was nevertheless viewed as a worthy king by most of his subjects, who believed that his small
vices corrected his greater ones. John Aubrey tells of a certain Arise Evans who “had a fungous Nose, and
said it was revealed to him, that the King’s Hand would Cure him: And at the first coming of King Charles
II into St. James’s Park, he kiss’d the King’s Hand, and rubbed his Nose with it; which disturbed the King,
but Cured him”: John Aubrey, Miscellanies, in Three Prose Works, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (Oxford,
1972).
4. Antonia Fraser, Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration (London, 1979).
5. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the
Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1991).
6. Quoted ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn., 1881).
11. Quoted in Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear.

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12. Peter Handke, Kaspar (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967).
13. Voltaire, “De l’Horrible Danger de la Lecture”, in Mémoires, Suivis de Mélanges divers et precédés de
“Voltaire Démiurge” par Paul Souday (Paris, 1927).
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Stuttgart, 1986), IV: I.
15. Margaret Horsfield, “The Burning Books” on “Ideas”, CBC Radio Toronto, broadcast Apr. 23, 1990.
16. Quoted in Heywood Broun & Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York,
1927).
17. Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, Fighter (New York, 1913).
18. Quoted in Broun & Leech, Anthony Comstock.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism as a Literary Force”, in A Book of Prefaces (New York, 1917).
23. Jacques Dars, Introduction to En Mouchant la chandelle (Paris, 1986).
24. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, II, 7 (Paris, 1857).
25. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (London, 1907).
26. Ibid.
27. Joan DelFattore, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America (New Haven &
London, 1992).
28. Quoted from The Times of London, Jan. 4, 1978, reprinted in Nick Caistor’s Foreword to Nunca Más:
A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People (London, 1986).
29. In Nunca Más.
THE BOOK FOOL
1. Patrick Trevor-Roper, The World through Blunted Sight (London, 1988).
2. Jorge Luis Borges, “Poema de los dones”, in El Hacedor (Buenos Aires, 1960).
3. Royal Ontario Museum, Books of the Middle Ages (Toronto, 1950).
4. Trevor-Roper, The World through Blunted Sight.
5. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, ed. D.E. Eichholz (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972), Book XXXVII:
16.
6. A. Bourgeois, Les Bésicles de nos ancêtres (Paris, 1923) (Bourgeois gives no day or month, and the
wrong year). See also Edward Rosen, “The Invention of Eyeglasses”, in The Journal of the History of