Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

THE BOOK FOOL
hey are all common gestures: pulling the glasses out of a case, cleaning them with a tissue or the hem
of the blouse or the tip of the tie, perching them on the nose and steadying them behind the ears before
peering at the now lucid page held in front of us. Then pushing them up or sliding them down the
glistening bridge of the nose in order to bring the letters into focus and, after a while, lifting them off and
rubbing the skin between the eyebrows, screwing the eyelids shut to keep out the siren text. And the final
act: taking them off, folding them and inserting them between the pages of the book to mark the place
where we left off reading for the night. In Christian iconography, Saint Lucy is represented carrying a
pair of eyes on a tray; glasses are, in effect, eyes that poor-sighted readers can pull off and put on at will.
They are a detachable function of a body, a mask through which the world can be observed, an insect-like
creature carried along like a pet praying mantis. Unobtrusive, sitting cross-legged on a pile of books or
standing expectantly in a cluttered corner of a desk, they have become the reader’s emblem, a mark of
the reader’s presence, a symbol of the reader’s craft.
It is bewildering to imagine the many centuries before the invention of glasses, during which readers
squinted their way through the nebulous outlines of a text, and moving to imagine their extraordinary
relief, once glasses were available, at suddenly seeing, almost without effort, a page of writing. A sixth of
all humankind is myopic; among readers the proportion is much higher, closer to 24 per cent. Aristotle,
Luther, Samuel Pepys, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schiller, Keats, Tennyson, Dr. Johnson, Alexander Pope,
Quevedo, Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Kipling, Edward Lear, Dorothy
L. Sayers, Yeats, Unamuno, Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce — all had impaired sight. In many people
the condition deteriorates, and a remarkable number of famous readers have gone blind in their old age,
from Homer to Milton, and on to James Thurber and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, who began losing his
sight in the early thirties and was appointed head of the Buenos Aires National Library in 1955, when he
could no longer see, commented on the peculiar fate of the failing reader who is one day granted the
realm of books:
Let no one demean to tears or reproach
This declaration of the skill of God
Who with such magnificent irony
Gave me at the same time darkness and the books.
Borges compared the fate of this reader in the blurred world of “pale vague ashes resembling oblivion
and sleep” to the fate of King Midas, condemned to die of hunger and thirst surrounded by food and
drink. An episode of the television series The Twilight Zone concerns one such Midas, a voracious reader
who alone of all mankind survives a nuclear disaster. All the books in the world are now at his disposal;
then, accidentally, he breaks his glasses.
Before the invention of glasses, at least a quarter of all readers would have required extra-large letters to
decipher a text. The strain on the eyes of medieval readers was great: the rooms in which they tried to
read were darkened in summer to protect them from the heat; in winter the rooms were naturally dark
because the windows, necessarily small to keep out the icy drafts, let in only a dusty light. Medieval
scribes constantly complained about the conditions in which they had to work, and often scribbled notes
about their troubles in the margins of their books, like the one penned in the mid-thirteenth century by a
certain Florencio of whom we know virtually nothing except his first name and this mournful description
of his craft: “It is a painful task. It extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the
viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.” For poor-
sighted readers the work must have been even harder; Patrick Trevor-Roper suggested that they likely
felt somewhat more comfortable at night “because darkness is a great equalizer”.
In Babylon and Rome and Greece, readers whose sight was poor had no other resource than to have their
books read to them, usually by slaves. A few found that looking through a disk of clear stone helped.
Writing about the properties of emeralds, Pliny the Elder noted in passing that the short-sighted Emperor
Nero used to watch gladiator combats through an emerald. Whether this magnified the gory details or
simply gave them a greenish hue we can’t tell, but the story persisted throughout the Middle Ages and
scholars such as Roger Bacon and his teacher, Robert Grosseteste, commented on the jewel’s remarkable

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property.
But few readers had access to precious stones. Most were condemned to live out their reading hours
depending on vicarious reading, or on a slow and painstaking progress as the muscles of their eyes
strained to remedy the defect. Then, sometime in the late thirteenth century, the fate of the poor-sighted
reader changed.
We don’t know exactly when the change happened, but on February 23, 1306, from the pulpit of the
church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Giordano da Rivalto of Pisa delivered a sermon in which he
reminded his flock that the invention of eyeglasses, “one of the most useful devices in the world”, was
already twenty years old. He added, “I’ve seen the man who, before anyone else, discovered and made a
pair of glasses, and I spoke to him.”
Nothing is known of this remarkable inventor. Perhaps he was a contemporary of Giordano, a monk
named Spina of whom it was said that “he made glasses and freely taught the art to others”. Perhaps he
was a member of the Guild of Venetian Crystal Workers, where the craft of eyeglass-making was known as
early as 1301, since one of the guild’s rules that year explained the procedure to be followed by anyone
“wishing to make eyeglasses for reading”. Or perhaps the inventor was a certain Salvino degli Armati,
whom a funeral plaque still visible in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence calls “inventor of
eyeglasses” and adds, “May God forgive his sins. A.D. 1317”. Another candidate is Roger Bacon, whom we
have already encountered as master cataloguer and whom Kipling, in a late story, made witness to the use
of an early Arab microscope smuggled into England by an illuminator. In the year 1268, Bacon had
written, “If anyone examines letters or small objects through the medium of a crystal or glass if it be
shaped like the lesser segment of a sphere, with all the convex side towards the eye, he will see the
letters far better and larger. Such an instrument is useful to all persons.” Four centuries later, Descartes
was still praising the invention of glasses: “All the management of our lives depends on the senses, and
since that of sight is the most comprehensive and the noblest of these, there is no doubt that inventions
that serve to augment its power are among the most useful there can be.”
The earliest known depiction of eyeglasses is in a 1352 portrait of Cardinal Hugo de St. Cher, in
Provence, by Tommaso da Modena. It shows the cardinal in full costume, seated at his table, copying from
an open book on a shelf slightly above him, to his right. The glasses, known as “rivet spectacles”, consist
of two round lenses held in thick frames and hinged above the bridge of the nose, so that the grip can be
regulated.
Until well into the fifteenth century, reading-glasses were a luxury; they were expensive, and
comparatively few people needed them, since books themselves were in the possession of a select few.
After the invention of the printing press and the relative popularization of books, the demand for
eyeglasses increased; in England, for instance, pedlars travelling from town to town sold “cheap
continental spectacles”. Makers of spectacles and clips became known in Strasbourg in 1466, barely
eleven years after the publication of Gutenberg’s first Bible; in Nuremberg in 1478; and in Frankfurt in
1540. It is possible that more and better glasses allowed more readers to become better readers, and to
buy more books, and that for this reason glasses became associated with the intellectual, the librarian,
the scholar.
The first painted depiction of eyeglasses, on the nose of Cardinal Hugo de Saint Cher, painted by
Tommaso da Modena in 1352. (photo credit 21.1)
From the fourteenth century on, glasses were added to numerous paintings, to mark the studious and
wise nature of a character. In many depictions of the Dormition or Death of the Virgin, several of the
doctors and wise men surrounding her death-bed found themselves wearing eyeglasses of various kinds;
in the anonymous eleventh-century Dormition now at the Neuberg Monastery in Vienna, a pair of glasses
was added several centuries later to a white-bearded sage being shown a hefty volume by a disconsolate
younger man. The implication seems to be that even the wisest among scholars do not possess sufficient
wisdom to heal the Virgin and change her destiny.
An eleventh-century Dormition of the Virgin in Neuberg Monastery, Vienna. Second from the right, one of
the doctors attending her is wearing a pair of scholarly glasses added more than three centuries later to
lend him authority. (photo credit 21.2)
In Greece, Rome and Byzantium, the scholar-poet — the doctus poeta, represented as holding a tablet or
a scroll — had been considered a paragon, but this role was confined to mortals. The gods never busied

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themselves with literature; Greek and Latin divinities were never shown holding a book. Christianity was
the first religion to place a book in the hands of its god, and from the mid-fourteenth century onwards the
emblematic Christian book was accompanied by another image, that of the eyeglasses. The perfection of
Christ and of God the Father would not justify their representation as short-sighted, but the Fathers of the
Church — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine — and the ancient authors admitted into the Catholic
canon — Cicero, Aristotle — were at times depicted carrying a learned tome and wearing the sage
spectacles of knowledge.
By the end of the fifteenth century, eyeglasses were sufficiently familiar to symbolize not only the prestige
of reading but also its abuses. Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the
humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible. I remember being laughed at, during one
recess in grade six or seven, for staying indoors and reading, and how the taunting ended with me
sprawled face down on the floor, my glasses kicked into one corner, my book into another. “You wouldn’t
enjoy it” was the verdict of my cousins who, having seen my book-lined bedroom, assumed that I would
not want to accompany them to see yet another Western. My grandmother, seeing me read on Sunday
afternoons, would sigh, “You’re day-dreaming,” because my inactivity seemed to her a wasteful idleness
and a sin against the joy of living. Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist — these are some of the
epithets that eventually became associated with the absent-minded scholar, the poor-sighted reader, the
bookworm, the nerd. Buried in books, isolated from the world of facts and flesh, feeling superior to those
unfamiliar with the words preserved between dusty covers, the bespectacled reader who pretended to
know what God in His wisdom had hidden was seen as a fool, and glasses became emblematic of
intellectual arrogance.
In February 1494, during the famous Carnival of Basel, the young doctor of law Sebastian Brant
published a small volume of allegorical verse in German entitled Das Narrenschiff, or The Ship of Fools.
Its success was immediate: in the first year the book was reprinted three times and in Strasbourg, Brant’s
birthplace, an enterprising publisher, anxious to share in the profits, commissioned an unknown poet to
increase the book by four thousand lines. Brant complained about this form of plagiarism, but in vain.
Two years later, Brant asked his friend Jacques Locher, professor of poetry at the University of Freiburg,
to translate the book into Latin. Locher did so, but rearranged the order of the chapters and included
variations of his own. Whatever the changes to Brant’s original text, the book’s readership kept
increasing until well into the seventeenth century. Its success was partly due to the accompanying
woodcuts, many by the hand of the twenty-two-year-old Albrecht Dürer. But largely the merit was Brant’s
own. Brant had meticulously surveyed the follies or sins of his society, from adultery and gambling to lack
of faith and ingratitude, in precise, up-to-date terms: for instance, the discovery of the New World, which
had taken place less than two years earlier, is mentioned halfway through the book to exemplify the follies
of covetous curiosity. Dürer and other artists offered Brant’s readers common images of these new
sinners, recognizable at once among their peers in everyday life, but it was Brant himself who roughed
out the illustrations intended as accompaniments to his text.
One of these images, the first after the frontispiece, illustrates the folly of the scholar. The reader opening
Brant’s book would be confronted by his own image: a man in his study, surrounded by books. There are
books everywhere: on the shelves behind him, on both sides of his lectern-desk, inside the compartments
of the desk itself. The man is wearing a nightcap (to hide his ass’s ears) while a fool’s hood with bells
hangs behind him, and he holds in his right hand a duster with which he swats at the flies come to settle
on his books. He is the Büchernarr, the “book fool”, the man whose folly consists in burying himself in
books. On his nose sits a pair of glasses.
These glasses accuse him: here is a man who will not see the world directly, but relies instead on peering
at the dead words on a printed page. “It is for a very good reason,” says Brant’s foolish reader, “that I’m
the first to climb into the ship. For me the book is everything, more precious even than gold. / I have
great treasures here, of which I understand not a word.” He confesses that, in the company of learned
men who quote from wise books, he loves to be able to say, “I have all those volumes at home”; he
compares himself to Ptolemy II of Alexandria, who accumulated books but not knowledge. Through
Brant’s book, the image of the bespectacled and foolish scholar quickly became a common icon; as early
as 1505, in the De fide concubinarum of Olearius, an ass is sitting at an identical desk, glasses on his nose
and fly-swatter in his hoof, reading from a big open book to a class of student-beasts.
So popular was Brant’s book that in 1509 the humanist scholar Geiler von Kaysersberg began preaching a
series of sermons based on Brant’s cast of fools, one for every Sunday. The first sermon, corresponding to
the first chapter of Brant’s book, was of course on the Book Fool. Brant had lent the fool words to
describe himself; Geiler used the description to divide this bookish folly into seven types, each
recognizable by the tinkling of one of the Fool’s bells. According to Geiler, the first bell announces the
Fool who collects books for the sake of glory, as if they were costly furniture. In the first century AD, the
Latin philosopher Seneca (whom Geiler liked to quote) had already denounced the ostentatious
accumulation of books: “Many people without a school education use books not as tools for study but as
decorations for the dining-room.” Geiler insists, “He who wants books to bring him fame must learn
something from them; he must store them not in his library but in his head. But this first Fool has put his
books in chains and made them his prisoners; could they free themselves and speak, they would haul him

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in front of the magistrate, demanding that he, not they, be locked up.” The second bell rings in the Fool
who wants to grow wise through the consumption of too many books. Geiler compares him to a stomach
upset by too much food, and to a military general hampered in his siege by having too many soldiers.
“What should I do? you ask. Should I throw all my books away then?” — and we can imagine Geiler
pointing his finger at one particular parishioner in his Sunday audience. “No, that you should not. But you
should select those that are useful to you, and make use of them at the right moment.” The third bell
rings in the Fool who collects books without truly reading them, merely flicking through them to satisfy
his idle curiosity. Geiler compares him to a madman running through the town, trying to observe in detail,
as he tears along, the signs and emblems on the house-fronts. This, he says, is impossible, and a sorry
waste of time.
Albrecht Dürer’s frontispiece for Sebastian Brant’s first edition of The Ship of Fools. (photo credit 21.3)
Armed with a lectern, a book, a bundle of birches and a pair of glasses, an ass teaches a class of beasts in
Olearius’s satirical De fide concubinarum of 1505. (photo credit 21.4)
The fourth bell calls the Fool who loves sumptuously illuminated books. “Is it not a sinful folly,” asks
Geiler, “to feast one’s eyes on gold and silver when so many of God’s children go hungry? Don’t your eyes
have the sun, the moon, the stars, the many flowers and other things to please you?” What need do we
have for human figures or flowers in a book? Are not the ones God provided enough? And Geiler
concludes that this love of painted images “is an insult to wisdom.” The fifth bell announces the Fool who
binds his books in rich cloth. (Here again Geiler borrows silently from Seneca, who protested against the
collector “who gets his pleasure from bindings and labels” and in whose illiterate household “you can see
the complete works of orators and historians on shelves up to the ceiling, because, like bathrooms, a
library has become an essential ornament of a rich house.”) The sixth bell calls in the Fool who writes and
produces badly written books without having read the classics, and without any knowledge of spelling,
grammar or rhetoric. He is the reader turned writer, tempted to add his scribbled thoughts to stand
beside the works of the great. Finally — in a paradoxical switch future anti-intellectuals would ignore —
the seventh and last Book Fool is he who despises books entirely and scorns the wisdom that can be
obtained from them.
Through Brant’s intellectual imagery, Geiler, the intellectual, provided arguments for the anti-intellectuals
of his time who lived uncertainly in an age that saw the civil and religious structures of European society
split through dynastic wars that altered their concept of history, geographical explorations that shifted
their concepts of space and of commerce, religious schisms that changed for ever their concept of who
and why and what they were on earth. Geiler armed them with a whole catalogue of accusations which
allowed them, as a society, to see fault not in their own actions but in the thoughts about their actions, in
their imaginations, their ideas, their readings.
Many of those who sat in Strasbourg Cathedral Sunday after Sunday, listening to Geiler’s railings against
the follies of the misguided reader, probably believed that he was echoing the popular grudge against the
man of books. I can imagine the uncomfortable feeling of those who, like myself, wore glasses, perhaps
taking them off surreptitiously as these meek helpers suddenly became a badge of dishonour. But it was
not the reader and his glasses that Geiler was attacking. Far from it; his arguments were those of a
humanist cleric, critical of untrained or vacuous intellectual competition, but equally strong in defending
the need for literate knowledge and the value of books. He did not share the resentment growing among
the general population, who saw scholars as undeservedly privileged, suffering from what John Donne
described as “defects of loneliness”, hiding away from the real labours of the world in what several
centuries later Gérard de Nerval, following Sainte-Beuve, was to call “the ivory tower”, the haven “to
which we climb higher and higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd”, far from the gregarious
occupations of the common folk. Three centuries after Geiler, Thomas Carlyle, speaking in defence of the
scholar-reader, lent him heroic features: “He, with his copy-rights and his copy-wrongs, in his squalid
garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and
generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living.” But the prejudiced view persisted of
the reader as an absent-minded egghead, an absconder from the world, a day-dreamer with glasses
mousing through a book in a secluded corner.
The Spanish writer Jorge Manrique, a contemporary of Geiler’s, divided humankind between “those who
live by their hands, and the rich”. Soon that division was perceived as between “those who live by their
hands” and “the Book Fool”, the bespectacled reader. It is curious that glasses have never lost this
unworldly association. Even those who wish to appear wise (or at least bookish) in our time take
advantage of the symbol; a pair of glasses, whether prescription or not, undermines the sensuality of a

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face and suggests instead intellectual preoccupations. Tony Curtis wears a pair of stolen glasses while
attempting to convince Marilyn Monroe that he is nothing but a naive millionaire in Some Like It Hot. And
in Dorothy Parker’s famous words, “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Opposing the
strength of the body to the power of the mind, separating the homme moyen sensuel from the scholar,
calls for elaborate argumentations. On one side are the workers, the slaves with no access to books, the
creatures of bone and sinew, the majority of humankind; on the other, the minority, the thinkers, the elite
of scribes, the intellectuals supposedly allied with authority. Discussing the meaning of happiness, Seneca
granted the minority the stronghold of wisdom and scorned the opinion of the majority. “The best,” he
said, “should be preferred by the majority, and instead the populace chooses the worst.… Nothing is as
noxious as listening to what people say, considering right that which is approved by most, and taking as
one’s model the behaviour of the masses, who live not according to reason but in order to conform.” The
English scholar John Carey, analysing the relationship between intellectuals and the masses at the turn of
our century, found Seneca’s views echoed in many of the most famous British writers of the late Victorian
and Edwardian ages. “Given the multitudes by which the individual is surrounded,” Carey concluded, “it
is virtually impossible to regard everyone else as having an individuality equivalent to one’s own. The
mass, as a reductive and dismissive concept, is invented to ease this difficulty.”
The argument that opposes those with the right to read, because they can read “well” (as the fearful
glasses seem to indicate), and those to whom reading must be denied, because they “wouldn’t
understand”, is as ancient as it is specious. “Once a thing is put into writing,” Socrates argued, “the text,
whatever it might be, is taken from place to place and falls into the hands not only of those who