Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

I have not provided a separate bibliography since most of the books that I drew upon are mentioned in
the following notes. In any case, the vastness of the subject and the limitations of the author, would make
such a list, gathered under the prestigious title of “Bibliography”, seem both mysteriously erratic and
hopelessly incomplete.
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1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955). Lévi-Strauss calls societies without writing “cold
societies” because their cosmology attempts to annul the sequence of events that constitutes our notion
of history.
2. Philippe Descola, Les Lances du crépuscule (Paris, 1994).
3. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, 2 vols., ed. Celina S.
de Cortázar & Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires, 1969), I: 9.
4. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974).
5. Miguel de Unamuno, untitled sonnet in Poesía completa (Madrid, 1979).
6. Virginia Woolf, “Charlotte Brontë”, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew
McNeillie (London, 1987).
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris, 1964).
8. James Hillman, “A Note on Story”, in Children’s Literature: The Great Excluded, Vol. 3, ed. Francelia
Butler & Bennett Brockman (Philadelphia, 1974).
9. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My Kingdom”, A Child’s Garden of Verses (London, 1885).
10. Michel de Montaigne, “On the Education of Children”, in Les Essais, ed. J. Plattard (Paris, 1947).
11. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott (New
York, 1978).
12. Samuel Butler, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (London, 1912).
13. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”, in Ficciones (Buenos Aires, 1944).
14. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (London, 1889).
15. Quoted in John Willis Clark, Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods (Cambridge, 1894).
16. Traditio Generalis Capituli of the English Benedictines (Philadelphia, 1866).
17. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York, 1988).
18. At the time, neither Borges nor I knew that Kipling’s bundled message was not an invention.
According to Ignace J. Gelb (The History of Writing [Chicago, 1952]), in Eastern Turkestan, a young
woman sent her lover a message consisting of a lump of tea, a leaf of grass, a red fruit, a dried apricot, a
piece of coal, a flower, a piece of sugar, a pebble, a falcon’s feather and a nut. The message read, “I can
no longer drink tea, I’m pale as grass without you, I blush to think of you, my heart burns as coal, you are
beautiful as a flower, and sweet as sugar, but is your heart of stone? I’d fly to you if I had wings, I am
yours like a nut in your hand.”

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19. Borges analysed Wilkins’s language in an essay, “El idioma analitico de John Wilkins”, in Otras
Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1952).
20. Evelyn Waugh, “The Man Who Liked Dickens”, a chapter in A Handful of Dust (London, 1934).
21. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Leer y escribir (Mexico, D.F., 1969).
22. Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie (Paris, 1994).
23. Jorge Luis Borges, review of Men of Mathematics, by E.T. Bell, in El Hogar, Buenos Aires, July 8,
1938.
24. P.K.E. Schmöger, Das Leben der Gottseligen Anna Katharina Emmerich (Freiburg, 1867).
25. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton,
1961).
26. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “In Praise of Illiteracy”, in Die Zeit, Hamburg, Nov. 29, 1985.
27. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987).
28. Charles Lamb, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”, in Essays of Elia (London, 1833).
29. Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, trans. Victoria Holbrook (Manchester, 1990).
READING SHADOWS
1. This is not to say that all writing has its roots in these Sumerian tablets. It is generally accepted that
Chinese and Central American scripts, for example, developed independently. See Albertine Gaur, A