Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Medicine and Allied Sciences 11 (1956).
7. Redi, Lettera sopra l’invenzione degli occhiali di nazo (Florence, 1648).
8. Rosen, “The Invention of Eyeglasses”.
9. Rudyard Kipling, “The Eye of Allah”, in Debits and Credits (London, 1926).
10. Roger Bacon, Opus maius, ed. S. Jebb (London, 1750).
11. René Descartes, Traité des passions (Paris, 1649).
12. W. Poulet, Atlas on the History of Spectacles, Vol. II (Godesberg, 1980).
13. Hugh Orr, An Illustrated History of Early Antique Spectacles (Kent, 1985).
14. E.R. Curtius, quoting F. Messerschmidt, Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft (Berlin, 1931), notes that

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the Etruscans did, however, represent several of their gods as scribes or readers.
15. Charles Schmidt, Histoire littéraire de l’ Alsace (Strasbourg, 1879).
16. Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, ed. Friedrich Zarncke (Leipzig, 1854).
17. Geiler von Kaysersberg, Nauicula siue speculum fatuorum (Strasbourg, 1510).
18. Seneca, “De tranquillitate”, in Moral Essays, ed. R.M. Gummere (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1955).
19. Ibid.
20. John Donne, “The Extasie”, in The Complete English Poems, ed. C.A. Patrides (New York, 1985).
21. Gérard de Nerval, “Sylvie, souvenirs du Valois”, in Autres chimères (Paris, 1854).
22. Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero As Man of Letters”, in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (London,
1971).
23. Jorge Manrique, “Coplas a la muerte de su padre”, in Poesías, ed. F. Benelcarría (Madrid, 1952).
24. Seneca, “De vita beata”, in Moral Essays.
25. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia,
1880–1939 (London, 1992).
26. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1932). To be fair to Arnold, his argument continues:
“but we are for the transformation of each and all of these according to the law of perfection.”
27. Aldous Huxley, “On the Charms of History”, in Music at Night (London, 1931).
28. Thomas Hardy, writing in 1887, quoted in Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.
29. Sigmund Freud, “Writers and Day-Dreaming”, in Art and Literature, Vol. 14 of the Pelican Freud
Library, trans. James Strachey (London, 1985).
30. And even Don Quixote is not entirely lost in fiction. When he and Sancho mount the wooden horse,
convinced that it is the flying steed Clavileño, and the incredulous Sancho wants to take off the kerchief
that covers his eyes in order to see if they are really up in the air and near the sun, Don Quixote orders
him not to do so. Fiction would be destroyed by prosaic proof. (Don Quixote, II, 41.) The suspension of
disbelief, as Coleridge rightly pointed out, must be willing; beyond that willingness lies madness.
31. Rebecca West, “The Strange Necessity”, in Rebecca West — A Celebration (New York, 1978).
ENDPAPER PAGES
1. Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (New
York, 1927).
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, ed. Erich Heller (Frankfurt-am-
Main, 1986).
3. Richard de Bury, The Philobiblon, ed. & trans. Ernest C. Thomas (London, 1888).
4. Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”, in The Common Reader, second series (London,
1932).
5. Gerontius, Vita Melaniae Janioris, trans. & ed. Elizabeth A. Clark (New York & Toronto, 1984).
6. Jonathan Rose, “Rereading the English Common Reader: A preface to a History of Audiences”, in the
Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992.
7. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 1994).
8. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols., ed. Celina S.
de Cortázar & Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires, 1969).
9. Marcel Proust, Journées de lecture, ed. Alain Coelho (Paris, 1993).
10. Michel Butor, La Modification (Paris, 1957).

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11. Wolfgang Kayser, Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk (Leipzig, 1948).
12. Quoted in Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian