The Library reopens on Wednesday the 28th of July

 The Victorian Government's decision to lift the fifth Melbourne lockdown means the Library can reopen. The Library will reopen at 10 am Wednesday the 28th of July. Contact tracing, mask wearing and other familiar Covid procedures are in place. Members are free to borrow.

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Quietest Book in the World

 

The quiet book is unopened in front of you.

The world around you can recede for a while to its place of residence.

If you open the book, as you do with a swing of your glasses, language begins.

The past meets you halfway, in a silence of complicity.

The mood may settle, like the muscles in your neck.

Or soon pace down and up and down towards some unexplained expectation.

It could be the Middle Ages, or just middle age.

It could be the Renaissance.

The truck in the street has already turned the corner and gone.

The quietest book, here in front of you, trials the notion of a quiet library.

Sometime you have visited a library yourself.

Footnotes lead to citations for the fallacy of the quiet librarian.  

You read how this notion is demolished once you attend a library conference. The boisterous library, the outspoken library, the talkative library.

These are not common expressions; their librarians can be all these things.

So many words exchanged when the quiet book is banned.

A sing-song of superlatives when the quietest book is reviewed.

Discussion gets deep about the very nature of the quiet book.

Confronted silently by the language of the past, you get to like it.

This language was created just for you.

Though someone was in mind, only who and why?

This language was created just for you, not.

Certain chapters are held together by some silent pact.

After you have turned off the reading lamp, certain sentences keep you awake.

Tomorrow you must return to them.

The quietest book in the world addresses tomorrow head-on.

By then, the voice is being assimilated in your mind.

The sentences are more than just gut feeling.

You find the quietest book in the world is like no other.

You push aside the thought that it is like all the others.

You accept that all books are quiet.

Some are quiet as a dormouse, others quiet as outer space.

Your hearing mechanisms are not tuned to such frequencies.

Reading doesn’t always help.

The literature has not proven that some books are quieter than others.

Hence, you read sipping a cup of tea, their very mystery.

When you enter a library, bookshop, or any booklined space, there is quiet.

They are not anechoic chambers and yet you hear the silence.

Lines of books speak to the future that is you.

Tomorrow is another day, reads the epigraph.

And here you are.

The quietest book in the world stands in for the voices of the generations.

The quietest book may not be labelled thus for sale purposes.

Only the other week you were reading one of your quietest nearby books.

Storms uprooted forests, floods swept homes downstream.

The affable diarist spends hours in coffee houses with voluble friends.

The new music is so loud, conversation at the opera must be curtailed.

The war on the continent is reaching a crescendo.

The plague could put an end to it all.

You could not put it down, even forgot to turn out the reading lamp.

The quietest book was picked up again next morning.

His library grew while increasing blindness hindered full appreciation.

The stone caused groans but his vocal visitors, vociferous opinions.

The city almost burnt to the ground; we are grateful for his account.

One book you will not have read contains the following poem.

It is translated from an Oriental language, from another century.

The forest is here but this morning no sounds may be heard.

Truly no language can speak the silence of fog.

Surely the owls are warm where they dwell.

But cold is everywhere, in the air and the bones.

Thought wishes to share such peaceful solitude

Where soundless immensity traps occasional mist water.

Inside the room the bed is warm and sleeps some more.

Table, fruit bowls, teacups - every object is quiet

But quietest of all on a window ledge is a book

Closed for some time, now in the light again,

The quietest book in the world.

You might enjoy everything I have put into this book.

Descriptions of travel before the pandemic arrived.

Conversations with our friends, some lost for good.

Cartoons of our hopeless politicians, even old Lunkhead.

Drawings that took hours, of the abiding seasons.

Cuttings of thought-provoking facts from the capital’s news sheets.

My efforts at interpretation of poems and scripture verses.

The abiding seasons, that supply pressed flowers and herbs.

You might; or might prefer most times your own window view.

Fog shows by example how to quieten down.

Until a bird song or cracking ice means fog is lifting, with blue hints. 

 Notes for the Poem:

Pictured are two of the quietest books in the world alluded to in the poem: ‘The Diary of Samuel Pepys’ and ‘The Poetry and Career of Li Po, 701-762 A.D.’, biography and translations by Arthur Waley.

A useful introduction to anechoic chambers is found here:

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/anechoic-chamber-worlds-quietest-room/index.html

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Loudest Book in the World

 

Competition is almost Trumpian to be the loudest book in the room. Radio doesn’t hold back. The talking book brought a new dimension to the repertoire of the book and, unlike the movies, has to keep strictly to the text. For some of us, a road trip is not complete without Jane Austen speaking to us (pictured) somewhat louder than is necessary while the landscape glides by. We try to think of the audiobook taken to its extreme, played to a packed stadium like a rock concert, but somehow that has never caught on: we like being spoken to at a human level, one-to-one. There is also the other issue, the practical outcome of listening to a favourite book at 130 decibels over three hours. We note in passing that the Guinness no longer celebrates The Loudest Band in the World for fear of promoting hearing loss. Another claimant for loudest book is loudest slam. We generally slam shut a book for one of three reasons: to express our displeasure at what we have just seen in the contents, to show that we exist, or to give someone a fright. None of these actions are seriously premeditated, so records are scarce as to which book made the slammest slam. Tests for slamness are still in their early stages. All we can say with certainty is there are a lot of contenders out there shouting for attention as biggest slammer. Visually speaking, every time we enter a bookshop we are confronted with the question of loudest book cover. Publishers seem to spend half their time devising the most eye-catching images for their products. We are invited to judge a book by its loudness. The ultimate result is graphic design overload, leaving us to question to what extent a cover ever has much to do with sales. Some books have visual loudness built in. There are books of my experience from the 1967-71 period when psychedelia and neon colours were mandatory in design (pictured). The orange flyleaves, or vivid pink, of these books leave rectangular imprints on the retina that remain there, like a sun cube, for some days. During that time the whole world looks like a Mark Rothko painting, so user beware, we need to give ourselves time out before opening these far-out books. They remind us that science can only go so far in quantifying loudness, that loud has a subjective quality that no amount of analysis can prove. When it comes to orange, or vivid pink, one person’s autumn leaf is another person’s sun flare. Which brings us to the loudness of the enclosed text. One contender, in this regard, is ‘Finnegans Wake’. James Joyce’s linguistic explosion of a novel is punctuated by no less than ten thunderwords, nine of them 100 letters long, the last 101. The thunderwords are instances of the exclamations and interjections that animate the whole story. This is only one kind of loud text, devised for dramatic entertainment as much as instruction. Asked to name another book where loud is a verity, my first response would be this. Psalms have slam. In the written record, they speak across lifetimes in a voice that is authoritative and experienced, tried and true, personal and general, loud and clear. They tell us to praise him upon the loud cymbals, to praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Shapeliest Book in the World

[One] The shape of the book has been entrenched in the human mind for over a millennium. It opens, it closes, it stays still. Held open in the hand it is like a bird. Closed, it could be a paving stone. It stays still, but tilted may riffle like waves. Here is a collection of seven triads about book shapes. [Two] The paperback concentrates more knowledge into a cubic octavo than we can imagine in our philosophy. The leatherbound gilt-tripping marbled-edged rectangle that repeats itself for miles along oaken shelves wishes to protect itself from the elements of time. The half-calf folio requiring two people to lift was intended as a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Such is our inheritance. [Three] Gouging begins with thumb-marker lunettes for letters in dictionaries, or anatomies, or books of the Bible. Magnifying glasses loom in built-in drawers of micro-print reproductions, millions of words tinier than ants. A map of the local area folds out into a city covering the entire floor space. All very practical. [Four] Then it starts getting impractical. ‘Natasha’, a children’s story book about Russian dolls, contains doll-shaped pages each one slightly smaller than the previous. ‘Circus Zingaro’, a pop-up book about a homeless girl who dreams of joining the troupe, takes longer to pack up than set up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-JfIW_VAcE  ‘Tilt’, a history of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, is bound at a severe angle to the perpendicular, lending new meaning to the word ‘cute’, though not cute to shelve (pictured). [Five] Converting the codex into an art object or personal statement is to acknowledge the complete familiarity of the book shape in everyday life. Google Image ‘artists books’ and we can spend hours scrolling through the myriad ways the book comes to life. Here are three examples that I found just now when searching ‘artists books’: A Webster’s Dictionary, its interior trimmed into the rooms, passageways and corkscrew steps of a house; a concertina that is a township stretching in all street directions into the bush; an old unused scrapbook that, when opened, is a stork taking flight across the room and through the window. To put it simply, the shapeliest book in the world is purely in the eye of the beholder. [Six] While the modern proclivity for repurposing or upcycling books is widespread, due in part to the scale of available objects. Here’s another triad based on Google Image ‘upcycled books’: the book that became a framed abstract cityscape collage; the books that literally furnish a room with chairs and couches; the books that are an English cottage garden. [Seven] Such is its familiarity, the book shape has become an inspiration for architects and designers everywhere. The book is in the landscape. If you are going to Kansas City it’s hard to miss the Public Library carpark, a three-storey row of 22 book spines shelved along the street. (pictured) More subtle is the Public Library in Lyon, where bookcases of different vintages hold famous volumes, all delicately painted fresco across the five storey walls. Online has a whole library of marble benches, staircases and glass skyscrapers, all designed in the shape of the book and really we could go on but it’s time now to switch off the reading lamp and get some sleep.

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Most Holey Book in the World

 
The enemies of books can be thorough. The most holey book in the world does not exist, having been digested by very hungry caterpillars (pictured). The proof is in the pudding, which means the most holey book vanished, leaving no evidence for its holeyest claims. This may be why ‘most holey book’ retrieves no hits on Google. While the librarian is on vacation, the mice will have no hesitation. The enemies of books play havoc with the records. The elements find their way in. All of a sudden, it’s sodden. Water makes the pages wavy. Water can balloon a book to several times its normal size. A minnow may turn into a whale. But at least there’s a chance we can still read the text. The most burnt book in the world leaves nothing but full stops (pictured). Guinness would tell us the title, if its scouts could recreate the work from ash and dust. Fire is a bad master. We will never learn what caused the fiery iconoclasts so much spite. Book burners know the mind of a tyrant. They obliterate the collective memory and exert control over what others value. The enemies of e-books are time and hire, compatibility and availability. The whole digital world is a fragile entity, with enemies everywhere: tired drives, broken links, 404 pages. Rust and moth may destroy. The idea that the internet has inbuilt entropy, that the rot could set in, seems not to perturb the scintillating savants of Silicon Valley. They would hear these words as a mini-jeremiad. What’s app, Doc?, they gleefully reply. Only, what happens when the cloud moves on? The most stolen book in the world is its own story of reader-response. If we knew where the book is now, we could possibly reconstruct its story. Theft keeps the words out of our hands. It is an enemy of books. If the purpose of a book is to reach those who want it, then theft deprives a book of that original purpose. Librarians are aware of this issue. Their efforts to recall overdue or stolen books have nothing much to do with possession, everything to do with equal access. Understandably, no records exist for the most neglected book in the world. The doorstopper has outlived its meaning in life and may as well be restored to the forest. The old scintillators have been shifted to the stacks. The sheer scale of publication lends to neglect. It is why the rediscovery of a neglected work is an argument for libraries. But neglect is a major enemy of books. We cannot say the same of the most banned book in the world which, for all we know, could be amongst the most read books in the world. A curious fact about lists of banned books is how many of them we readily recognise, or indeed have read.

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Most Valuable Book in the World

Bill Gates, a person instrumental in enabling our daily communications today, a person who has changed humanity’s reading habits, who has shifted the modes of librarianship, is the owner of the most valuable book in the world. We pay each day through his gates, so he can sign the bill. The bill was U$30,802,500 for Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscript known as Codex Leicester. The elite book market is no different from the art market, or the purchase of vast property. Leonardo did not produce his book to make megabucks. His purpose was intellectual enquiry and, at least in these terms, he and Bill share an interest. It remains to be seen if Bill will end his life banished from the kingdom he served so well. In truth, it is meaningless to speak of book value in this moneyed way. There are dozens of books of more historic significance than Leonardo’s, protected by governments and institutions that will never think of selling them. Their value is greater than rubies, while tomorrow the market could add to its insider conversation by selling a book to out-trump Gates. Stop Press. Chinese billionaire Wang Zhongjun has purchased a letter by the 11^th-century scholar Zeng Gong for U$31,730,000. It consists of a sheet of paper, so not a book, as such. End of Transcript. Where were we? The Gates bill reminds us of the high end of the second-hand book trade, that world where contents and authorial purpose have been forgotten in pursuit of large returns, populated with collectors who see books as gold ingots. The reasons for a title’s fame have become lost, leaving simply the criteria for a high price, depending on author, publication date, binding and other variables. Oh, sorry, just got a text message. The original printer’s manuscript of John Smith’s ‘Book of Mormon’ has been bought for U$35,000,000 by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’. Thank you, but not a book, as such. Meanwhile the rest of us like to keep it personal, economical even. Our most valuable books stay on our shelves and usually have minimal market impact. They do not reside inside unreachable locked cabinets, or in display cases for the admiration of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. For example: 1. ‘The Magic Pudding’ by Norman Lindsay, given to me by my grandmother on my tenth birthday, is amongst the most valuable of my childhood books (pictured). Reading is not a priority with the characters, who spend all their time battling for possession of an ill-mannered pudding. 2. ‘A Certain World’, W.H. Auden’s commonplace book collected near the end of his life, is browsed each year at random. Thought by many to be his idea of an autobiography, it reminds me of university days with friends who argued over Auden. 3. ‘The Art of Living’ (1949), the earliest of many art books by the New York artist Saul Steinberg (pictured) that have come my way, like my collections of other favourite book artists like Maurice Sendak and Ronald Searle. Fortunately, there is no need to downsize my home library of its thousands. If I ever did, these three books would be on the list of the last hundred. Some people describe such possessiveness as sentiment; however, sentimental value is a residual factor. The real reasons have to do with personal identity, a lifetime’s knowledge, the circling of memory, connection with others through time, namely family and friends, our human world and the authors themselves. This book rather than that book is a choice we make all the time, adding thereby to their unquantifiable value.

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Most Translated Book in the World

Irish historian Eamon Duffy, in ‘A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation’ (pictured, Bloomsbury, 2021, page 83) writes that “There are more than 350 different translations of the Bible into English, more than into any other language. And if we count English versions of the New Testament, or of individual books or clusters of books such as the Psalms or the Gospels, the number of different English Bible translations runs into thousands.” Note the quiet sub-clause “more than into any other language”, which only hints at the scale of translations into those “other” languages. Wikipedia, quoting Wycliffe Bible Translators, summons the numbers: “The full Bible has been translated into 704 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,551 languages and Bible portions or stories into 1,160 other languages. Thus at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,415 languages.” The books of the Bible, a set of between about forty and about seventy depending on our tradition, have much to say about books. Adam lay y-bounden, four thousand winters thought he not too long, and all for an apple that he took, as clerks find written in their book. The medieval English carol gives a nod amusedly to its own written world. Whatever the claims of the oral tradition for the Genesis story, the carollers sing that they live in debt to their text-based society, even down to its Latin puns. Soon after, we find the Tower of Babel, that original symbol of the translator.  The confusion of tongues engenders a need to reduce chaos and improve clarity through translation, something that requires intensive listening, not just more speaking. Establishing new versions of Scripture is a permanent challenge. Indeed, a permanent challenge within one language. Revelation with lightning, in fact lightening, effect initiates what the heavy-duty words themselves plod out in their vastly various vernaculars. Words shift in meaning. Even the greatest story ever told is retold in all sorts of contradictory ways, one of the intents being to teach us perspective, to show humility, to accept something might get lost. Scripture also warns us against indulging in superlatives. The person who goes about making out they’re the mostest, is heading for a fall. This can extend to translations of the Bible. As Eamon Duffy says of the 1611 King James Bible, “even now in the USA there is a powerful federation of more than a thousand evangelical churches who believe that this so-called Authorized Version is actually superior to the original Hebrew and Greek scriptures it translates.” (page 84) The 47 translators of that version (fancifully pictured by George E. Kruger) would be the first to disagree, knowing as they did that the full breadth and depth of meaning of the originals cannot be carried over into one perfect copy. Which is why we have concordances, commentaries, dictionaries, interlinears, and all the other biblical apparatus that add an extra permutation to the Bible’s claim as most translated book. Ecclesiastes says that of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh. Yet how many of these extra texts outside the text do we need to know what Ecclesiastes might be saying? Translation is here to stay.

‘A People’s Tragedy : Studies in Reformation’ by Eamon Duffy SHORT REVIEW.

 

‘A People’s Tragedy : Studies in Reformation’ by Eamon Duffy. (Bloomsbury, 2020)

 A brief review by Philip Harvey, first published in The Melbourne Anglican, July 2021.

Irish historian Eamon Duffy’s latest essay collection reiterates his lifetime project to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. His forensic analysis of the people and events that shifted the English realm from a Catholic to a Protestant nation in the 16^th century both honours and laments what he sees as the losing side in that political see-saw.

 Like his great sparring partner Diarmaid MacCulloch, Duffy introduces new material and insights to such central subjects as late medieval pilgrimage, the dissolution of the monasteries, the collapse of the shrine network, and the extremes of polemic on all sides. His style flows and his arguments never wander.

 Central to Reformation dispute is Bible translation. Duffy’s concise and lively histories of the Catholic Douai, Protestant Geneva, and 1611 state-approved Anglican versions incisively illustrate the way words matter in debate, how each side vied for authority with their own Bible. Priest, elder, pastor, or minister? Word choice could be a matter of life and death. Vernacular translation hinges on how translators want them read: argument is inevitable.

 Readers of Hilary Mantel will thrill to his stout defence of Sir Thomas More. Duffy joins the debate about how far fiction can go with historical sources. For him, Mantel has Robert Bolt’s man-for-all-seasons More in her sights, reversing the roles of saint and villain so Thomas Cromwell is the more sympathetic figure. Whatever your view, Duffy shows powerfully how literature influentially changes our ideas about historical figures, for good or ill. Reading Duffy, we can say the same of historians.

 

 

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Most Edible Book in the World

 
‘Eat the scroll’ has firm biblical authority. For Ezekiel, to consume the word is to be able to speak it again to Israel. In prophetic terms, the act is transformative. We are told the text is sweet as honey. The Book of Revelation also contains the instruction, but even though the taste is sweet, the words leave a sour effect on the stomach. The message of John will be bitter. These profoundest experiences were the last thing on my mind when I playfully googled ‘most edible book in the world’ only to discover, very much to my surprise, the existence of the International Edible Book Festival. Normally held around the 1^st of April each year, predominantly in North America, it combines the spirit of two philosophies: “we are what we eat” and “we are what we read.” Book artists wear their chef’s hats. Not surprisingly, cakes are common entrants, being similar in shape and decorative potential to the squarish book. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may be easily transformed into a chocolate cake called ‘The Cadbury Tales’. Would anyone like some more of ‘The Rocky Road Not Taken’? ‘The Jungle Book’ may turn into a complete pop-up book, with caramel tracks, marzipan ruins, and foliage of sweet green icing flowing down (pictured). ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ is a regular and popular entrant wherever and whenever the Festival is held (pictured). But the Festival is not all cakes and ale. Given the nature of the binding, an entry for the works of Bacon could better be titled ‘Heart Attack City’. ‘Green Eggs and Hamlet’ could be a bit rich, too. The judges were no doubt happier tucking into the healthwise  ‘The Lord of the Rings’, constructed from regal staircases of sliced sushi roll. This buffet of edible books gives the general idea: https://bookriot.com/20-incredible-edible-books/  The date of the Festival coincides with the birthday of the person to whom it is dedicated, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), regarded by many as the inventor of food writing. He believed that “the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star,” something that could be said of some of the edible books in his Festival. “Let them eat cake!” say the librarians, generally aware that with these kinds of books we will soon be hungry again. Jovial Anglican clergy of my childhood used to enjoy elaborating on Thomas Cranmer’s collect for the second Sunday in Advent by saying that with Scripture we should “hear, read, mark, learn, inwardly digest, and be ready to regurgitate.” They sometimes delivered this message from the pulpit, whereat they weekly proceeded to do the same, leading by example with spoken words. Words that could be utterly absorbing.

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Most Incomprehensible Book in the World

We have all encountered a book sometime that is fairly much incomprehensible. Very comprehensible invective may be directed at this book, or nervous laughter, or shrug of the shoulders. What to do. The book is left to talk its incomprehensible language and we are left to pursue our own. Incomprehensibility is usually due to a book being written in the language of the tribe, whether scientific jargon, humanistic gobbledegook, zoological zippiededoodah.  Much modern poetry seems deliberately composed to make understanding impossible, rather than for experiential clarity. We each have a book that, though intended to be understood, is the most incomprehensible thing we have ever seen in our lives. And that’s just in English. The Voynich Manuscript is not like that, a work that has kept cryptographers in a state of incomprehension for centuries. Almost every year a new reader of this mysterious medieval book publishes a fresh theory that serves mainly to reconfirm its incomprehensibility. There are Voynich watchers, people whose lives pendulum between amusement that yet again the text denies access to a world expert, and dread that in fact the code of their favourite conundrum may finally be cracked. A carbon reading by the University of Arizona in 2009 dates the vellum between 1404 and 1438. That much is certain. The work is illustrated throughout with flora, humans, and cosmological features, leading us to think it may be some kind of encyclopedia (pictured); pages of herbs and plant roots suggest it may be a pharmacopeia, or even a wacky recipe book. Pages of nude women bathing in pools raise other theories. But it is the text, covering all 240 pages, that plunges us deep into incomprehensibility.  James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ is written in an invented literary language called Wakese and, likewise, our Manuscript is written in Voynichese. Wakese is a poetic hybrid, still generally comprehensible if we have English, that creates multiple levels of meaning in the story-telling. Voynichese is not like that. At least, it might be, if only we knew what it was saying. The alphabet of this unknown script has something like 20 to 25 invented characters that have yet to be matched meaningfully with any known language. Cryptography, computers, kitchen sinks – everything has been thrown at it. Wikipedia lists these language hypotheses, amongst those offered over time: the text could be cipher, code, shorthand, stenography, glossolalia, a transferred natural language, or a constructed language, perhaps even a Wakese before the fact. Some enthusiasts have strained every fibre of their being to prove it might be a hoax, but then what kind of hoax? Each new breakthrough with the Voynich Manuscript serves mainly to affirm the universal view that it is incomprehensible. It is an enigma of human ingenuity. If you wish to start up your own theory about the Manuscript, the work can be found here at its home in the Beinecke Library of Yale University: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Oldest Book in the World

 

The half-life of an e-book is much briefer than that of a print book. Though only a sensible guess, this dose of reality reminds us of the fragility of books and the variable changes in the technologies that make them. Naming the oldest print book depends on our definition of the word ‘print’. In Europe, that honour symbolically goes to the Gutenberg Bible (circa 1450-55), the first book to be made using mass-produced moveable-type. In Asia, it is a copy of the Buddhist holy text, the Diamond Sutra (CE 868). This rare book is made up of Chinese characters printed on a scroll of grey print paper, wrapped along a wooden pole and is considered the oldest surviving printed book in the world. In the Americas, the Aztecs made books, but the print book came with the conquest of Mexico. A printing press arrived there in 1539 and the first book was delivered five years later: ‘Doctrina Breve’, by the first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga. Religion also has everything to do with the first printed book in Africa. ‘Abudarham’ is a Jewish liturgical text first published by Samuel Nedivot and his son Isaac in Lisbon in 1489. They republished the book, virtually unchanged, in Fez in Morocco in 1516, after having endured the Jewish expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. The Church Missionary Society printer William Colenso produced New Zealand’s first book, a 16-page pamphlet of Ephesians and Philippians translated into Maori (1835). The first book to be published in Australia breaks the religious theme. It was the ‘New South Wales Standing Orders’ (1802), of which the website of the State Library of NSW notes drolly, “It was not a best-seller.” None of these books are the oldest in the world, of course, nor do we know if they have reached their half-life. To cut to the chase, the oldest book contains illustrations of a horse-rider, a mermaid, a harp, and soldiers. It is the Orphic six-pack called the Etruscan Gold Book (pictured), made out of 24-carat gold, dating from 600 BCE. The linked six gold sheets were discovered in 1955 in Bulgaria, which is why it is on display in the National History Museum in Sofia. Except that it’s not a book, according to the highly credible Erik Kwakkel, who defines a book as, historically speaking, a folding codex. For him, the oldest book is out there somewhere, it predates the Book of Kells (CE 800, pictured), which itself just predates the Diamond Sutra book, but after that it’s up to us to find it, or make our own judgement: https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/what-is-the-oldest-book-in-the-world/ 

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Longest Book in the World

Guinness thinks ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ is the longest novel in the world, though Marcel Proust should talk to my daughter. Bridie is a devotee of Japanese manga and is currently working her way through ‘One Piece’, an action adventure picture saga with 99 collected tankoben, i.e. individual volumes, and counting (pictured). The author, Eiichiro Oda, and his artists seem to produce new instalments at a Dickensian speed, faster than their readers can keep up. The very same Guinness says ‘One Piece’ has "the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author. As of February 2021, the manga had over 480 million copies in circulation in 43 countries worldwide, making it the best-selling manga series in history.” Proust would have things to say about Guinness, given that Wikipedia says the longest novel is ‘Venmurasu’ by the contemporary Tamil writer Jeyamohan, a renarration of the Indian classic, the Mahabharata. We should not be surprised by versions of the Mahabharata that are longer than the Mahabharata, when we consider Thomas Mann’s ‘Joseph and His Brothers’, a retelling of the Genesis story that, at 1200 pages, goes considerably longer than the original. Proust is eighth on the Wikipedia list, Mann’s novel tenth. There are road novels where we wish the satnav guided the author’s car into a lake. The quest for the longest book, as distinct from novel, can meet all sorts of ludicrous dead ends. We wonder if some titles of longest books don’t also bob up on lists of Most Unread Book. If we treat the title of a set as one book (see Proust), are some encyclopedias the longest in the world? Given the storage capacity of computers, there are writers now generating the longest book not as some creative trial but as a pastime. When we read of the lost works of ancient authors, we can only guess at the scale of the absence; just as it’s impossible to imagine a world in which Shakespeare’s works were accidentally lost. No point blaming a librarian for that! Wikipedia states, modestly, that Wikipedia is the longest encyclopedia, but to be fair does own up to the Yongle Dadian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia In our long search for the longest our minds wander rather than wonder after a while. What, for example, is the longest unfolding book? The British artist David Hockney has been painting Normandy landscapes during the pandemic (pictured), inspired by the longest tapestry in the world (almost) at Bayeux. His folding French panorama could extend into the next province and still not be the longest unfolding book in the world. That claim probably goes to an unidentified orihon. Originating in the Tang Dynasty in China, the concept of writing on a roll then folding the pages to read at ease travelled to Japan where, in the form of the unfolding book, the books became known as orihon. The thought of orihons on horizons, zigzagging into space like moon-shot streamers, is attractive. We may never know the end of it, or necessarily want to.

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Smallest Book in the World

 
Every day we open a book attached to an email. We watch the pages unfold on our glass screen, scroll down into something approaching eternity, never asking for its dimensions or pondering if it is the smallest book in the world. We download an ebook, to a device where one size fits all. Our pudgy digits tap, flick and sweep the flatly digital display, impressing us occasionally with the idea that small is beautiful. The Penguin paperback was invented to go in our handbag or coat pocket: they’re blockbusters compared with the chip in our phone. The complex history of ebooks can be explained in terms of our desire for portability, compactness, and swift access to large amounts of information. In these respects, the ebook is the latest chapter in a long history of wanting the book in our hand, in a size that can go anywhere. Google and Guinness agree that the world's smallest reproduction of a printed book is ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’. It was produced by a university imaging laboratory in Vancouver in 2007. It is 0.07 mm x 0.10 mm, the letters carved into 30 microtablets on a polished piece of single crystalline silicon, using a focused-gallium-ion beam with a minimum diameter of 7nanometers. Unquote. Theologians will be interested to note that this has been compared to the head of a pin, at 2 mm across. But then, we are talking contemporary technology here. Some people still believe a book is made out of paper. The smallest physical book in the Carmelite Library is a portable King James Bible (pictured), published in Glasgow in 1901. Its metal case has a magnifying glass inserted. By holding the glass three inches from our eyeball we can read the text four inches distant, albeit darkly. The Bible would have been ideal for our world trip, back in the days when we went on world trips. This is not, of course, the smallest physical book in the world. Google again. It says the smallest physical imprint is a 26-page book on Japanese flowers, the pages just 0.75 mm in size. ‘Shiki no Kusabana, Flowers of the Seasons’ (pictured) was published in 2016 by Toppan, one of Japan’s largest printers, which has been printing micro-books since the 1960s. Theologians will note that this book has been compared in size to the eye of a needle. The book was printed using the same technology used to print banknotes and has a retail price of 29,400 yen. That’s about $360 Australian, or about $385 New Zealand. It is unclear from our sources just how many copies of ‘Shiki no Kusabana’ have been produced, or if purchase means having to travel to Toppan’s display museum in Tokyo. It could be like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Largest Book in the World

Last year’s library conference included a 12-day global tour of famous and not so famous libraries, all at the safe distance of our screens. This year I’ve decided to put on an Exhibition of Superlative Books. Over the next twelve weekdays the Superlatives will flow on the ANZTLA e-list, but also here on FB. I hope you enjoy the posts. Here is the Exhibition Guide for the space called Largest. Text by Philip Harvey.

 One of the largest books in the Carmelite Library is ‘The Red Book’ of Carl Jung (height 40 cm), which he called ‘Liber Novus’. It was published posthumously in 2009, a private collection of psychological experiments from 1913 to 1916 that were instrumental in the foundation of Jung’s theories. The Library also holds a reader’s edition translation in handbook size, devised to assist study of the larger volume. Days may be spent enjoying its calligraphy and hand-painted images, going deeper into the unconscious. Carl Jung would have had theories about the psychology of bigness involved in producing the largest book in the world. Why, not how, is a question we ask when looking at Exhibit 2, a colossal double elephant folio of Hungarian flower illustrations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A06biAs4p9M Or there is the largest book of poems in the world (pictured), made by the Puerto Rican Rafael Morales Rodriguez, which crushes the very concept of the slim volume of verse. Morales boasts that in its 4498 pages the word ‘love’ appears 7027 times and the word ‘heart’ 5238 times. How we are meant to read the book, or create the intimate space associated with reading poetry, is not explained. Guinness says the largest book is a 2012 compilation of stories on the Prophet Muhammad created in Dubai and measuring an impressive if unmanageable 5 m x 8.06 m and weighing approximately 1500 kg. (pictured) The Carmelite Library does not have the doorway that could give access to this book. Indeed, there are books that require the room, or even the entire building, to be custom designed to house them. For some people though, it depends what we mean by a book. One of the largest integrated set of texts is incised in stone and rests in a religious compound in Mandalay in Myanmar. Housing this book was part of the book’s actual manufacturing plan. It is a stunning production, though some would argue that is not a book, that’s a pagoda: https://asuitcasefullofbooks.com/kuthodaw-pagoda-the-biggest-book-in-the-world-vlog/ Indeed, once we start expanding the definition of the word ‘book’ itself, who knows where it might all end? The largest book could be the building that houses the computers that record the input of the millions of diarists who freely contribute to Facebook. This is somewhat incomprehensible to the imagination. The four petabytes of data generated each day on Facebook is stored in what is known as the Hive. Online is coy about the geographic location of Hive, but it is available to us on our gadgets and we can read it every day. Those with a metaphorical turn of mind might say the largest book is the universe itself, that which all books strive to explain in larger or smaller measure, continually in a state of creation, there for us to interpret. The loan time is a lifetime and access is free.