The Book of the Erinyes

Inspir­a­tion #1: The fol­low­ing pas­sage from a won­der­ful book by Gene Wolfe called The Shadow of the Tor­turer where the prot­ag­on­ist Severian is listen­ing to the remin­is­cences of the old blind Lib­rar­ian, Mas­ter Ultan.

I first read this book when I was 14, back in 1984. I’ve prob­ably re-read it 20 times since and it remains one of my favour­ite books:

“I was sit­ting there, as I said, and had been for sev­eral watches, when I came to me that I was read­ing no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of cer­tain odors and tex­tures and col­ors that seemed to have no con­nec­tion with any­thing dis­cussed in the volume I held. At last I real­ized that instead of read­ing it, I had been observing it as a phys­ical object. The red I recalled came from the rib­bon sewn to the head­band so that I might mark my place. The tex­ture that tickled my fin­gers still was that of the paper in which the book was prin­ted. The smell in my nos­trils was old leather, still wear­ing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books them­selves, when I began to under­stand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of ech­idnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose stud­ies they are, are for the most part of the opin­ion that no trace of them sur­vives unfos­sil­ized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bind­ings are covered with the thick­est gems. We have books cased in per­fumed woods shipped across the incon­ceiv­able gulf between creations—books doubly pre­cious because no one on Urth can read them.”

“We have books whose papers are mat­ted of plants from which spring curi­ous alkal­oids, so that the reader, in turn­ing their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantas­ies and chi­meric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but del­ic­ate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desic­cated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tab­lets and record­ings on a hun­dred dif­fer­ent sub­stances. There is a cube of crys­tal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no lar­ger than the ball of your thumb that con­tains more books than the lib­rary itself does. Though a har­lot might dangle it from one ear for an orna­ment, there are not volumes enough in the world to coun­ter­weight the other.”

Per­fect!