The Book of the Erinyes

I’m lucky to be on a work trip to New York at the moment, and this morning—my bodyc­lock still work­ing on UK time, and the rain pour­ing down—I man­aged to grab some time to visit the Mor­gan Lib­rary and Museum on Madison Avenue, not far from my hotel.

The Mor­gan began as the private lib­rary of fin­an­cier Pier­pont Mor­gan hous­ing his col­lec­tion of illu­min­ated, lit­er­ary, and his­tor­ical manu­scripts, early prin­ted books, and old mas­ter draw­ings and prints.

The main focus of my visit to this insti­tu­tion was to see—first-hand—a Guten­berg Bible (the Lib­rary owns three of them!) prin­ted in 1455 by Johannes Guten­berg, the inventor of the print­ing press and mov­able type.

The visit was a fant­astic mine of inspir­a­tion, from the won­der­ful lib­rary itself (illus­trated here — photo by mach­bel, found on Flickr, licensed under Cre­at­ive Com­mons, used with thanks), to the vast array of old books (includ­ing some great Books of Hours), the Guten­berg Bible itself, and a fant­astic col­lec­tion of art­work encom­passing per­sonal favour­ites such as Joseph Cor­nell, Egon Schiele, and Jim Dine, as well as pre­par­at­ory sketches and draw­ings by old masters.

I left the gal­ler­ies and went to the Lib­rary shop feel­ing very pleas­antly over­whelmed, my head over­flow­ing with ideas and inspir­a­tion for the Book of the Erinyes.

In the shop, in addi­tion to a couple of post­cards, I bought a copy of Mini­ature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treas­ures — a won­der­ful, richly illus­trated, book explor­ing the world of books that are less than 3 inches high.

I don’t actu­ally have a huge interest in mini­ature books, but the bind­ings illus­trated in this book are won­der­ful — I think the cre­at­ors decided that they could have more fun with small books.

They range from tra­di­tional leather bind­ings to bind­ings made of mother-of-pearl (pop­u­lar as a deluxe bind­ing in the 19^th cen­tury), gold-thread on silk, tor­toise­shell, cop­per, vel­vet, gold, sil­ver fili­gree, palekh lac­quer (a Rus­sian folk craft), polycar­bon­ate, and enamel. Some are plain, oth­ers gilt-tooled, embed­ded with emer­alds, amethysts or pearls, embossed, embroidered, engraved, or dec­or­ated with tiny enamel portraits.

The wealth of cre­ativ­ity dis­played in this book is amaz­ing, and will cer­tainly prove invalu­able as inspir­a­tion for bind­ing 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!