This
is a waterproof-covered book which has lost its colour by much contact
with water. It is full of investigative drawings and exploratory text
written on many different thicknesses of paper. There are drawings of
every conceivable watery association - seas, tempests, rain, snow,
clouds, lakes, waterfalls, streams, canals, water-mills, shipwrecks,
floods and tears. As the pages are turned, the watery elements are often
animated. There are rippling waves and slanting storms. Rivers and
cataracts flow and bubble. Plans of hydraulic machinery and maps of
weather-forecasting flicker with arrows, symbols and agitated diagrams.
The drawings are all made by one hand. Perhaps this is a lost collection
of drawings by da Vinci bound into a book by the King of France at
Ambois and bought by the Milanese Dukes to give to Prospero as a wedding
present.
2. A Book of Mirrors
2. A Book of Mirrors
Bound
in a gold cloth and very heavy, this book has some eighty shining
mirrored pages; some opaque, some translucent, some manufactured with
silvered papers, some coated in paint, some covered in a film of mercury
that will roll off the page unless treated cautiously. Some mirrors
simply reflect the reader, some reflect the reader as he was three
minutes previously, some reflect the reader as he will be in a year's
time, as he would be if he were a child, a woman, a monster, an idea, a
text or an angel. One mirror constantly lies, one mirror sees the world
backwards, another upside down. One mirror holds on to its reflections
as frozen moments infinitely recalled. One mirror simply reflects
another mirror across a page. There are ten mirrors whose purpose
Prospero has yet to define.
3. A Book of Mythologies
3. A Book of Mythologies
This
is a large book. Prospero on some occasions has described it as being
as much as four metres wide and three metres high. It is bound in a
shining yellow cloth that, when polished, gleams like brass. It is a
compendium, in text and illustration, o f mythologies with all their
variants and alternative tellings; cycle after cycle of interconnecting
tales of gods and men from all the known world, from the icy North to
the deserts of Africa, with explanatory readings and symbolic
interpretations. Its authority and information is richest in the Eastern
Mediterranean, in Greece and Rome, in Israel, in Athens and Rome,
Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where it supplements its information with
genealogies, natural and unnatural. To a modern eye, it is a combination
of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Frazer's The Golden Bough and Foxe's Book of
Martyrs. Every tale and anecdote has an illustration. With this book as a
concordance, Prospero can collect together, if he so wishes, all those
gods and men who have achieved fame or infamy through water, or through
fire, through deceit, in association with horses or trees or pigs or
swans or mirrors, pride, envy or stick-insects.
4. A Primer of the Small Stars
4. A Primer of the Small Stars
This
is a small, black, leather-covered navigational aid. It is full of
folded maps of the night skies that tumble out, belying the modest size
of the book. It is a depiction of the sky reflected in the seas of the
world when they are still, for it is complete with blanks where the land
masses of the globe have interrupted the oceanic mirror. This, to
Prospero, was its greatest usage, for in steering his leaky vessel to
such a small blank space in a sea of stars, he found his island. When
opened, the primer's pages twinkle with travelling planets, flashing
meteors and spinning comets. The black skies pulsate with red numbers.
New constellations are repeatedly joined together by fast-moving, dotted
lines.
5. An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus
5. An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus
Bound
in a battered and burnt, enamelled-green tin cover, this atlas is
divided into two sections. Section One is full of large maps of the
travel and usage of music in the classical world. Section Two is full of
maps of Hell. It was used when Orpheus journeyed into the Underworld to
find Eurydice, and the maps, as a consequence, are scorched and charred
by Hellfire and marked with the teeth-bites of Cerberus. When the atlas
is opened, the maps bubble with pitch. Avalanches of hot, loose gravel
and molten sand fall out of the book to scorch the library floor.
6. A Harsh Book of Geometry
6. A Harsh Book of Geometry
This
is a thick, brown, leather-covered book, stippled with gold numbers.
When opened, complex three-dimensional geometrical diagrams rise up out
of the pages like models in a pop up book. The pages flicker with
logarithmic numbers and figures. Angles are measured by needle-thin
metal pendulums that swing freely, activated by magnets concealed in the
thick paper.
7. The Book of Colours
7. The Book of Colours
This
is a large book bound in crimson watered silk. It is broader than it is
high, and when opened the double-page spread makes a square. The three
hundred pages cover the colour spectrum in finely differentiated shades
moving from black back to black again. When opened at a double spread,
the colour so strongly evokes a place, an object, a location or a
situation that the associated sensory sensation is directly experienced.
Thus a bright yellow-orange is an entry into a volcano and a dark
blue-green is a reminder of deep sea where eels and fish swim and splash
your face.
8. The Vesalius Anatomy of Birth
8. The Vesalius Anatomy of Birth
Vesalius
produced the first authoritative anatomy book; it is astonishing in its
detail, macabre in its single mindedness. This Anatomy of Birth, a
second volume now lost, is even more disturbing and heretical. It
concentrates on the mysteries o f birth. It is full of descriptive
drawings of the workings of the human body which, when the pages open,
move and throb and bleed. It is a banned book that queries the
unnecessary processes of ageing, bemoans the wastages associated with
progeneration, condemns the pains and anxieties of childbirth and
generally questions the efficiency of God.
9. An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead
9. An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead
This
is a funereal volume, long and slim and bound in silver bark. It
contains all the names of the dead who have lived on earth. The first
name is Adam and the last is Susannah, Prospero's wife. The names are
written in many inks and many calligraphies and are arranged in long
columns that sometimes reflect the alphabet, sometimes a chronology of
history, but often use taxonomies that are complicated to unravel, such
that you may search many years to find a name, but be sure it will be
there. The pages of the book are very old and are watermarked with a
collection of designs for tombs and columbariums, elaborate headstones,
graves, sarcophagi and other architectural follies for the dead,
suggesting the book had other purposes, even before the death of Adam.
10. A Book of Travellers' Tales
10. A Book of Travellers' Tales
This
is a book that is much damaged, as though used a great deal by children
who have treasured it. The scratched and rubbed crimson leather covers,
once inlaid with a figurative gold design, are now so worn that the
pattern is ambiguous and a fit subject for much speculation. It contains
those marvels that travellers talk of and are not believed. 'Men whose
heads stood in their breasts', 'bearded women, a rain of frogs, cities
of purple ice, singing camels, Siamese twins', 'mountaineers dew-lapped
like bulls'. It is full of illustrations and has little text.
11. The Book of the Earth
11. The Book of the Earth
A
thick book covered in khaki-coloured webbing, its pages are impregnated
with the minerals, acids, alkalis, elements, gums, poisons, balms and
aphrodisiacs of the earth. Strike a thick scarlet page with your
thumbnail to summon fire. Lick a grey paste from another page to bring
poisonous death. Soak a further page in water to cure anthrax. Dip
another in milk to make soap. Rub two illustrated pages together to make
acid. Lay your head on another page to change the colour of your hair.
With this book Prospero savoured the geology of the island. With its
help, he mined for salt and coal, water and mercury; and also for gold,
not for his purse, but for his arthritis.
12. A Book of Architecture and Other Music
12. A Book of Architecture and Other Music
When
the pages are opened in this book, plans and diagrams spring up
fully-formed. There are definitive models of buildings constantly shaded
by moving cloud-shadow. Noontime piazzas fill and empty with noisy
crowds, lights flicker in nocturnal urban landscapes and music is played
in the halls and towers. With this book, Prospero rebuilt the island
into a palace of libraries that recapitulate all the architectural ideas
of the Renaissance.
13. The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur
13. The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur
This
book reflects on the experience of the Minotaur, the most celebrated
progeny of bestiality. It has an impeccable classical mythology to
explain provenances and pedigrees that include Leda, Europa, laedalus,
Theseus and Ariadne. Since Caliban - like centaurs, mermaids, harpies,
the sphinx, vampires and werewolves - is the offspring of bestiality, he
would find this book of great interest. Mocking Ovid's Metamorphoses,
it tells the story of ninety-two hybrids. It should have told a hundred,
but the puritanical Theseus had heard enough and slew the Minotaur
before he could finish. When opened, the book exudes yellow steam and it
coats the fingers with a black oil.
14. The Book of Languages
14. The Book of Languages
This
is a large, thick book with a blue-green cover that rainbow-hazes in
the light. More a box than a book, it opens in unorthodox fashion, with a
door in its front cover. Inside is a collection of eight smaller books
arranged like bottles in a medicine case. Behind these eight books are
another eight books, and so on. To open the smaller books is to let
loose many languages. Words and sentences, paragraphs and chapters
gather like tadpoles in a pond in April or starlings in a November
evening sky.
15. End-plants
15. End-plants
Looking
like a log of ancient, seasoned wood, this is a herbal to end all
herbals, concerning itself with the most venerable plants that govern
life and death. It is a thick block of a book with varnished wooden
covers that have been at one time, and probably still are, inhabited by
minute tunnelling insects. The pages are stuffed with pressed plants and
flowers, corals and sea weeds, and around the book hover exotic butter
flies, dragonflies, fluttering moths, bright beetles and a cloud of
golden pollen-dust. It is simultaneously a honeycomb, a hive, a garden
and an ark for insects. It is an encyclopedia of pollen, scent and
pheromone.
16. A Book of Love
16. A Book of Love
This
is a small, slim, scented volume bound in red and gold, with knotted
crimson ribbons for page-markers. There is certainly an image in the
book of a naked man and a naked woman, and also an image of a pair of
clasped hands. These things were once spotted, briefly, in a mirror, and
that mirror was in another book. Everything else is conjecture.
17. A Bestiary of Past, Present and Future Animals
17. A Bestiary of Past, Present and Future Animals
This
is a large book, a thesaurus of animals, real, imaginary and
apocryphal. With this book Prospero can recognise cougars and mamosets
and fruit bats and manticores and dromersels, the cameleopard, the
chimera and the cattamorrain.
18. The Book of Utopias
18. The Book of Utopias
This
is a book of ideal societies. With the front cover bound in gold
leather and the back bound in black slate, it has five hundred pages,
six hundred and sixty-six indexed entries and a preface by Sir Thomas
More. The first entry is a consensus description of Heaven and the last
is one of Hell. There will always be someone on earth whose utopian
ideal will be Hell. In the remaining pages of the book, every known and
every imagined political and social community is described and
evaluated, and twenty-five pages are devoted to tables where the
characteristics of all societies can be isolated, permitting a reader to
sort and match his own utopian ideal.
19. The Book of Universal Cosmography
19. The Book of Universal Cosmography
Full
of printed diagrams of great complexity, this book attempts to place
all universal phenomena in one system. The diagrams are etched into the
pages disciplined geometrical figures, concentric rings that circle and
counter circle, tables and lists organised in spirals, catalogues
arranged on a simplified body of man, who, moving, sets the lists in new
orders, moving diagrams of the solar system. The book deals in a
mixture of the metaphorical and the scientific and is dominated by a
great diagram showing the Union of Man and Woman - Adam and Eve - in a
structured universe where all things have their allotted place and an
obligation to be fruitful.
20. Lore of Ruins
20. Lore of Ruins
An
antiquarian's handbook, a checklist of the ancient world for the
Renaissance humanist interested in antiquity. Full of maps and plans of
the archaeological sites of the world, temples, towns and ports,
graveyards and ancient roads, measurements of one hundred thousand
statues of Hermes, Venus and Hercules, descriptions of every discovered
obelisk and pedestal of the Mediterranean, street plans of Thebes, Ostia
and Atlantis, a directory of the possessions of Sejanus, the tablets of
Heraclitus, the signatures of Pythagoras; an essential volume for the
melancholic historian who knows that nothing endures. The book's
proportions are like a block of stone, forty by thirty by twenty
centimetres, the colour of blue-veined marble, chalky to the touch, with
crisp, stiff pages printed in classical fonts with no W or J.
21. The Autobiographies of Pasiphae and Semiramis
21. The Autobiographies of Pasiphae and Semiramis
A
pornography. It is a blackened and thumbed volume whose illustrations
leave small ambiguity as to the book's content. The book is bound in
black calfskin with damaged lead covers. The pages are grey-green and
scattered with a sludge green powder, curled black hairs and stains of
blood and other substances. The slightest taint of steam or smoke rises
from the pages when the book is opened, and it is always warm - like the
little heat apparent in drying plaster or in flat stones after the sun
has set. The pages leave acidic stains on the fingers and it is
advisable to wear gloves when reading the volume.
22. A Book of Motion
22. A Book of Motion
This
is a book that at the most simple level describes how birds fly and
waves roll, how clouds form and apples fall from trees. It describes how
the eye changes its shape when looking at great distances, how hairs
grow in a beard, why the heart flutters and the lungs inflate
involuntarily and how laughter changes the face. At its most complex
level, it explains how ideas chase one another in the memory and where
thought goes when it is finished with. It is covered in tough blue
leather and, because it is always bursting open of its own volition, it
is bound around with two leather straps buckled tightly at the spine. At
night, it drums against the bookcase shelf and has to be held down with
a brass weight. One of its sections is called 'The Dance of Nature' and
here, codified and explained in animated drawings, are all the
possibilities for dance in the human body.
23. The Book of Games
23. The Book of Games
This
is a book of board games of infinite supply. Chess is but one game in a
thousand in this volume, merely occupying two pages, pages 112 and 113.
The book contains board games to be played with counters and dice, with
cards and flags and miniature pyramids, small figures of the Olympic
gods, the winds in coloured glass, Old Testament prophets in bone, Roman
busts, the oceans of the world, exotic animals, pieces of coral, gold
putti, silver coins and pieces of liver. The board games represented in t
he book cover as many situations as there are experiences. There are
games of death, resurrection, love, peace, famine, sexual cruelty,
astronomy, the cabbala, statesman-craft, the stars, destruction, the
future, enomenology, magic, retribution, semantics, evolution There are
boards of red and black triangles, grey and blue diamonds, pages of
text, diagrams of the brain, Arabic carpets, boards in the shape of the
constellations, animals, maps, journeys to Hell and journeys to Heaven.
24. Thirty-Six Plays
This
is a thick, printed volume of plays dated 1623. All thirty-six plays
are there save one - the first. Nineteen pages are left blank for its
inclusion. It is called The Tempest. The folio collection is modestly
bound in dull green linen with cardboard covers and the author's
initials are embossed in gold on the cover - W.S
24. Thirty-Six Plays
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