May they be rotated on the breaking wheel and hanged. Amen

A book of the abbey of SS Mary and Nicholas of Arnstein. If anyone steals it: may they die the death, may they be roasted in a frying pan, may the falling sickness and fever attack them, and may they be rotated on the breaking wheel and hanged. Amen

Warning in a German bible, cited in S. Charles, The medieval scriptorium (2024), 151

Good typography is the glass lamp that shields the candle of civilization

But why should any of this matter? Is it not merely what my friends are pleased to call 'font fetishism'? Does all this talk of kerning and the Golden Section not reek of pretension? I don't think so. For although typography considers written words as aesthetic entities in their own right, it does not forget that they are first and foremost the servants of sense. The ultimate purpose of typography is to make reading as pleasant as might be, sparing the reader discomfort and distraction, and thereby freeing that reader's energy and intellect to attend to what the words mean. Good typography is the glass lamp that shields the candle of civilization, that its light may shine through steady and clear.

M. Fisher, 'Philosophical designs', Slightly Foxed 75 (2022), 62

People say that a book you can't find doesn't exist

I recall that for a while, even though the situation was so desperate, Brauer spent all his time bringing his card index up to date. He was finding it increasingly hard to find the books he was looking for. People say that a book you can't find doesn't exist. ... Classifying twenty thousand volumes is no easy matter. Not only do you have to have a strict respect for order - an almost superhuman respect, I would say - but you need a method and time to devote to the thankless task of cataloging works whose meaning is very different from the numbers you use to identify them.

C.M. Dominguez, tr. P. Sis, The house of paper (2004), 48-9

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witness to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there it is part of us, I have notices that many people make a note of the day, month,, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, an umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

C.M. Dominguez, tr. P. Sis, The house of paper (2004), 14