Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Responding to our conversation about the curses medieval scribes wrote in books to prevent their theft, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst emails a modern-day book curse from the instructional manual Beginning Glassblowing by...
As Alberto Manguel points out in his book A History of Reading, there was a time when reading silently was considered a strange habit. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “History of Reading Silently” We were talking on our Facebook...