Before the printing press, a book was among the most valuable things a community could own. A single large volume might take a scribe a year and the skins of a flock of sheep. It could not be insured, and there was no catalog that could trace it. If it walked out of the library it was gone.
So the people who made books protected them in the only way available, which was to threaten the thief with God. At the front or back of a manuscript, a scribe would write a short formula consigning anyone who stole, damaged or failed to return the volume to a range of penalties, from excommunication to an eternity in the company of the devil. These are book curses. They are one of the most entertaining genres in the history of writing, and among the least read.
How a curse is built
The form is remarkably stable across centuries and languages. Most examples contain the same parts, in roughly this order.
- The claim
- A statement of ownership: this book belongs to a named house or person. Everything that follows depends on it.
- The offense
- A list of what is forbidden. Theft is always included. The more thorough scribes add borrowing without leave, cutting out leaves, and selling.
- The penalty
- What will happen to the offender. Exclusion from the church is common. Disease, fire and the gnawing of worms are popular. The more creative add specific organs.
- The duration
- For how long. The usual answer is forever, sometimes with a reference to the day of judgment for emphasis.
- The escape clause
- Occasionally, a way out: the curse lifts if the book is returned. This is the most practical part and the one most often omitted.
A scribe could also curse the reader who annoyed him personally, and some did. Others used the space to complain about the cold, their eyesight or the quality of the ink. The margin was the only place in the book that belonged to the person who wrote it, and the curse was one of several ways of using it.
The most famous curse is a fake
The book curse most often quoted today is a long and splendidly vicious text said to hang in a monastery library in Spain. It wishes upon the thief that he be struck with palsy, that he languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, that bookworms gnaw his entrails, and that when he goes at last to his final punishment the flames of hell consume him forever.
It was written in 1909 by an American librarian with a sense of humor, as part of a spoof about the eccentricities of old books, and has been reprinted as genuine ever since. It is the perfect specimen for this cabinet: a piece of folklore that improved on its originals so thoroughly that it replaced them. Readers interested in why invented documents outcompete real ones may consult Why Conspiracy Theories Feel True. The real curses, it should be said, are scarcely milder. They simply lack a good editor.
Curses for the present day
The threat of excommunication has lost much of its force, and the theft of books is now a minor problem compared with their mistreatment. The curses below have been composed for the offenses that matter now. They follow the classic form. None is intended to work, and readers who find one coming true are asked to let the desk know.
For the borrower who does not return. May the book you kept sit at your bedside unread, so that its spine reproaches you each night. May you meet its owner in the street. May they be kind about it.
For the one who folds down corners. May every page you mark be the wrong page, and may you never again find where you were in anything, in books or otherwise.
For the one who breaks the spine to make it lie flat. May your own back crack audibly in public places, at moments of solemnity.
For the one who reads in the bath. May the water be always lukewarm, and may the book swell to twice its size and remain so as a monument.
For the one who lends a borrowed book to a third party. May it pass from hand to hand forever, and may each new reader be told that it is yours.
For the one who cuts out the illustrations. May the frames you put them in hang crooked. May the light fade them by Thursday.
For the reviewer who did not finish it. May your own book be read by one person only, to page forty, and may that person be asked for a quotation.
For the one who underlines everything. May you find that you have, at last, emphasized nothing. This is already the case. The curse merely ensures that you notice.
For the one who sends a book to be pulped. May you be reborn as paper and used for the minutes of a committee.
For the one who quotes it without having read it. May the quotation be misattributed to you, permanently, and may it be the worst sentence in the book.
For the one who leaves a book face down to keep the place. May you be kept in the same position for the same length of time. Two weeks on holiday should do it.
For the one who keeps books only for show. May a guest take one down and ask you about it. May it be the one with the uncut pages.
May you find that you have, at last, emphasized nothing.
A note on the archive's own books
The reading copies in this library carry no curse, and the editors considered the question with some care. A book that is given away cannot be stolen, and a PDF cannot be dog-eared. After a long meeting the only offense anyone could identify was that of printing a reading copy and using it to level a table, and it was agreed that this was a legitimate use of paper.
The grimoire tradition next door is a different matter. Books of magic were often written to be feared, and the warnings in them were part of the product. A reader who wishes to see the book curse at its most ambitious should start there, bearing in mind that the most alarming threats were usually composed by the people with something to sell.
A blessing
The medieval scribes sometimes balanced their curses with a blessing, and it would be ungracious to end without one.
For the one who returns it. May you return it on time, unmarked, with a slip of paper at the page that struck you most. May the owner find the slip years later and wonder who you were. May you be lent many more.