The Enemies of Books | Page 2

William Blades
Fire-king as his own. Chance conflagrations, fanatic
incendiarism, judicial bonfires, and even household stoves have, time
after time, thinned the treasures as well as the rubbish of past ages,
until, probably, not one thousandth part of the books that have been are
still extant. This destruction cannot, however, be reckoned as all loss;
for had not the "cleansing fires" removed mountains of rubbish from
our midst, strong destructive measures would have become a necessity
from sheer want of space in which to store so many volumes.
Before the invention of Printing, books were comparatively scarce; and,
knowing as we do, how very difficult it is, even after the steam-press
has been working for half a century, to make a collection of half a
million books, we are forced to receive with great incredulity the
accounts in old writers of the wonderful extent of ancient libraries.

The historian Gibbon, very incredulous in many things, accepts without
questioning the fables told upon this subject.No doubt the libraries of
MSS. collected generation after generation by the Egyptian Ptolemies
became, in the course of time, the most extensive ever then known; and
were famous throughout the world for the costliness of their
ornamentation, and importance of their untold contents. Two of these
were at Alexandria, the larger of which was in the quarter called
Bruchium. These volumes, like all manuscripts of those early ages,
were written on sheets of parchment, having a wooden roller at each
end so that the reader needed only to unroll a portion at a time. During
Caesar's Alexandrian War, B.C. 48, the larger collection was consumed
by fire and again burnt by the Saracens in A.D. 640. An immense loss
was inflicted upon mankind thereby; but when we are told of 700,000,
or even 500,000 of such volumes being destroyed we instinctively feel
that such numbers must be a great exaggeration. Equally incredulous
must we be when we read of half a million volumes being burnt at
Carthage some centuries later, and other similar accounts.
Among the earliest records of the wholesale destruction of Books is
that narrated by St. Luke, when, after the preaching of Paul, many of
the Ephesians "which used curious arts brought their books together,
and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them,
and found it 50,000 pieces of silver" (Acts xix, 19). Doubtless these
books of idolatrous divination and alchemy, of enchantments and
witchcraft, were righteously destroyed by those to whom they had been
and might again be spiritually injurious; and doubtless had they
escaped the fire then, not one of them would have survived to the
present time, no MS.of that age being now extant. Nevertheless, I must
confess to a certain amount of mental disquietude and uneasiness when
I think of books worth 50,000 denarii--or, speaking roughly, say
L18,750,[1] of our modern money being made into bonfires. What
curious illustrations of early heathenism, of Devil worship, of Serpent
worship, of Sun worship, and other archaic forms of religion; of early
astrological and chemical lore, derived from the Egyptians, the Persians,
the Greeks; what abundance of superstitious observances and what is
now termed "Folklore"; what riches, too, for the philological student,
did those many books contain, and how famous would the library now

be that could boast of possessing but a few of them.
[1] The received opinion is that the "pieces of silver" here mentioned
were Roman denarii, which were the silver pieces then commonly used
in Ephesus. If now we weigh a denarius against modern silver, it is
exactly equal to ninepence, and fifty thousand times ninepence gives
L1,875. It is always a difficult matter to arrive at a just estimate of the
relative value of the same coin in different ages; but reckoning that
money then had at least ten times the purchasing value of money now,
we arrive at what was probably about the value of the magical books
burnt, viz.: L18,750.
The ruins of Ephesus bear unimpeachable evidence that the City was
very extensive and had magnificent buildings. It was one of the free
cities, governing itself. Its trade in shrines and idols was very extensive,
being spread through all known lands. There the magical arts were
remarkably prevalent, and notwithstanding the numerous converts
made by the early Christians, the , or little
scrolls upon which magic sentences were written, formed an extensive
trade up to the fourth century. These "writings" were used for
divination, as a protection against the "evil eye," and generally as
charms against all evil.They were carried about the person, so that
probably thousands of them were thrown into the flames by St. Paul's
hearers when his glowing words convinced them of their superstition.
Imagine an open space near the grand Temple of Diana, with fine
buildings around. Slightly
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