Quotes

"Within every book there lies concealed a book of nothing. Don's you sense it when you read a page brimming with words? The vast gulf of emptiness beneath the frail net of letters. The ghostliness of the letters themselves. Giving a resemblance of life to things and people who are really nothing. Nothing at all. No, it was the reading that mattered, I eventually understood, not whether the pages were blank or printed."

"The Mohammedans say that an hour of reading is one stolen from paradise. To that perfect thought I can only add that an hour of writing gives one a foretaste of the other place."

"The creature is supposed to be a salamander. The little dragon that dwells in fire without being consumed was a reassuring thought for people who work with paper."

"Vitam mortuo reddo" (I restore life from death)

"In an argosy of Hellenistic authors, he found an amusing diatribe against the reading of novels."

• Lassitude during public debates indicates the chronic reader of books full of lies, coincidences and impossibilities.
• Some of these pernicious works have been known to bring on fits of sneezing, others cause blood to flow from the ears. Those which contain didactic passages may fill the lungs with mucosity, and impair breathing.
• Inflammation of the eyes from protracted reading of such works may be alleviated by drinking slightly watered wine.
• Care should be taken of the books given to a pubescent female; if the breasts begin to swell to unusual fullness, reading should cease.
• These noxious books are often hastily bound with pastes derived from the boiling of animal hides. The inferiority of such bindings is usually matched by the worthlessness of the contents.
• Curiously, eunuchs do not read these books, nor do they go bald.

"In every library, readers sit in placid quiet while all around them a forest decays."

Buy Salamander from Amazon.co.uk