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From Curses to Copyright
by
Frank X. Roberts
A story is told of an elderly lady who having only recently been introduced to Shakespeare’s plays was asked what she thought of them. “Well,” she said, “He must be a good writer, because so many people say he is. But as far as I can see he’s all quotations.”
This brief article on book curses will not be all quotations, but it will contain a few, borrowed from the various sources cited in the article. I hope I won’t be cursed for it.
Curses in books to protect them from abuse and thieving have been used from time immemorial. Some scholars say they go back as far as the thirty-ninth century B.C. Here is one from a clay-tablet book of Mesopotamia. It begins oddly enough by blessing those who would care for the book, but it quickly puts a “curse upon the one who would try to alter it, burn it, dissolve it, lend it, lose it, or allow any one to steal it.” (Leila Arvin; Scribes, Scripts and Books.) In comparison to some later curses which will be quoted below, this is quite mild. But it was probably strong enough for most folk in ancient times who knew the warning was backed up by the power and might of their kings or rulers.
For example, the colophon of a clay-tablet book in the library of Ashurbanipal, the great Assyrian ruler of the seventh century B.C., contained the following curse against book theft and misrepresentation of ownership. (The curse invokes both the secular and the religious powers, the might of Ashurbanipal and the anger of his gods.) “Clay tablet of Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, who trusts in Ashur and Ninlil. Your lordship is without equal, Ashur, King of the Gods! Whoever removes [the tablet], writes his name in place of my name, may Ashur and Ninlil, angered and grim, cast him down, erase his name, his seed in the land” (Lionel Casson; Libraries in the Ancient World.)
I have borrowed three curses from Marc Drogin’s Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. Drogin supplies a plethora of curses from a wide variety of sources. (For the full blast of medieval book curses, in their context, read Drogin’s book.)
Some book curses were short but not sweet. From the ninth century A.D. comes this: “Whoever this book to make his own doth plot, the fires of Hell and brimstone be his lot.” Excommunication was, of course, the worst of punishments in the Christian world, so it often came into use in book curses. For example: “May whoever steals or alienates this book, or mutilates it, be cut off from the body of the Church and held as a thing accursed, an object of loathing.” A longer and quite ugly curse from a monastery in Spain was apparently used not only against the book thief but also against the borrower. It is doubtful if anyone would keep a friend for long if they lent a book with the following written on the flyleaf or on a bookmark in it. “For him that stealeth or borroweth and returneth not this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him . . ..” This curse goes on through wishing a palsy on the recalcitrant borrower, worms in his entrails, and finally that he be consumed by the fires of Hell!
Books were hard to come by in the Middle Ages, so a sentence of damnation was pronounced on anyone who stole or even hid in the library for his own use, a translation of the works of any ancient classical author, such as Aristotle. But no punishment was too severe for a person who absconded with a copy of the Vulgate Bible. For anyone who did so: “Let him die the death; let him be frizzled in a pan; the falling sickness and fever should rage in him, he should be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen” (Ernest Savage; Old English Libraries.)
The word “anathema” occurs frequently in book curses in the Middle Ages. It gave a curse a solemn ecclesiastical tone and was supposed to entail a denunciation involving excommunication. Sometimes the word “maranatha” was joined with anathema. The resulting hyphenated word was then thought to intensify the curse in some unexplained way. But whether or not it worked better than wishing the book thief or abuser boiled in oil or fried in a pan is not clear.
Surely, the mother of all curses from the Middle Ages, the most horrifically creative, and probably the longest curse ever written, was that made famous (or infamous) by a gentleman who went by the name of Ernulphus. He was also the Bishop of Rochester in England.
Ernulphus’ curse, written originally in Latin, was created primarily for use in the excommunication rites of the Catholic church. But the curse was so broad, extensive and varied, in what might be called its coverage of the human and the inhuman, that it became an all-purpose instrument. Any part of it might be adapted to damn a book thief or a book abuser. It might even be extended, as in the following excerpt from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, to curse out the help, in this case the unlucky man servant, Obadiah.
The curse is much too long to quote in full here, but I will give a snippet of it from the translation Sterne provides in his hilarious classic, together with Sterne’s intercalations about the characters in the novel involved in the cursing. Anyone wanting to read the entire curse will find it, in Latin and in English, in Volume III of Tristram Shandy . . .
May he [Obadiah] be damned wherever he be,—whether in the house or in the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church—may he be cursed in living and in dying. May he be cursed in eating and in drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting . . .
and on and on it goes, through all the various functions and parts of the human body, a tour-de-force of a curse. It may make you laugh and it may make you cry—it might even deter a book abuser—but it won’t disappoint you.
Next to Ernulphus’ horribly majestic condemnations, the following two school-boy curses will appear weak and anemic. The first has a nineteenth-century ring to it:
Steal not this book my worthy friend
For the gallows will be your end;
Up the ladder and down the rope,
There you’ll hang until you choke;
Then I’ll come along and say-
where’s that book you took away?”
Gerald Donaldson, Books
The second, from a twentieth-century school book, is mildly threatening but a long way from being hanged by the neck or roasted in Hell.
This book is John Smith’s
My fist is another,
You touch one
And you’ll feel the other.
There is hardly even a faint echo of the medieval book curse in these contemporary examples.
Today books are published in multiple hardback copies, followed in many instances by a numerous paperback edition. So most titles can be easily and cheaply obtained or replaced by most readers, making the protection of books, as physical objects, from theft and/or abuse now of less immediate importance and interest.
In the place of book curses, we moderns have copyright statements. These variously worded warnings (they could hardly be called curses) covering the use or abuse of the wording or text of a book are meant to protect an author’s so-called intellectual property, not the physical book itself.
But true book lovers who find books in libraries, in book stores and elsewhere, their pristine pages made unreadable by heavy underlinings in ink or yellow highlighting from cover to cover, or with distended and broken spines, because some unthinking person has used as a bookmark an inappropriate or destructive device, may still be heard to murmur under their breaths, “Anathema-maranatha,” if not worse.
Frank’s extensive career in teaching and librarianship began when he taught English in the U.S. From 1961 to 1963, as part of a Columbia University program called “Teachers for East Africa,” he taught English and American Literature in East Africa. There he met his wife, Dorothy. They returned to the U.S. where he simultaneously taught and finished two Masters’ degrees, in Education and in Librarianship. In 1968 they returned to England where Frank taught Library Studies, and adopted Hodge, a cat who later traveled around the world with them. In 1972, Frank was “seconded” for two years to teach at Makerere University in Uganda, East Africa, but left reluctantly after one year when the tyranny of Idi Amin became intolerable. From there it was back to England, then Australia and finally to America in 1979, to Buffalo where Frank earned his doctorate. Later they moved to Colorado, where he was Professor of Library Studies at the University of Northern Colorado until retiring in 1997. Frank published James A. Michener: A Checklist of his Work with a Selected Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press) in 1995. He has written on bookmarks, specifically on medieval bookmarks, his special area of interest. A poet by avocation, he writes eclectically but traditionally. Contact Frank.
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