Sat, 09 Jun 2007
Master Ultan
I can't think of anything to write, so why not quote Gene Wolfe? Here's one of my favorite passages from The Shadow of the Torturer. It's a short speech by Master Ultan, the chief librarian.
We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, for the most part are of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metal of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are bound with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations--books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.
We have books whose papers are made of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning the pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose pages are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here--though I can no longer tell you where--no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot may dangle it from one ear as an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other. All these I came to know and made safeguarding them my life's devotion.
