The Devil's Library

What if every book burned was a book worth saving? For seventeen centuries, certain books have been considered too dangerous to keep on the shelf. They have been confiscated, smuggled, encrypted, hidden under temple floors, sealed in clay jars, locked in monastic vaults, looted by emperors, sold at auction, scanned by hobbyists, and stolen by the truckload. They have killed, or have been blamed for killing, more people than is convenient to discuss. The Devil's Library is the first volume to walk the working library of forbidden books as a single connected story. Not a survey. Not a manual. A biography of objects, and of the people who made and kept and used them, across thirty centuries on five continents. You will descend four floors below the Royal Library in Stockholm to examine the most-handled page of the Codex Gigas — the medieval Devil's Bible — under multispectral light. You will sit in the Toledo translation rooms of 1256 where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars rendered the Picatrix into Castilian. You will walk the bonfire at Ephesus, the auto-da-fé at Maní in 1562, the Bavarian vault that preserved the Munich Manual, the Mortlake rooms where John Dee and Edward Kelley produced an angelic grammar that still defies linguists. You will meet the librarians of Timbuktu who, in 2013, smuggled three hundred and fifty thousand manuscripts out of an occupied city in metal trunks. And in the closing chapters, you will face the question we have been moving toward all along: whether the modern computational era has built, in working code, a tradition the older grimoires anticipated by a thousand years. This is not a grimoire. It is a biography of grimoires — which is a different and more useful kind of haunted.