 Hello and welcome to this online event presented by the British Library. My name is Julian Harrison and I am the lead curator of medieval historical manuscripts. We hope that you're all safe and well out there whether you're watching this event live or you're following us on our catch-up service. We're absolutely delighted today to be joined by Edward Brook Hitchin who is talking about his new book The Madman's Library in conversation with John Lloyd but before they have their talk I just want to run through a few points of housekeeping. First of all Edward and John will attempt to answer any of your questions at the end of this presentation. If you wish to ask a question please use the comments box at the bottom of his screen. Secondly we'd really welcome any of your feedback so please use the menu at the top of the screen and also the British Library is a registered charity so we'd very much welcome your donations and also if you'd like to buy copies of Edward's book The Madman's Library please follow the link at the top of the screen. If you'd like to continue this conversation using social media please look at the links at the bottom of the presentation and also there you'll be able to find more information about this event with short biographies of John and Edward. But first I'd like to introduce to you John Lloyd. He is a television and radio comedy presenter and producer. He's best known for QI, Black Adder, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Spitting Image and Not the Nine O'Clock News and he is currently the presenter of BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity so please welcome John Lloyd. Very nice to be here it looks like I'm actually in the British Library doesn't it but I'm not this is my office. Now this really is Edward Brook Hitchhunter's book The Madman's Library really is the most fantastic book and I'm not the only one who thinks so it was made Sunday Times Literary Book of the Year 2019 and here's some quotes. Anybody who loves the printed word will be bowled over by this amusing erudite beautiful book about books. It is in every way a tramp, one of the loveliest books to have been published for many many years and that's Alexander McCall Smith no less. So it is a beautiful book as he says it's fascinating hilarious, it's poignant, weird by turns and visually delicious enough to eat the spoon. It's full of as a QI person it's full of the most delicious bits of information, factoids, even the footnotes are interesting which I think is almost unique in books. Here's one the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio 1868 to 1938 had his books printed on rubber so you could read them in the enormous sunken bath he shared with his goldfish so that's the kind of mad eccentricity so let's say hello to Edward, Edward hello there he is, he's the distinguished author as I say it's so so good this I can't I've been reading it all day and I've been right through it twice. Here's another one the Cornish physician Richard Lower 1631 to 91 wanted to see if dogs could be fed by injecting soup into their veins, you probably remember him. So what I was going to say it's a feast for the eyes as well as the mind and before I come to sort of grill you I just want to show everybody at home some of the amazing images from this book let's have a little quick slideshow just to show how delicious this look at. There we go all these extraordinary illustrations photographic and drawn from all different cultures and all different styles and times so tell me a little bit about your background what was your childhood like? Well this is the product of growing up as the son of a rare book dealer my dad's work from home so I grew up in a rare book shop and while he's specialized in British exploration and travel it's particularly Captain Cook like any dealer he would encounter unique things bizarre things and of course when you're younger and you don't have a PhD in the history of a certain subject that's what catches your eye a bit like you know what QI does and sort of opening up history with the most tantalizingly curious aspects of it and so that's what I always wanted to do was to find a way to crack open the well probably not to the viewers our viewers today but to most people the world of antiquarian books is viewed as quite a sort of musty gray dull dark thing a bit like a geode but you know if you crack it open in the right way there's these amazing glittering weird things inside and so it seemed like the best way to do that was focus on the books themselves because I love books about books but I'm not as interested in reading about the classics and the great authors as I am curious about books I've never heard of before and so it became you know imagining a library of these things you know if Isaac Disraeli had a library today with infinite budget and a complete lack of you know basic basic practical sense what kind of books would be on that sort of shelf of the ultimate library of curiosity so that was the general guiding theme and so yeah hopefully and to provide enough images so that you believe that these things really do and did exist that was pretty crucial too yeah one of the things that's really distinguished about the book as I was saying to you the other day that um it's you're using your left brain and your right brain alternately because look at a picture you've got to have one kind of way of thinking sort of intuitive and spatial and the words are the left brain and it's actually an extraordinarily sort of rich experience and the other thing I can't you've told me it's only taken you a year to write which I find completely astonishing well it's a year to write but 10 years to do the research for but luckily you can you can work on multiple books simultaneously but you just need that green light from the publisher to say that this year you get to do this one and so yeah having done books about strange and beautiful maps this was the dream project this is what I always you know secretly wanted to do and you know you were talking about left brain and right brain well for anyone who's ever really immersed themselves browsing library catalogs but auction catalogs as well that's the experience you have but you're sort of dazzled by both the images and the sheer wealth of material so trying to trying to make something like that for the general reader someone who might otherwise walk past the book about book section that was that was the goal yeah because we should declare an interest because of course you in your spare time I can't believe you have any spare time but you work for qi as a researcher and script writer because we came across you because one of our elves is they're called and drew hunter Murray was given your first book I think fox tossing octopus wrestling and other forgotten sports for christmas and he just thought it was amazing and then met you at a party and he that's I think how you came to into our purview and I rather imagine it must be quite quite interesting to be amongst people who are as crazy about information as you are that must be yes absolutely and people who have read the same strange books I mean the qi library itself rivals the bl in terms of the scope of things that the subject the range of subjects that are on the shelves because anything from the history of feces to you know the sort of social hierarchy of ants or something like that so it's it's it's for anyone who watches and loves the program which I'm sure a lot of people watching this do as well it's that celebration of the obscure and the strange and things that seem too strange to be true that's that's where all the pleasure comes from waiting to see if someone's pulling your leg but actually know these things and it's it's fact is often stranger than anyone could possibly imagine well I think our backgrounds here show that we we are of like mind and of course many of the other elves are similarly you know crazy about their contents and yes the strangeness I remember by all the books that one's read you know sex and slavery and medieval Scandinavia a history of how you know I once read a dictionary just for the pleasure of it that kind of thing so so we are in but one thing that fascinates me because it's got such range the book geographical and historical did you travel a lot in that year particularly in those 10 years absolutely around to various cities in Europe when I went to Poland for a book talk the first thing I did was go to not just the public libraries but also to rare book dealers and take take with me a sort of list of themes of things I wanted to sort of grow and yeah one of them was tell me the strangest book you've ever come across in the hope that I could completely crowdsource all the material and maybe that would take care of everything but it's a lot of fun because dealers like librarians but dealers are much more mercenary you know they have that magpie eye and they know exactly how to zero in on a great story to sell you a book because it's a very intimidating thing walking into an antiquarian bookshop for anyone who hasn't hasn't dared to do it it seems quite sort of off-putting but they are they are a wonderful resource of alternative back channels of history and to find things you never knew existed so they were absolutely the number one resource to consult around Europe and in America there's the Grolia Club in New York who are very helpful with tips and tricks and it was it it's quite a difficult thing because you're saying tell me something that no one knows about you're asking an expert so you really need to find something surprising if you're going to if you're going to do a book and you're going to arrogantly claim here are things that you don't know about you've really got to back that up you know well bookshops are a salvation for people like you I mean because because of the algorithmic nature of the modern internet you know when we started qi 20 odd years ago you know it was a treasure trove of stuff because of all these different people posting about absolutely everything and it wasn't moderated so you could go up rabbit holes but now they only tell you what they think you want to hear yeah there's in a bookshop get a secondhand bookshop and you will get surprises because you can you can browse in a non-linear way I guess absolutely and go go to I recommend to everyone I mean now is a bit of a tricky time obviously but if you love immersing yourself in the British library talking to the librarians about their particular interests I would really recommend going to an antiquarian book fair as well especially the the London Book Fair because there are dealers from all over Europe who are bringing their shiniest things and so much of it from all the continental dealers that works that especially if they're illustrated that it certainly helps get an idea of what's going on but there are so many things that that you will never have come across and they are usually snapped up by as many librarians searching for new acquisitions as they are by collectors and other dealers and you meet some amazing people I mean when I was talking to dealers for this book one of them said oh you should talk to this customer I just spoke to who only ever buys copy number 97 of every limited edition book and he refuses to tell anyone why it's 97 so there's all kinds of mysterious characters in there as well yeah so did you spend a lot of time in the over the last 10 years in the British library itself absolutely and I really you know I've really really miss it as I'm sure a lot of people do and purely from a selfish point of view it's been a nightmare in a sense I'm very lucky to do this but it has been extremely tricky doing the research and expensive to the research of finding all the books and I know that I've probably missed so many great resources that the BL have to offer but but luckily also we saw Julian Harrison introducing us at the beginning you know followed Julian on Twitter he's amazing at sort of revealing sort of discoveries he's made in their archives and manuscripts you've never heard of and also the BL published a huge amount of sort of generous articles with their experts revealing their secret stories so that's been a lot of consolation it's been seeing all the amazing digitization efforts by the library as well and it really that really does open up the library I'm not sure we people who have grown up with the idea of a digitization project realize just how lucky we are to have that because it really wasn't that long ago that the great treasures of libraries were completely locked away and you know untouchable to anyone who didn't have a PhD and with special permission from the king so yeah I feel like this is a really despite the challenging circumstances this is a really amazing time to be able to write books because of what technology and the generosity of librarians offered very very very very very good point so what you've done is you've selected a bunch of images from the book as a kind of to suggest a spine to the the chat as it were yes and just because there's so much information you can't possibly keep it all in your head and we can't we can't cover everything because it's so so diverse yeah what should we kick off with I think it should be as if we are wandering through a real library right and we should randomly reach out and grab the volumes that hopefully best represents the intention to sort of have fun and be surprised so I think perhaps the the the subject that I always get asked a lot about particularly that I think partly because it's the most gruesome but equally the most horribly fascinating area of the history of book production is the thankfully lost art of anthropodermic bibliography so if we have image one I think it is well you'll have to explain that to most people I think what answer yes so if you you this is a very admirable binding isn't it lovely guilt rich blood like crimson but this is actually a book bound in human skin that's what anthropodermic bibliography means it's a mid 17th century volume it's this one is actually in the collection of the welcome library in London and it's a work on it's a French work on pregnancy childbirth virginity it's called day integrity artist and I thought it best represents this theme because it's so surprisingly beautiful in it and it it allows us horrible horrible nature but but as with everything in history just just like on qi you have to interrogate everything without just reflexively recoiling in disgust and you have to think okay why why did people bind folks into human skin it's unthinkable to our modern sensibilities but the fact is that it was an optional extra that while I'm sure it wasn't beloved and was offered by many binders and it had a very powerful symbology to it because you find three main genres of literature bound in human skin and most of these books and collections around the world those institutions that admit they have them you usually date from between 1600 to 1800 so this is smack in there and the idea was very simple so it's medical works of maybe strange cases quite often beautiful women because it's more tragically romantic as well but it encapsulates this this period this emerging understanding of science and what you notice is there's a crossover from medical work such as this to criminal cases and there are quite a good amount of these books are actually the records or the trial notes of highwaymen of well for example in the Bristol record office they have a human skin binding of a book about the exploits of a man called John Horwood who was very jealous and he saw a woman who had spurned him walking along a stream with her new boyfriend and he threw a pebble at her it struck her in the head and she fell into the stream and went into a coma and she died and he was hanged and they printed well they bound the record of his awful crime in his own skin and it acts as a warning it's it's like a way of of punishing someone metaphorically because what what better way of of emphasizing and punishing this outlaw this abhorrent to society than representing them in the very symbol of civilization the book so it's a very fitting punishment and I would imagine it's actually quite a good deterrent as well I mean it's quite frightening thought that could end up happening to you and then as we move into the 19th century when it's still practiced human skin binding you find it uses more as a romantic metaphor to encapsulate literature in the same way that skin encapsulates our souls and so the famous famous example of that is from 1877 with the French astronomer writer Camille Flamérial who was at a party and he didn't think much of it he complimented a passing countess on the charm of her skin it turned out she was dying of a terminal illness and the next thing he knows a few weeks later there's a knock at his door a famous Parisian surgeon called Monsieur Sioux has a bundle under his arm saying he's just flayed the marvellously attractive countess whose last request was that her skin be given to Flamérial for him to bind a copy of his latest work now this all sounds like total hot air but but for example with Flamérial he um he confirmed it to newspapers and so there is a copy of his um his novelet Teddy Sioux um bound in the skin of of a beautiful countess so it's it's it's the most um shocking but uh absorbing area of book history to sort of present a potted history of and not get to not get not hang around it long enough for a mess to get on your shoes you know so it's the uh yeah there's a great story about that um talking of criminals and bindings of the uh Dutch naturalist Herman Burhaver who had a pair of ladies shoes made from the skin of an executed criminal whose nipples were used to decorate the front of the insta I thought that was a horrible ordinary touch yeah not just human skin too is it because you write in the book if a creature has run hop slithered or swam on this planet at some point its skin has been used to bind a book so you track down all sorts of oddities desk capital and boa constrictor hide mine camp in skunk and this is these are these are examples of what's called sympathetic binding which actually applies to a lot of human skin practice as well but it was a way of Riley um matching the material the outer material to the um thematic material of the book so it's a lot of fun going through auction records finding these strange examples and I think I've got an image in there of um a copy of Paradise Lost bound in snakeskin as well and and and Moby Dick in whale skin that's yeah yes and then Victorian big game hunters loved to self publish their you know journals of their adventures and bind them in some some poor exotic animal lion or something exactly yeah another fascinating thing it's not just the outsides of the book in this chapter um about this kind of thing is Saddam Hussein and the Quran that was an extraordinary story yes uh that was looking at if you've got books made of flesh uh how about books written in blood um and I know this sounds like I've I've been obsessing over the goriest parts I promise it's much more varied than that um but blood writing has a surprisingly long history going back to uh as a sort of Buddhist ascetic practice a way of um devotional sacrifice cutting your fingers even breaking your bones to literally pour yourself into your work and earn you merit and karma um but we can skip around the centuries and around the world so if you imagine a a a Buddhist blood written work on the shelf what could go next to it well um I talked to um a lovely book dealer called Ali Rao at um Mags Brothers in London who are big book dealers and she said oh yes now hang on books books written in blood that reminds me and they had just sold um a copy of uh the account of a shipwreck from I think 1840 called Fate of the Blenden Hall um which had been written by the captain and all but two of the uh the ship's crew and passengers had survived the quartermaster the captain writes pushed past his own wife and child to jump onto the life raft um but they made it to the uh ironically named inaccessible island but he had he had to use what washed up a shore to keep his journal and he had a writing desk that turned up he had stacks of the Times newspapers and he had pens but he had no ink and so the clue is given in the subtitle of the book which is written entirely in the blood of the penguin so unfortunately that's that's how he sourced his material um but you can skip forward again to 1977 I think and the American rock band Kiss were asked to star in a Marvel comic book and as a gimmick they were flown to the printing factory and had blood withdrawn from their arms which was mixed with the chemicals and so this comic book declares on the front printed in the blood of Kiss but yes like you mentioned the ultimate story or the ultimate example of this area is an amazing story that not very many people have come across um presumably because it was just so horrible and covered up but Saddam Hussein who was not you know noted for rational hate behavior generally uh when he was uh aiming to celebrate his 60th birthday in 1999 he commissioned a master calligrapher the Baghdad to create an 800 page Quran um written in Saddam Hussein's blood so over a period of two years he had something like over 50 pints of blood withdrawn from his arm and mixed in with the chemicals um but of course the problem with that uh in Islam is of course it's haram it's forbidden to create this kind of monstrosity but it's also forbidden to destroy a Quran so it presents a dilemma to its archivist and supposedly it sits somewhere underneath Baghdad in an archive that can only be opened by three separate keys simultaneously um because no one knows what to do with it but I include a photo of it on display to prove that this is not just uh not just a rumor I thought it was the fascinating thing was an an element of poignancy and that Saddam said that he had led a very dangerous life and should have lost a lot more blood than he did and this was his worst saying thank you to god which is strongly it's a strangely human thing that even the worst people got aside to them which is you know a little yeah a bit kind well that's great so I think we've covered the most gruesome bits so let's move on to another picture okay well so if we have a look at um the second picture too this is um hopefully something that people will never have seen before and it doesn't look that remarkable does it but this is um this was uh a result of Captain Cook's famous voyages um on these expeditions in the South Pacific um the crew collected samples each each uh there are multiple different samples in this image that we're looking at of Tappercloth on this cloth made from the barks of trees that the local people were to make for and use for all kinds of purposes and the British crew would sort of collect samples and they brought them home and an enterprising book dealer decided to sell them um in uh custom made books he'd make one up for on demand for whoever walked into his walked in his door so it's known it's nicknamed as Captain Cloth sorry Captain Cook's Atlas of Cloth because it is it is an extraordinary artifact from the history of exploration because you can literally feel um taste smell um cultures many of which no longer exist but you can travel around the world um through um using much of your senses without ever moving um so it's a fascinating relic of um exploration and maybe it should be paired with the Aurora Strahles which was produced on Shackleton's expedition from 1907 to 1909 which was which is much very famous and and was the first book written produced printed and bound in the Antarctic and the copies are unique because they didn't have leather with them they for the bindings they use the boards of their tea cases so each one is different each one is stamped with different letterings on the inside so again a very exciting book so this is in a a chapter called Curious Collections which is full of yes full of good treats um yes well which is a lot of fun but i have to admit i i i don't know which um which sort of area of these sort of literary histories you prefer but for me the the um the one that really fish because right okay so okay yes let's link to that so if we have a look at image eight for example thank you um this uh is a typically sort of hallucinogenic illustration from a book by a an Amsterdam publisher called Louis Renard and in 1719 Europeans knew very little about Indonesian wildlife Louis Renard uh knew even less but that didn't stop him from producing this magnificent uh two volume history of the fish of the Indonesian waters but as he admits in the introduction to the second volume the second volume it's things start to get a little short of accuracy or maybe generous with the truth and he also had these extraordinary colorings down of the illustration presumably as a you know very understandable to sell the books but if you look at the bottom right image you can see that little blue fish actually has four legs and it's known as the le poisson courant or the running fish and the little inscription above it tells provides the details that um this this fish has been known to leave the uh see follow people up the shore follow them home and in fact a friend of the author supposedly has a keeps one in his house like a dog and it just followed him around and he pets it um so he also covers different crabs that like living in mountains crabs that climb trees and there's even an illustration of a mermaid which supposedly cried like a mouse right um another thing i just i wonder if we should leave the picture up as long as that i don't know but we'll we'll we'll see they're working out rather than our faces yeah that's what people want to see um well if we're talking about amazing illustrations maybe we should have a look at the um dive into the supernatural um because if if we could possibly have image three i know we're jumping around here i'm sorry john if i'm throwing you off a track um i just thought it was in terms of color i thought it might be quite a good link is that cool sorry is that called chaos did you have another idea no no not so you okay cool all right so i'll i think what this best illustrates is we're now we're looking at a at a work that is technically cast as a grimoire or a spell book um but because this is dated to about 1775 this is produced at the time when the hysteria over witchcraft and magic has died down um this is known informally it's the compendium of demonology and magic and it's full of these wonderful watercolor gouache illustrations um and as well as the devil that you can see here chewing in his trademark position chewing on limbs probably of the three traitors as dante describes um you also have these alternative bizarre illustrations of um how to go treasure hunting with um by summoning demons which actually serves as a warning because in this particular illustration um the devil with an enormous uh how do i put this uh devil tackle or uh demonic genitals which crop up fairly regularly in grimoire i guess to highlight this sort of uh outrageous illegal nature of the books themselves um but this compendium of demonology and magic serves both as uh a sort of tempting um uh journey of naughtiness into things that were once forbidden while also serving um as clear warnings to not ever um get involved with this kind of magic because obviously with with a lot of grimoires the dates are given on their production um are complete lies a lot of them is uh sort of image engineering the authors are usually either anonymous or they're credited to king Solomon or or other character or moses you know people from people of spiritual wisdom um and i recommend to anyone interested in grimoires there's a brilliant book by Owen Davis um which does a brilliant overview of the history of all of them um so um perhaps this could be a good way into that yeah i was um wondering about i've just wanted to go drop back a picture uh not just a picture but the the thing that i was particularly close to my heart was um Harvey Einbinder's The Myth of the Botanical yeah so uh yes looking at maybe interesting stories behind the big collections that we all know and love um so for example yes the Harvey Einbinder was this very furious American physicist who could who had finally had enough of just how many mistakes there were in his addition of the encyclopedia Britannica and so he compiled actually i think i have a copy he compiled an entire book listing every mistake that was in there let me just find the camera there we go Harvey Einbinder this is from this is in the 1950s i think um and he had no interest in forcing them to correct themselves he just wanted to embarrass them um and it's this wonderful story that doesn't often get associated with the Encyclopedia Britannica just as um for any any who don't know the surprisingly murderous origin stories of the Oxford English Dictionary it's an extraordinary story of when in 1879 James Murray was you know commissioned to embark on this mammoth project no one had attempted this with Dr Johnson and he realized this is too much for me to handle i'm going to need to crowdsource so he sent out appeals through bookshops and libraries and the public submitted definitions and example uses of words but the most prolific contributor by far was a doctor Dr William Chester Miner and over years Miner produced thousands and thousands of really useful definitions and and Murray credited him with contributing to a significant chunk of the work and finally Murray said you know my friend we must meet they struck up a correspondent uh and um Miner had always forbidden it he said no we can't we can't meet and finally he relented me said okay fine take a train to Crowbourne in Berkshire there'll be a carriage waiting for you and it'll take you to me and he's led up to this beautiful enormous building shown into the the main study and there's a man standing there and Murray says my friend it's so good to meet you and the man says no no no i'm not i'm not Miner i'm i'm i'm his and his i'm his doctor he's he's a he's a patient here at at the Broadmoor and Insane Asylum for sort of criminally insane and he was a civil war surgeon who had just he saw Irishman everywhere and unfortunately he missed a he thought one would have stolen something from his bed chased this phantom out into the street and shot an innocent passerby and ever since then he's been committed but he had a lot of time on his hand and a lot of books and he was a very smart man so that's who we have to credit for a lot of uh Oxford English dictionary well just going back to the Britannica qi actually owns three entire sets of the Britannica the 1911 edition the 33 and the 98 and it's fascinating how a bit like your book you know if you read the 1911 edition it's like a work of poetry it's magical yeah yeah a sense of wonder and surprise is so delicious and the 33 again is all you know amazing stuff about engineering and and uh Indian philosophy and so on and by the time it's got to 1998 the sort of right towards the end of the print edition when they stopped doing it it's basically the economies of towns in the midwest of america it's very strange and it had big influence on qi it's almost almost the reason why qi started because when my son was born i was determined to be the best dad in the world and i bought my first print set of the encyclopedia in 1998 well it wasn't no it wasn't in the 90s and um determined to read the whole thing from cover to cover so i'd know to answer any of harry's questions i was so annoyed at how boring it was i went to see a friend of mine i said somebody should take only the interesting bits of the encyclopedia britannica and make a short crunchy book which is sort of slightly what what harvey unbinder did okay next slide please edward let's go on all right um what do you feel like john how about how about uh uh some literary hopes um because those are my favorite those are my favorite stories um so if we could have maybe image four please just have a look at this if it's amazing so uh a change from books so this is a statue of the snake god glycon now this is bizarre so this this dates back to a gentleman from second century ad a greek named alexander of abanatecos who wanted to make something of himself so he went to the local temple of the local god i think it was a sklepe of uh he buried some fake tablets that he had created uh and he took with him a tamed snake that he left on the ground um and waited for the tablets to be discovered by someone they were just poking up and when they were uh he arrived in prophet's road declared himself the representative a sklepe of this god um and translating the text um said a sklepe is now wishes to be known as glycon the snake deity glycon i am his earthly representative uh fall in line join my join join this new religion but what's so extraordinary is the way that he held sway over his followers because according to lucian who is our one source for this story so you know we're hoping it's all true um alexander alexander the source of his power was a hand puppet he created a snake puppet made of linen that he held on his hands lucian says it used horse hairs to operate and a little fork tongue would sort of pop back out back and forth and he would use it to make proclamation channeling uh glycon and this sounds like absolute nonsense um but from archaeological evidence of the image that we've just saw um that is a statue that was dug up in the 90s um under the uh train station in romania um and it suggests that alexander's glycon cult lasted for a hundred years after his death um but he would he'd use the puppet to answer his followers question he'd secretly read their question so he knew what answers to give i mean he was a real he was a real uh chance he's an amazing character um but i thought he was a kind of spiritual descendant of character i know you're familiar with john of george salmanazar yeah early 18th century who that's just my favorite kind of character in in cartography or enjoy in historical geography they're known as travel liars um people who invent an entire nation or country or city for their own personal game and george salmanazar for people who haven't heard of him um was a blond haired blue eyed man who spoke with a thick french accent who turned up in london in in the sort of very early 1700s announced himself as the first person from taiwan to have ever stepped foot on the european continent and he was the toaster pie society he was invited to dinner parties he became good friends with dr johnson because he told these outrageous stories of um the um the life of what things were like in taiwan of how the priests would sacrifice annually 20 000 boys and eat their hearts raw and he produced a book in 1704 called a historical description of formosa and the second edition was illustrated and that one really sold well because it has images of of sort of devil towers and the alphabet and it was all completely made up and we never we never discovered his true name but um he was he was immensely well liked and he was clearly immensely clever he was grilled at the royal society by edmund holey he was trying to catch him out um and asked him about formosan chimneys and holey said um can you see the sun reach the bottom of the chimney and salmanazar says no we can't and holey says oh well you see your line because taiwan is in the tropics and the sun would be shined directly down and quick as a flash salmanazar said absolutely but you see formosan chimneys a corkscrew shape the sun never makes it that i mean he just sound an amazing person because as you say dr johnson was a big fan um big fan yeah and he was supposedly really really witty and another on the travel lies there's a great um piece about the crews of the kawa wanderings in the south seas 1921 and uh captain um walter e trap rock who was really e trap rock and it was a completely fictitious book and it's celebrated with people who are interested in um in exploration literature as being the the greatest parody of travel literature it was meant to sort of puncture the the pompous a bit like how instagram now well used to be of people showing off all their luxurious holidays it was lampooning um the sort of the wealthy who would write up their travel accounts of of not very difficult journey um but it's fully illustrated with photos it's i think it dates from about 1920 21 maybe 21 yeah um and so his photos taken of these um these intrepid voyages going to an exotic island but the photos are very clearly taken in a cheap photo studio and for example they mentioned the the eggs of the exotic fatwa bird and if you actually look closely it's it's a pair of dice stuck in a bird he says they're square eggs they lay square eggs obviously a set of there's there's so many good funny things in it because um the author trap rock his huge pseudonym is um described as having previously written two books curry dishes for moderate incomes and a round of rougher on roller skates but people people take it literally don't they yeah and well he was invited walter walter trap rock who didn't exist was invited to lecture at i think at the uh was it national geographical the royal geographical society an institution yeah there's national geographic national geographic um so i so i love those kinds of poses and they're very fun to collect because they're not viewed traditionally as having a lot of um academic significance they're not the great works of the 20th century or or before so you can pick them up quite cheaply they're a fun thing to have on your shelf because as you're reading them you're winking back at the author you're in on the joke with them it's a very fun feeling absolutely so um right we've only got it's amazing how the time flies we've only got just a quarter of an hour left so pick another um should we go to japan because okay so let's do that yeah okay um so if we're talking about hoax literature this is a bizarre story based again on in 1933 um a shinto priest in um japan in northern japan discovered what was what purports to be the last will in testament of jesus christ sadly the document disappears just before world war two um so it's impossible to verify but what happened is that in this document it mentions that jesus had i think there's 12 years in the in the new of his life in the new testament of his young life that are unaccounted for and this document claims that in that time jesus has basically taken a gap year to japan had studied with master linguists had learned the language and had a great time and then had returned home but this document goes on to say um at the time of the crucifixion jesus actually had managed to sneak away his brother his previously unreported brother um is sikuru or something like that that had taken his place on the cross and jesus fled with um i think his brother's ear is a memento and a lock of hair um and had fled all the way to japan had made it to a village called shingu which is about seven hours north of tokyo by train where he'd had become a farmer he lived to a grand old age of 106 had children grandchildren is described as being bold and quite goblin like with a big hooked nose um and the what what's the best part of this story is that there remains to this day shingu is a thriving village um the people of the village believe themselves to be descendants of christ they're buddhists so it's not a big deal they don't care they don't celebrate christmas or anything and they just go about their business but every year thousands of um pilgrims make their way from tokyo take that seven hour train ride north to visit the village because they're surrounded by a white picket fence and i have an image of it in the book is the grave of jesus christ um with a nice introductory sign telling the story that's the shot isn't it john if you put up the shop that's brilliant that's jesus's grave there we are in shingu there we go there's jesus's grave in shingu um and you see how well maintained it is that's the local yogurt factory who keep it up um there's also there's a gift shop where you can buy jesus japanese jesus monks and coasters apparently so i would love to go there one day when things return to normal it'd be wonderful this is uh um in a chapter called religious oddities and i mentioned at the top that even the footnotes in your book are fascinating and there are a couple here which are religiously odd about a court case in the states in 1971 when a prison inmate sued the devil for depriving him of his constitutional rights and the case was dismissed on the ground that as a foreign prince satan could claim sovereign immunity they didn't know where to send the paperwork the one about the arizona lawyer who brought a negligence case against god for a hundred thousand dollars asked for his secretary's house was damaged by lightning he won the case by default when the defendant felt him here in court yeah i think that's amazing i think i might as well i i love the uh i love jesus he was a garlic farmer apparently you say garlic farmers that's where the money is yeah the small details that make the book so so absolutely delicious let's move on to the books of spectacular size edward as we don't have time oh actually i wonder if i can show this this is going to be impossible to show on camera for obvious reasons but i'm still going to try anyway so the idea was how small her book's gone and how large can they go um and so if you see this is actually this is based on discovering i don't think it's even going to show up can you see that tiny speck in the middle of the white there so that is the smallest bound book that has ever been ever anyone's ever managed to produce it's 26 pages long it was produced in leipzig in 2002 as a celebration of the of of the Gutenberg press of the anniversary um and it's actually representative of a really long history of bookbinders for very practical reasons showing off their skill by trying to produce the smallest works possible inventing miniature presses to produce these things it's an incredibly arduous task but i think my favorite story from of small books because it could get a bit repetitive if you went to you know kept looking for the record break is is um a version it's called the dantino it's a tiny copy of of dante's divine comedy and it was produced by the salmon brothers of padua and maybe 1879 please don't hold me to these dates um and uh and the why this book is famous and actually the dealer at the fair who sold me this miniature book told me i had a copy of it as well and i couldn't afford it sadly but he told the story of how um it's famous for being a very dangerous book because it completely destroyed the eyesight so the people of the printers the designers the the tool makers everyone who worked on it because it was it took weeks and weeks to produce just a few pages they had to go incredibly slowly and delicately and it was so small that it just um painfully strains the eyesight i can testify to that because i tried to read it and you get an almost instant headache or pain behind the eye um so it's a sort of legendary weaponized typeface in a sense you must tell the story about the smallest published book in the world that was published in leipzig in 2002 oh is that is that this one this is the one that's called the smallest book in the world yes yes that's that's this book yeah is it is that the one yes that's the same one yeah that was so tell us the story about the german dealer you spoke to and um yes uh who was very very nice but he did mention it when he sold it to me he came with a warning and he said a colleague had had a copy uh at past tense um but she'd made the mistake of um breathing and had accidentally exhaled and spent the rest of the day on her hand and knees um examining the floorboards with a magnifying glass trying to find something that as big as a peppercorn and and so he he said you know for goodness sake just just it's why it comes in the box just keep it in the box don't show it to people it's not worth it and hold your breath and for goodness sake don't do it anywhere dusty where you might sneeze that's very good um so uh just uh bigging up your footnotes again there's a fantastic footnote in this chapter books a spectacular size dr johnson claimed to have such a good memory that he could recite an entire chapter of neil horribos 1758 work the natural history of iceland from memory and the chapter goes as follows chapter 72 concerning snakes there are no snakes to be met with throughout the entire island it's a good party trick to have i was thinking i think i recommend it to people yeah um but um yeah i don't do you what do you feel like uh moving on to is there anything well i just i think you should tell the ladies and gentlemen about some of the biggest books really as you've done the tiny ones yeah the young encyclopedia yeah the google yes uh well the young emperor uh attempted he basically like you he wanted to to know everything and to him uh unable to buy the britannica or anything like that he decided to make his own but being an emperor um he decided to do it thoroughly so he since he spent a period of decades sending out scribes across china to compile every written work that they could find to produce this work that actually is in part lost because it was just impossible to keep together over the over the centuries um but it was the first wikipedia in a sense he wanted it all his fingertips so he wanted knowledge to come to him um quite you know fair enough if you got she's got the budget for it um but supposedly if you stacked all of the the volumes of this encyclopedia together it would fill a very lot one of those very large uh truck trailers that lori's pulled down the motorway um so it is it's a sort of extraordinary pre wikipedia um and on the on the other end of that actually thinking about it um thanks for the wonders of google uh and google translate i struck up a pen paddle ship with a brazilian tax lawyer named veniceus what's his name veniceus leonior and being a lawyer he was absolutely infuriated with brazil's labyrinthine ridiculously extensive tax law the amount of laws that are constantly generated new laws are brought in all the time they have one of the worst system systems in the world the most complicated and so as an actor protest he spent something like two hundred thousand dollars of his own money um uh many many years he went through several heart attacks 23 years i say 23 years and a divorce and a new marriage and various heart attacks to print out every single brazilian tax law and bind it together in one book i don't think we've given the image but i wonder if you can see here and he very kindly sent me a photo to include in the book and can you see him there he's he's perched on top of his magnum opus there yeah so this is a book 41 000 pages long almost seven feet thick it weighs seven and a half tons i mean that is two and a half tons yeah that was the weight of the john louis fair lori that came earlier today i mean that's how big it was um and and uh yeah and so i was just asking him about why he did it and he sort of explained this protest reasons and then i you know the obvious question to ask is is he planning a second edition but he said no there are no plans to uh to add to it oh that's brilliant um so um we are going to have questions in about five or six minutes so that i should remind anybody'd like to ask ed a question ed would a question please um get in touch with the moderator and we'll hopefully you can come to you we've got 15 minutes for that so my last section here the last picture i think we haven't dealt with is the triangular book of councillor oh yes yeah should we that's image 11 i think okay now so one one of the um chapters in there one of the areas that was a lot of fun to research is cryptic books to look at books of code and cipher and go beyond the ones that always fill the pages of the daily mail amid claims that someone has cracked it because they've used a an aromaiic dictionary or something like that so i wanted to find works that were much more obscure so the triangular book of uh the count sound shaman um is just as interesting as it's author just as strange as it's author the count sound shaman was um a legendary figure in uh high society in europe in that book was produced around 1750 um so he's coming a bit later than george samanzar but equally charismatic and he was a hit at parties he was a very strange man he claimed to be an adventurer no one could quite place his accent he was always he'd always make up a new story whenever anyone asked him about his origins and he claimed to have discovered the secret to longevity he was so old he said that he'd been he had attended the wedding at cana where jesus had turned water to wine um and all the secrets of this um this uh magic science that he discovered were contained in this um uh frustratingly cryptic work but it's such a it's such an amazing object um that's in the i think it's in the collection of the getty research institute um but that that is a classic example of basically using a book as an excuse to tell the story of a wonderfully eccentric character because Horace Walpole said of him uh wrote of him uh uh he he sings he plays the violin wonderfully composes is mad um and he claimed he did he claimed to be so old he'd been to the wedding at cana where he turned wine yeah yeah so who wouldn't want to talk to someone like that at a party absolutely um great so so oh gosh there's so much um edwin we could talk about is there anything you want to mention before i turn to questions because we've got some coming in here i wonder if there's a couple of minutes there's one image that i think is worth showing because it links on from eccentric so if you see image seven there um raffinesce's notebook raffinesce raffinesce the um french naturalist um this is from 1818 this is a book 70 17 of his notebooks and it looks fairly standard for a for a wildlife expert he traveled to kentucky in 1818 to meet his hero uh john james audible who is most famous for producing that double elephant folio birds of america which is one of the most valuable books in the world a beautiful beautiful um book um but raffinesce was absolutely obsessed with um studying uh natural history and all he wanted to talk about with audible he invited himself to stay he vastly overstayed his welcome and all he did was want to to grill audible about the local wildlife that he discovered to the point where audible was getting incredibly irritated by this tunnel efficient man and actually when i was looking for good stories i was reading audible on diary and he mentions uh they'd all gone to bed uh and there was a loud crashing noise that came from the guest room and he burst in to see what the ruckus was and he discovered raffinesce had grabbed audible's favorite prized violin and was chasing a bat around the room trying to brain it and capture it as a specimen um so you can imagine that is uh perhaps the most annoying kind of house guest so what happened is that audible started teasing him having fun with him he was he was he clearly took things very literally so audible started making up details of local wildlife inventing animals describing them and raffinesce very faithfully completely um believe believing every word that his hero said would drop down these details and so in that image we have um these are completely these are four completely uh made up fish and my favorite is at the bottom left which is the um the devil devil jack diamond fish which was uh noted to be bulletproof can we see the picture briefly oh yeah picture seven um so that fish at the bottom left which uh has quite a lot of character for a fish in the face um was supposedly bulletproof hunters had tried to kill it and it was responsible for uh leaping out of the banks and snatching two men further upstream and so raffinesce copied all this down um copied them into his published um works of his experiences in america and was absolutely humiliated upon publication when people pointed out there was a load of rubbish right well that is an hour thank you so much edward that was gosh really thank you john um so we've got time say we've got a few minutes for questions um and here's one what was edward's favorite find which of all the books you found did you get most excited about that yeah that's a really um that's a really tough question i think my answer is always different because it's like when someone asks you i imagine you get asked a lot tell me tell me your favorite joke or something like that you always yes impossible come up and the most interesting thing you know it's impossible yes exactly so i'm gonna give us a short list give us a little yeah well i'll give you the think the first one that popped into my head and this will this this will really not sound too much to for my gravitas but this is a wonderful book uh let me show it up it's called naked came the stranger it's produced in 1969 written by uh Penelope ash and it was in fact uh a very calculated unambitious hoax by a group of journalists who wanted to show how um novels like was it Valley of the Dolls was was a sort of the sort of pulpy trashy sexy novels that were all the rage um just how trashy they were and how easy they were to write so a group of american journalists in San Francisco got together um and each divided the chapters among themselves and i think they produced in about a week they published it didn't tell anyone that it was a total joke and it was a story of a board housewife on long island sleeping with everyone that she could uh and it's actually in the inside is dedicated to daddy which is rather upsetting um and uh and it sold i think the reception it sold something like 400 000 copies it was a sensation uh the movie rights were well they attempted to try and option the movie rights and its authors were completely horrified that no one had picked up on the fatire of it um and in fact it just it just became a best-selling novel that everyone tried to read um so i love the idea that as sophisticated as literary hoaxes are they can sometimes just go completely over the heads it means they work too well and there was a quote i quoted the author in the book where he'd reflected on the whole episode he'd refused he turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a sequel and he said america sometimes i worry about you a bit like um springtime for hitler yeah exactly so um a question from alexandra hello of um this is perhaps anthropodermic bibliophagy from which part of the body would the skin be taken the back and would they make more than one book out of one body that's a very good question i from what i understand and from the examples that we have the copies are unique from what i'm aware of it wasn't a run there wasn't a a series there wasn't a great demand for multiple corpses and and i've read that some skin was taken from the leg some from the back um and i think with the countess it probably would have been the shoulders in the back it's wherever it's sort of most flexible um but i you know at the same time it's treated like any other level and aside from there's one uh turn of the century uh book historian i quote who said he'd he'd gone to paris and viewed in person um a copy of the 1792 constitution that had been bound in the skin of a revolutionary supposedly um and he said it it feels and looks just like normal leather but it's actually quite hard to get rid of the hair so it's quite sort of desiccational bumps and little protruding hair um but um no i as far as i'm aware the copies were unique and there's actually another anecdote um from an american book designer who was recalling in 1950 a woman had come to him um asked with her letters written to her late husband asking him to bind these letters in the skin of her late husband and he he just mentions that he was very concerned because she had remarried and he couldn't help but wonder whether her second husband was worried that he was going to become uh volume two so the binder just writes the the binder writes let us hope it was a strictly limited edition right so um here's a question about the pictures in the book was it difficult to get permissions for the images because it must be do you know how many how many hundreds there are several hundred yes i think um a heavily illustrated book is well my i've done um a book called the phantom atlas which was about places that we believed existed on maps through the centuries and that's about maps and that was maybe 200 i think there are nearly 400 images in here it's ridiculous but but it it works my publishers designers are absolutely amazing at fitting everything in i had to cut half the material out of it as well to sort of condense everything um but in terms of um image clearances you know it was a period of 10 years it was it was talking to a lot of dealers um uh and just just asking you never know if you just ask someone um what they might say and if you explain the idea and you you know you're genuine with your enthusiasm for it and say you know it would be such an honor to have this image in here um a lot of dealers were perfectly happy to um give permission um and also i go by a lot of libraries uh who offer a lot into the public domain the british library have been incredibly active and generous in i think they've uploaded something like a million pictures into the public domain so purely to get a book like this published you have to use every sort of every trick in the book to legally find ways of um of just sort of called begging favors really and looking for alternative photographing out of the book did anyone refuse permission i think there was one map dealer who who did and it was only because he'd just given permission to someone else to use it in a book which was fair enough um and then at a rare book fair i happened to see that same book and asked if i could currently take a picture for my book and they were they were very willing so um and also i had to i had to pay to clear a lot of them as well but but that's not a problem yeah that's so it wasn't for nothing it's not all free oh god that would be wonderful no no i think um some works are just so unique um which is why i'm very nervous uh about this book i'm about to start which is uh the same idea but applying it to the history of art and it'll be called the madman's gallery and looking for strange because the problem with paintings unlike books you know they're not um really reprinted a lot um so that should be interesting um but yeah i think anyway if anyone's interested in getting into writing nonfiction um learning some good public domain archives to explore is a is an absolute must and you can find gold mines of ideas in that so one question i i had ed would was um did you why were there no pictures of kit williams masquerade in the book that struck me really odd oh you can't really do what it is until you see it yes there where are we we are that was where is kit william i think that was there not a picture of kit williams in that not masquerade yes but not of the book oh i thought they were maybe holding it up i couldn't remember i don't know but i don't know but i i wrote a parody of that right this is quite a super long from this is from the first spitting image book oh wow it's a parody version yeah of masquerade and it's president's brain is missing so we made reagan's golden brain and and uh a thousand pounds first person to find it yeah yeah well do you remember the the excitement of that book at the time i mean how because i don't remember i mean yeah beautiful paintings absolutely delicious and it seems like it really captured the sort of a obsession of the nation at the time it must have been a lot of crap yeah it's an amazing story yes if you're going to bring out a book um that's a that's a great publicity trick to bury a golden hair somewhere and say that there are clues inside the book to find it yeah and then unleash the great british public on on on the countryside with shovels well um i don't know if anyone's got any more questions because we've got uh about five minutes left to run um otherwise well while we're waiting ed we're just going to do a little bit of uh so where can they buy the book do they do we know oh i think there's a link there's a link there um so as say it's been so delightful talking to you i um i really thank you john thoroughly enjoyed the book and i read a lot of books and i don't yeah there's very few books i like as much as this one i honestly say that's very kind of you thank you i'm a great present for somebody too but what we thought we'd do to to finish off was um the last chapter in the book it's called strange titles which is the books that you know also very intriguing but you haven't got room to do everything so you've just got the titles so let's let's look through those and see which ones you would like to have in your collection yeah i i'm fascinated by the amount of literature that was obsessed with defending boldness and the scent defending beard that's produced if you look at the very earliest one it's called a claudia de calvis or in praise of bold men because obviously this is from nine nine ten and obviously at that time the writers were monks um and so a lot of the more whimsical literature um produced at that time is books like that i think the british library had the very first book called um apologia bar big bar this or in defense of the beard as well um which was written by a bishop who who produced it to calm the warring factions of his monasteries those who had beards and those who didn't to say that they were equally as respectable and worthy to god um but is there a title that you were curious about drone well there's some there's some absolute crackers in here um well jonathan swift had a real knack with uh titles um so for example 1722 um he disguised himself under the pseudonym the countess of fizzle rumpf and wrote arse musica or the lady's back report which is a history a book about farting basically oh i quite like nuclear war what's in it for you from 1982 yeah actually a lot of these i they're in the collection of the british library if anyone's to find them i went there to sort of are they see them in person yes do they have proceedings of the second international workshop on nude mice japanese i wonder i wonder quite possibly that's a good uh research challenge they definitely have does the earth rotate no from 1919 by william westfield i thought that person that was wonderful electable spoons of the third rike that's about that actually i think that was featured on some one of the american talk shows and that actually has got a bit of a cult following that book has it yeah and irishman's difficulties with the dutch language from 1912 who's who in coca spaniels um what would christ do about syphilis pretty how to make them pay i miss that one well that's amazing well thank you so much they're said but it's been it's been great fun i hope everybody has has enjoyed it at home um and i think i'll hand over to the boss now thank you so much to edward and john for that absolutely fascinating conversation if you want to find out more about the british library's events program please consult our website we'd also encourage you to fill in our feedback form and don't forget of course that you can find a link to buy edwards book the manman's library there thank you ever so much for joining us and goodbye