The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,” one of these curses runs, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever. Even a worldly skeptic, with a strong craving for what he had in his hands, might have hesitated before slipping such a book into his cloak. If

my grandfather would have made this into a bookplate

The resemblance to the design of public libraries in our own society is no accident: our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derive precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago. Through

they are not a public good. they are both rival and exclusive