By Its Cover (Commissario Brunetti, #23)

by Donna Leon

Old books had always filled Brunetti with nostalgia for centuries in which he had not lived. They were printed on paper made from old cloth, shredded, pounded, watered down and pounded again and hand-made into large sheets to be printed, then folded and folded again, and bound and stitched by hand: all that effort to record and remember who we are and what we thought, Brunetti mused. He remembered loving the feel and heft of them, but chiefly he remembered that dry, soft scent, the past’s attempt to make itself real to him.

‘Make the laws for your friends, impose them on your enemies.’ How many times in his life had people explained that rule of survival to him?

‘If you get rid of all the books, you get rid of memory,’ he said. ‘And culture, and ethics, and variety, and any argument that opposes what you choose to think,’

Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine intelligence.