She gave bare numbers for the casualties of aerial bombing in World War Two—books, with a correlation to buildings and human lives. Beauvais, forty-two thousand books; Tours, two hundred thousand; Douai, one hundred and ten thousand; Chartres, twenty-three thousand books and two thousand manuscripts—some of those, only carbonised by heat, had been preserved and, thanks to modern methods, would one day be transcribed again. Italy, two million books, thirty-nine thousand manuscripts. Great Britain during the Blitz, twenty million books. Germany, ten million in public collections, and the rest,
...more
