Open Writing

"May you live in interesting times" is a particularly nasty Chinese curse, and while librarians adore intellectual stimulation, sometimes even we think enough is enough. There's Zhang Yiyi, a Chinese novelist who pushes the envelope of "interesting." He was first in this year's Biggest April's Fool in China, according to news reports from Shanghai, after repeatedly comparing himself to Confucius and writing a non-fiction book "detailing the negative characteristics of people from 13 provinces and municipalities." That outraged a few hundred million countrymen, but he's topped that; last week NPR.com reported Zhang will spend a million yen ($153,500) for ten plastic surgeries "to transform himself into Shakespeare's spitting image."

The Bard didn't like anyone messing with him, knew a few curses, and doubtlessly planned for such transgressors. After all, his epithet reads "Good frend for jesus sake forbeare/ to digg the dust encloased heare./ Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones and/ curst be he yt moves my bones."

Librarians know something about cursing, too. Besides working around dictionaries, novels, and restroom walls containing execrations, librarians have manufactured curses for millennia, although today we rely more on electronic theft detection systems. As Sandra Anderson wrote in "The Medieval Book Curse," "The book curse was not a technological security system, but a security system of social context."

Instead of electrically-triggered alarms, ancient librarians used curses to link book thievery to excommunication, damnation, or anathema. Excommunication was the lightest sentence, since it can be reversed, and anathema the worst because it includes "permanent removal from the Church and from the sight of God." But librarian-scribes were cursing long before then. Around 650 BCE Assyrian King Assurbanipal instructed his scribal staff to include the following on his important clay tablets: "Whosoever shall carry off this tablet … may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and property in the land."

Medieval scribe's curses were grander. Marc Drogin wrote in his book "Anathema!", about Hugh, the abbot of Lobbes Abbey in Germany. Hugh "was apparently having 'one of those days' in 1049, as he sat finishing the compilation of a library catalogue. Apparently a number of the monastery's books were missing … for he wrote on the last page: "All those who do not books return/ Are thieves, not borrowers, and earn/ The punishment Justice demands;/ Their sacrificial loss of hands,/ May God, therefore, as witness see/ That it be done unswervingly."

Parisian scribe Simon Vostre completed a Book of Hours in 1502 with the lines "Whoever steals this Book of Prayer/ May he be ripped apart by swine,/ His heart be splintered, this I swear,/ And his body dragged along the Rhine." In contrast is gentle Eleanor Worcester, who in 1440 wrote "This book is mine/ And I it lost, and you it find,/ I pray you heartily to be so kind,/ That you will take a little pain,/ To see my book brought home again."

Wikipedia says "curse" is "any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to some entity." The Online Etymological Dictionary says that curse's origins are obscure. "Curuz," Old French for "anger," and the Latin "cursus," or "course," are possible antecedents, but "no similar word exists in Germanic, Romance or Celtic."

At least we know the origin of the expression "Curses! Foiled again!." It was coined for the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" animated television series, according to the May 22, 2006 edition of www.Word-Detective.com. The line was inevitably uttered by arch villain Snidely Whiplash in his futile struggles with Mountie Dudley Do-right.

Fortunately book curses aren't needed much at our library, where inventories have revealed far less theft than many other open-stack public libraries suffer. Open stacks permit people to see books nearby the ones they seek and opportunity for inspiration and serendipity to guide their quests for knowledge. Allowing patrons to browse the bookshelves is something Andrew Carnegie insisted upon when endowing the 1,600 libraries he built in this country. Open stacks make for better access to knowledge, and as Shakespeare said, "Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven."