Plenty of Nothing

Homer on a Snake's Intestine

    While Basiliscus was Emperor (475-476 AD) a very serious fire broke out at Constantinople. Beginning in the quarter of the bronze merchants, it spread to all the areas nearby and reduced to ashes the colonnades of the public squares and the adjacent houses, as well as the Basilica, so-called, which contained a library of 120,000 books. Amongst these it is written that there was the intestine of a serpent, one hundred and twenty feet long, which had written on it in gold letters the poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Malchus, who wrote a history of these Emperors, also mentions this. The fire also destroyed the beautiful palace of Lausus and the statues therein, the Hera of Samos, the Athena of Lindos and the Aphrodite of Cnidos, famous masterpieces of art, and it spread as far as the Forum.

    Malchis, Fragment 11 (in Brockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire, volume 2, page 419).

In the Central Library

Hey, They Fixed It

UBC Papyri

A couple of papyri from Roman Egypt have surfaced at the UBC Library where they have been filed away since the 1930s. Story.

Laureate's Sherry

Poet Laureates are paid in sherry. Cheltham's Library has one of the empties.

Geisel Library

The Geisel Library building at University of California, San Diego, is named after Dr Seuss.

Agricola Street Library

Book Mural

Boxed Set

The Tale of Genji boxed set. This kawachibon dates from the Kamakura period and is held in the Hosa Library in Nagoya.

Third Skin for the MacOdrum Library

Fifties-style.

Eighties-style.

And now. Read.