Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Today when i checked the mailbox i discovered Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Laurel has very kindly sent it down, and i have started devouring it already. Enjoy some:

    “Amen,” William said in a devout tone. “But what does this have to do with the fact that the library may not be visited?”
    “You see, Brother William,” the abbot said, “to achieve the immense and holy task that enriches those walls”–and he nodded twoard the bulk of the Aedificium, which could be glimpsed fromt he cell’s windows, towering above the abbatial church itself–“devout men have toiled for centuries, observing iron rules. The library was laid out on a plan which hasa remained obscure to all over the centuries, and which none of the monks is called upon to know. Only the librarian has received the secret, from the librarian who preceded him, and he communicates it, while still alive, to the assistant librarian, so that death will not take him by suprise and rob the community of that knowledge. And the secret seals the lips of both men. Only the librarian has, in addition to that knowledge, the right to move through the labyrinth of the books, he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping. The other monks work in the scriptorium and may know the list of the volumes that the library houses. But a list of titles often tells very little; only the librarian knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehoods, the volume contains. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it; sometimes he first consults me. Because not all truths are for all ears, not all falsehoods can be recognized as such by a pious soul; and the monks, finally, are in the scriptorium to carry out a precise taks, which requires them to read certain volumes and not others, and not to pursue every foolish curiosity that seizes them, whether through weakness of intellect or through pride or through diabolical prompting.”

I came across a pretty detailed set of notes on the book.