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466 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
„We like lists because we don’t want to die”.
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners? (Song of Songs, p.223)
He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language (Cervantes, 1615, p. 387)
a third emerged, which might be called San Francisco and which spans the Golden Gate and the bay with long, light bridges and sends open trams climbing its steep streets, and which might blossom as capital of the Pacific a millennium hence [...] in an empire more vast than the Great Khan's. (Calvino, 1972, p. 97)
Finally, we come to the Mother of all Lists, infinite by definition because it is in constant evolution, the World Wide Web, which is both web and labyrinth, not an ordered tree, and which of all vertigos promises us the most mystical, almost totally virtual one, and really offers us a catalogue of information that makes us feel wealthy and omnipotent, the only snag being that we don't know which of its elements refers to data from the real world and which does not, no longer with any distinction between truth and error. (p. 360)
Antipericatametanaparbeugedamphicribrationes Toordicantium. (Rabelais, 1564, p. 381)
you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, [...] (Calvino, 1979, p. 392)
Pity for us who always battle on the frontier / Of the boundless and the future. (Apollinaire, 1918, p. 398)