Forbidden Books

Censors banned them. Empires burned them. Readers kept the survivors alive.

Some books are dangerous to read. A few are dangerous merely to own, and one or two are dangerous to touch. The Key of Solomon promised command over spirits and was copied by hand for centuries. The Voynich Manuscript has resisted generations of cryptographers, among them the codebreaker who led the team that broke Japan's diplomatic ciphers. A Michigan chemistry professor mounted eighty-six arsenic wallpaper samples into a warning volume so hazardous that its five surviving copies are handled with special precautions. And the great libraries of Alexandria, Baghdad, and Nalanda gathered the knowledge of whole civilizations, then lost it to fire, conquest, and neglect.

Forbidden Books shelves thirty histories in five chapters: the sorcerer's grimoires, the burned libraries, the unbroken ciphers, the physically and politically dangerous pages, and the phantom volumes, from the Emerald Tablet to the Book of Thoth, that haunt literature without ever quite proving they exist. Every entry keeps to the documented record, marks legend as legend, and ends in a bibliography for readers who intend to go further.

For four centuries the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum taught Europe one durable lesson: there is no quicker way to make a book sought after than to forbid it.