tumbl dry

"… reading means on the contrary no longer seeing the presence of signs, so that a river in the grasslands might appear in the place of the twists and turns of writing, a crenellated castle in the place of the more regular characters of the printer, and, as in illuminations, an abundance of fruits, leaves, and flowers behind the disappearing letter, making us believe that things could be born of language as if from a horn of plenty. This crossing of signs, transparent to the point of being invisible, also allows passing from one tongue to the other and making the dead speak."

Gérard Macé, The Last of the Egyptians (via invisiblestories)

I bought this based on your indirect recommendation. The excerpts from the publisher are really amazing:

About Champollion I knew: that he did not go to Egypt with Napoleon, that he never saw the actual Rosetta stone, only more or less bad copies, that he suffered from gout and swollen feet like those of Oedipus, that he heard a lion’s roar in the name Cleopatra, and that he fainted in his brother’s presence when he had discovered the secret of the hieroglyphics.

“Then I learned that in the winter of 1827 he had the novels of Fenimore Cooper read to him, and in particular The Last of the Mohicans. I followed him on this novelistic path through a forest that he perhaps tried to decipher while getting interested in the manners and customs “of America’s savage nations.” I followed him to the Louvre where he had just set up the Egyptian galleries when he saw there Indians of the Osage tribe among the Greek statues and felt the sadness of the tropics in the slow cadences sung by a crouched woman.

Incidentally, after searching for H Press (which Burning Deck notes as the UK publisher but is now defunct) and finding a Norwegian distributer, I typed in ‘Last of the Norwegians’ into spdbooks’ search engine, which was perplexing, unlikely and hilarious to me.