‘If you steal this book I’ll beat your brains out’

‘I would lend you my copy, but the fucker who previously borrowed it still hasn’t given it back.’ Those precise words were uttered to me by an eminent churchman, more in anger than in sorrow, while chatting at high table about a book he believed I might find useful. Its title has long since slipped my mind, but I remember thinking at the time: who lends a book to a friend and seriously expects to get it back? Few things can be so often borrowed and so seldom returned.

This new and delightfully puckish collection from the publishing arm of the Bodleian Libraries, edited and introduced by the medievalist Eleanor Baker, brings together more than 70 examples of ‘book curses’, from ancient Babylon to 20th-century America, intended to deter potential thieves or forgetful borrowers. Many of their authors, appropriately enough, were members of the clergy, amplifying the stakes of earthly punishment with the prospect of divine retribution. They make my old dinner companion seem like a teddy bear.

The curses range from the venomous to the sadistic. On the one hand, there is something to be admired about the stolid minimalism of the 13th-century Suffolk monk (or possibly nun) who inscribed one library copy with the warning: ‘Whoever steals this book will be hanged by the neck.’ Almost the equivalent of stating that shoplifters will be prosecuted. Equally simple but enjoyably evocative is the ‘return me or die’ that closes another medieval curse, as though the scribe would personally track the thief down and shank him between the ribs.

At the other end of the scale are gruesome jinxes such as ‘May the devil rot off his skin’ and, in the mind-twistingly Boschian vision conjured by one German monk:

May he die a death, may he be cooked in a frying pan, may the falling sickness and fever attack him, and may he be rotated [on a wheel] and hanged.