JF Ptak Science Books Post 1664
(Part of a series of on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things and the History of Nothing .)
I have a notion that when we enter the infinite library of Jorge Borges that what we find somewhere in there, in the middle (where every place is the middle) we find that the books being read are just like the volumes from this illustration. It may only make sense that in a place where everything that could be written had been written, and that in the place where there was a finite amount of the infinite and vice versa, that the whole mechanism would go spinning fractally out of control once the Primum Mobile got the chance to introduce the notion of the Blank Book. Reproducing nothing infinitely may be a lot more cumbersome than reproducing everything than can be written. At least the written aspect has some sense of order to its infinity, and that--like when approaching the speed of light--that when you get near "the end" that everything gets a little, well, funny. When confronted with infinitely reproducible nothingness, there's nothing that quite reproduces to the end of pi like the blank book. It's nothing all the way down. And all the way up, too, for that matter.
[Image source: Statuta ordinis cartussiensis a domno Guigone priore cartusie edita, printed in Basel by J. Amerbach, 1510. Illustrated with woodcuts by Urs Graf. This is a beautiful and important work, a great effort by an early and important press, and this image happens to show study timne in a Monastic setting. Their books of course weren't blank.]
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