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Napoleon’s Miniaturized Traveling Library
- Jerry2 9y agoVery cool! Unfortunately, no one seems to have a list of books that were in it. I wonder what Napoleon liked to read...
- jhbadger 9y agoThis "Life of Wellington" mentions the capture of Napoleon's traveling library and mentions that they found the works of Homer, the Bible, Ossian (a supposed ancient Scottish poet now thought to be fraudulent), and a work of Voltaire. https://books.google.com/books?id=pqv_06RS6XcC&lpg=PA536&ots=XAF9qrRA8Y&pg=PA519 https://books.google.com/books?id=pqv_06RS6XcC&lpg=PA536&ots...
- cafard 9y agoNabokov has curious things to say about the influence of Ossian (maybe in the introduction to his translation of the Song of Igor's Campaign?).
- athenot 9y ago- For religion, he wanted: both (bible) testaments, the Quoran, history of the Church. - Epics: Homère, Lucain, Le Tasse, Télémarque, La Henriade - Tragedies: some Corneille, Racine (minus a few), Voltaire. No Molière - History: some chronology works and works on the Roman Empire He didn't want many memoires and "useless dissertations". As a side-note this started in July 1808 and by December he was complaining that there wasn't enough new content. The full project never got executed, only a subset ever got produced and apparently it wasn't satisfactory. Source: Les Bibliothèques particulière de L'Empereur Napoléon, Antoine Guillois, 1900 — http://bibnum.enc.sorbonne.fr/omeka/files/original/0ac1be91312051774cb5436fab7eff4d.pdf http://bibnum.enc.sorbonne.fr/omeka/files/original/0ac1be913...
- rootedbox 9y agoI heard you like books... so I put a books in your book.
- fnordian_slip 9y agoJust in case you are wondering why you are being downvoted: This sort of low-effort joke is generally frowned upon here. While it might be fun to some, it would ultimately lead to many more comments that do not add to the discussion, and thereby dilute the overall experience.
- mercer 9y agoSaid account is 5.5 years old, so they know what's what. Furthermore, judging by their comment history, this user as a habit of posting low-quality comments interspersed with enough 'real person' stuff, I suppose, to prevent a ban. I'm not a fan.
- jay-anderson 9y agoDoes anyone know how small the books were? There's nothing in the picture to give a sense of scale.
- d_theorist 9y agoThe article mentions that they were "small 12mo", which is a standard size (also called a duodecimo) corresponding to 5 x 7.375 inches.
- njharman 9y agoAnti-Adblock or something said > You value our content ... Less than you think. Certainly not as much as my time, attention, and security. Bye.
- gwerbin 9y agoArticles like this always make me wonder about the effect of technology, particularly easy access to the Internet at all times, on my generation (born in the late 80s and early 90s). That discussion -- about attention spans, finding exactly what you're looking for versus having to interpret a static document, etc. -- has been had a million times on this site and elsewhere. But it struck me that he didn't ask for digests or something like that. For Napoleon, evidently there was more to these books than their information content alone.