A BOOK CURSE 🧙🏿📜📚

Usually invoking threat of excommunication, or anathema, the more creative and dramatic detail the better. Generally located in the first or last page of a volume as part of the colophon, these curses were often considered the only defense in protection of highly coveted books and manuscripts. This was notably a time in which people believed in curses, which was critical to its effect, thus believing that, if a person stole or ripped out a page, they were destined to die an agonizing death. With the introduction of the printing press, these curses instead became “bookplates [which] enabled users to declare ownership through a combination of visual, verbal, and textual resources. For the first time, warning, threatening, and cursing had become multimodal."

A book curse might read, for example, “If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen.” 🧱