Radical: Marianne Moore’s Characters

Abstract

On the 3rd March 1900, the Illustrated London News featured an advertisement for The Library of Famous Literature, ‘AN IDEAL LIBRARY FOR THE HOME’ (Figure 1). The copy reads as follows: Embracing the literature of all time, [The Library of Famous Literature] opens with a curious story which belongs to an age before even parchment or papyrus had been invented, when men wrote in curious wedge-shaped characters on tablets of soft clay, which were afterwards baked and numbered like the leaves of a book, and deposited in great libraries like that of Assurbanipal at Nineveh.