Note 5 — Chapter XXIII · The Curse on Knowledge.

In Stockholm I saw the so-called Devil’s Bible, the biggest book in the world, in the Royal Library. It is literally as they describe it, ‘gigas librorum’: no single man can lift it from the floor. It was part of the booty carried off by the Swedes after the surrender of Prague, A.D. 1648. It contains three hundred parchment leaves, each one made of an ass’s hide, the cover being of oak planks, 1½ inches thick. It contains the Old and New Testaments; Josephi Flavii Antiquitates Judaicæ; Isidori Episcopi L. XX. de diversis materiis; Confessio peccatorum; and some other works. The last-named production is written on black and dark brown ground with red and yellow letters. Here and there sentences are marked ‘hæc sunt suspecta,’ ‘superstitiosa,’ ‘prohibita.’ One MS., which is headed, ‘Experimentum de furto et febribus’, is a treatise in Monkish Latin on the exorcism of ghosts and evil spirits, charms against thieves and sickness, and various prescriptions in ‘White Magic.’ The age of the book is considerably over three hundred years. The autograph of a German emperor is in it: ‘Ferdinandus Imperator Romanorum, A.D. 1577.’ The volume is known in Sweden as Fan’s Bibel (Devil’s Bible). The legend says, that a monk, suspected of black arts, who had been condemned to death, begged for life, and his judge mockingly told him that he would be pardoned only if he should produce next morning all the books here found and in this vast size. The monk invoked the Devil’s assistance, and the ponderous volume was written in a single night. This Devil must have been one who prided himself more on his literary powers than his personal appearance; for the face and form said to be his portrait, frontispiece of the volume, represent a most hideous ape, green and hairy, with horrible curled tusks. It is, no doubt, the ape Anerhahn of the Wagner legends; Burns’s ‘towzie tyke, black, grim, and large.’5