OOK!

La description de la bibliothèque dans « Le nom de la Rose », labyrinthe interdit à toute autre personne que le bibliothécaire et son aide, m'a fait enfin comprendre une nouvelle référence de l'excellentissime Terry Pratchett. En l'occurence, il s'agit de la bibliothèque de la Unseen University, dont le bliothécaire n'est autre qu'un orang-outan (accident de magie).

« The Library was the greatest assemblage of magical texts anywhere in the multiverse. Thousands of volumes of occult lore weighted its shelves. It was said that, since vast amounts of magic can seriously distort the mundane world, the Library did not obey the normal rules of space and time. It was said that it went on forever. It was said that you could wander for days among the distant shelves, that there were lost tribes of research students somewhere in there, that strange things lurked in forgotten alcoves and were preyed on by other things that were even stranger.*

Note en bas de page : *All this was untrue. The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and had more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-size human to enter. The relevant equation is: knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel black hole that knows how to read. »

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, 1989