Creative Wordshops February 2026

In Praise of Portable Books: Aldus Manutius
A home without books is like a body without a soul. (Cicero)

In the novel, Buried Treasure (Sven Axelrad), Nova, a homeless young girl is
apprenticed to Mateus, the Master of Cemeteries. Mateus is dyslexic, so the name tag around his black dog’s neck reads ‘God.’ God does most of the grave digging.

Nova sleeps close to the Philosophical Dept (their soccer
team is called Kierkegoal) at the University in the town of Vivo. Her pillow is dog-eared copy of a 577 pager (Chilean novelist) seen in the image. About the quixotic travels of two poets. Nova absorbs the story during the night while asleep through a kind of literary osmosis. She’s able to
tell the stories in the morning.

Here’s another story embedded in another novel. In Venice there is a plaque, carved in stone, written in formal Italian. This marks the home of Aldus Manutius (1449-1515) a giant in publishing history. A Renaissance
humanist thinker who studied ancient Greek and Latin. Before Aldus, books were sealed in private collections or monasteries, inaccessible even to scholars.