Bibliomaniacs Beware!

More from "Night & Horses & the Desert." A warning for bibliomaniacs - books can kill you! The back cover blurb mentions the book contains "a treatise on bibliomania by Al-Jahiz, possibly the only writer to have been killed by books." Talk about piquing curiosity!
Apparently Jahiz used to pay bookshop owners to lock him in their shops overnight so he could read their stock. "It is reported that he was killed when an avalanche of books collapsed on top of him."

His treatise on bibliomania is quite good but too long for a lazy typist like me to reproduce here, so go to a library or perhaps get locked in a bookshop to read it. Wait, I found someone not as lazy, Chandrahas Choudhury at The Middle Stage has an excerpt and argues a relationship between bibliomania and blogging. I think he's onto something. //grin//