Smithsonian has an interview with Edward Brooke-Hitching on “literary curiosities” and his book, The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities From History. “You realize everyone has their own form of curiosities, and that as a species, we’ve always been incredibly strange and weird, but also very funny and endlessly imaginative. So that’s what the book is really supposed to do—show and celebrate this depthless capacity of human imagination, show how paper is a kind of psychic capacitor holding all of these personalities that are alive the moment you open them, even though their authors have been dead for maybe a thousand years.”