Books I've actually finished lately: 125

Often books speak of other books.

- Umberto Eco

Distant Eco

In the light of the sad passing of Umberto Eco, I am tickled to discover - turning, for the first time, to the opening pages of The Name of the Rose - that the 'missing' manuscript on which Eco's first and still most famous novel is entirely predicated is only missing because a woman 'he' was sleeping with ran off with it.

Favourite footnotes: 11

I may have been wrong about this.

- Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist

Books I've actually finished lately: 103

After I publish a text on semiotics, I devote my time either to recognizing what was wrong or to demonstrating that those who did not understand it in the way I meant were misreading it. 

- Umberto Eco

The translator's victory

Once, during work on Calvino's great comic novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, a running battle ensued over use of the word 'feedback', which Weaver repeatedly struck out of the typescript, and Calvino repeatedly re-inserted. (In the end, Weaver won: Calvino died before he was able to see the final proofs.)

- Ian Thompson, in his Guardian obit of the legendary William Weaver