The book and the library

The eleventh entry is o incunábulo, and the word English uses for the same thing keeps a cradle inside it. Behind « incunabulum » stands the Latin incunabula, the swaddling bands a newborn was wrapped in, and behind those cunae, the cradle itself. Latin had the word only in the plural, and had already let it travel: incunabula could mean the beginnings of anything, the place a thing came from. So when scholars wanted a name for the books printed while the craft was young, they reached for infancy rather than for a date, and English took the Latin over whole — one « incunabulum », several « incunabula », the singular a back-formation from a plural that never had one. Two things follow. The word says nothing about printing, only that these volumes are its infancy, which is why the line it draws at the turn of the sixteenth century is a convention and not a property of any book. And the picture survives in plain English without the Latin: the cradle of civilisation, a gift shown from the cradle. Portuguese has o incunábulo and has built no figure on it.