Row upon row, column upon column, like a great and silent mind in the night...notice that the books lie open on lecterns, most of them probably chained in place to prevent theft.  The Cottonian library and modern codex book libraries still use the same row/column system of storage, though they now have too many volumes to allow many to rest open, and it's bad for their preservation.  Their survival is anything but guaranteed without our care, who gave them life and must preserve them.  As Eco's character, Adso of Melk writes of the destroyed library, "It is cold in the scriptorium, my thumb aches. I leave this manuscript,   I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus."  (The link is to a brief note from the enigmatic Ryan Stansifer, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Florida Institute of Technology.)  For the syllabus and supporting notes from a nifty English literature course based on the book, taught by Professor Earl Anderson at Cleveland State University in Fall 1999, click here.  (It's a course that does something like what English 215 attempts to do--very interesting!)