It was said by some English Shakespearean purists that in the film Prospero's Books, there was too much Greenaway and not enough Shakespeare. One of their objections must surely be the introduction of Prospero's books. But I believe the book device was legitimate. Prospero's friend Gonzalo had, as an act of friendship placed some of Prospero's favorite volumes into the leaky boat that saw Prospero and his daughter Miranda into exile. After a passage of sea and storm, a mere Duke of Milan miraculously becomes an emperor of magic on his island whose noises delight but hurt not. How come?

In a play about the uses and abuses of magic, where magic is a synonym for knowledge performed before an anxious James I (Shakespeare's current patron who was fearful of the occult), the gift of books can be a key. We invented twenty-four such keys, a bibliographical thesaurus covering the ground of experience: a floral, a bestiary, a book of Architecture and Music, a pornography, a cosmology, a dictionary, a book of comparative religions, a book of languages, and a book of mirrors to watch the past, the present, and the future.

The film was completed in Japan with the help of the new televisual technology where the formidable electronic book with a hundred thousand animated pages is a possibility where books will now open and burst in front of your eyes, flowering with symbols, notions, illusions, splendors, and speculations, bouncing out their magical knowledge for limitless contemplation.

This cataloque of the twenty-four volumes is presently arranged for inspection in neat archival fashion in a four by six agenda each book of its kind a definitive volume and an archetype.