Casanova: Librarian, too

In 1928, Viennese writer Stefan Zweig declared that Casanova "proved that one may write the most amusing story in the world without being a novelist, and give the most admirable picture of the time without being a historian." Anyone who reads Casanova's memoirs, which he composed to console himself in a lonely old age – he died at 73 in 1798 – will see the rightness of Zweig's claim. Yet almost nobody does read them. Casanova's "History of My Life" is an invaluable record of 18th-century Europe, but it is also one of the longest works ever written. The standard English edition runs to more than 3,600 pages.

3,600 pages? Ouch.



Giacomo Casanova' by Anton Raphael Mengs




Casanova with a conquest in Paris