The word sycophant comes from the ancient Greek sykophantēs, conventionally parsed as sykon (fig) + phainein (to show). Accordingly, the sykophantēs is literally a “fig-shower.” There were various folk explanations in antiquity: the fig showerer was someone who tattled on those illegally exporting Attican figs; or he was a denouncer of thieves of sacred fig trees or of makers of the obscene “fig gestures” like the blasphemer Vanni Fucci who, in canto 25 of Dante’s…
 
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Novels are not just extended narratives bound and printed in codex form. They are also gateways to imaginative worlds that are constructed not just on the page but on a backstage composed of the sorts of materials that abound in archives: marked up source books, maps, reference tools, diagrams and drawings, paper slips, notes to self and others, inventories, rough and not-so-rough drafts. Umberto Eco’s 1994 novel The Island of the Day Before is one…
 
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