‘The book will kill the building,’ Frollo declares in Book V, Chapter I, and then Hugo’s narrator elucidates in the next chapter. The printing press will change everything, has changed everything, is an endless architectural monument producing bricks for a tower, and replaces monuments like Notre-Dame itself. And, of course, he is right, because here is this novel, safe from weather, fire, revolutions, renovations, earthquakes. It cannot be blown up by man or toppled over by God; it fits in your hand but is larger than a cathedral.
Reader, here is your book.
- Elizabeth McCracken, introduction to Hunchback of Notre-Dame