Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, sociology, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, cultural studies, mythology, zoology, and related subjects.

The Book of Imaginary Beings was written by the Argentine short-story writer, essayist, and poet Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero and published in 1957.

The TU Library collection includes several books by and about Jorge Luis Borges.

The Book of Imaginary Beings contains descriptions of mythical beasts from folklore and literature of medieval Europe, Chinese and Indian myth, and modern authors such as Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe.

The beasts include the Upland Trout, which lives in trees and flies through the air, but is afraid of water.

Another imaginary animal, the Goofang, swims backwards to keep the water out of its eyes.

The Strong Toad has a shell like that of a turtle, glows like a firefly in the dark, and is so tough that the only way to kill it is to reduce it to ashes.

The Simurgh is an immortal bird that makes its nest in the tree of science.

Borges notes that dragons are very powerful, but

• We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.

Here are some other excerpts from The Book of Imaginary Beings, as posted online:

• Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
• As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.
• Belief in the Fish is part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor. In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colors nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors.

One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections.

Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off. The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the color of this line will be like no other color. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle. In Yunnan they do not speak of the Fish but of the Tiger of the Mirror. Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.

• Brownies are helpful little men of a brownish hue, which gives them their name. It is their habit to visit Scottish farms and, while the household sleeps, to perform domestic chores. One of the tales by the Grimms deals with the same sub- ject. The famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson said he had trained his Brownies in the craft of literature. Brownies visited him in his dreams and told him wondrous tales; for instance, the strange transformation of Dr Jekyll into the diabolical Mr Hyde, and that episode of Olalla, in which the scion of an old Spanish family bites his sister’s hand.

• We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day. They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface. At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries. It is also rumoured that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death. Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag finds its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence. The tale is from China and is recorded by G. Willoughby-Meade in his book Chinese Ghouls and Goblins.
• Everyone is familiar with the phrases ‘grin like a Cheshire cat’, which means of course to put on a sardonic face. Many explanations of its origin have been attempted. One is that in Cheshire cheeses were sold in the shape of the grinning head of a cat. Another, that Cheshire is a Palatine county or earldom and that this mark of nobility provoked the hilarity of its cats. Still another is that in the time of Richard III there was a game warden named Caterling who used to break into an angry smile whenever he crossed swords with poachers. In Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865, Lewis Carroll endowed the Cheshire Cat with the faculty of slowly disappearing to the point of leaving only its grin – without teeth and without a mouth. Of the Kilkenny Cats it is told that they got into raging quarrels and devoured each other, leaving behind no more than their tails. This story goes back to the eighteenth century.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)