Man extends record by mirror typing “wretched” anti-witchcraft book
Michele Santelia has extended his record for the most books typed backwards with the completion of his 83rd work.
The 65-year-old accountant from Campobasso, Italy, has held this record since 2007, adding to it each year with a new book.
Each book must be typed using ‘mirror writing’, such that the result is the mirror image of any given language’s normal writing.
However, Michele chooses to make the task even harder for himself by typing each book in a different language, as well as by using blank keyboards and never looking up at the computer screen.
His latest work is a mirrored version of the Malleus Maleficarum (usually translated as the Hammer of Witches), a treatise about witchcraft published in 1486 by German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer. The book contributed to the increasingly brutal prosecution of suspected witches over the following two centuries.
Using the medieval German version of the Latin alphabet, Michele took four months to type the entire text.
His 484-page book contains 181,653 words and weighs 19.5 kg (43 lb).
Michele bound it in leather and added wooden covers, which he burned to “represent the fire of the stakes on which women were barbarously slaughtered in the Middle Ages”.
He added: “I dedicate Malleus Maleficarum Backwards with great emotion to the memory of women of all times and throughout the world; innocent victims of man's madness, stupidity and cowardice.
“I write backwards precisely to contest a world that paradoxically is going backwards.”
Michele has been mirror typing for over three decades. He cites Leonardo da Vinci, one of the world’s first known practitioners of mirror writing, as his inspiration for pursuing the hobby.
Michele typed most of his books by using four blank keyboards simultaneously, though he says he has the ability to use up to 16 at the same time.
At the start of a new project, he assigns each blank key to a different letter of whichever alphabet he’s using.
He’s used various alphabets such as Hieroglyphs, Old Hebrew, Traditional Chinese, Mayan, Etruscan, Cuneiform, Voynich glyphs, and the ancient Ethiopian Ge’ez script, just to name a few.
After finishing typing, Michele prints the text onto large pages, which he then binds in an ornamental cover.
He has gifted his books to several notable people in the past, including former US presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama; Popes Johannes Paul II and Benedict XVI; and former Italian presidents Carlo Ciampi and Giorgio Napolitano.
If stacked on top of each other, his 83 books – comprised of 37,750 pages containing over 4.8 million words altogether – would measure 9.08 metres (27.79 ft) in height and weigh 1,282 kg (2,826 lb). Michele calls it the “Tower of Babel Backwards”.
While the biblical Tower of Babel represents confusion, mine is written in languages from around the world, but in reverse. It is therefore the allusion to a return, precisely backwards to an idyllic world, where there is no longer unprecedented violence, false ideologies, horrendous crimes, unspeakable evil, absurd power and political games.
Michele, pictured above with his pet dog Maya, plans to dedicate his next book to all dogs on Earth, describing them as “our splendid four-legged friends who would never betray their owners, even if unfortunately, we are the ones who betray them when we mistreat them.
“I really hope that measures will be adopted as soon as possible in Italy and around the world that will send those who mistreat dogs and animals in general to prison for many, many years.”
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