The Dumas Club / Ninth Gate

[Rhialto]

I’ve been enjoying The Dumas Club, written by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

http://www.amazon.com/Club-Dumas-Art.../dp/0679777547

This novel is best described as a bibliophile's satanic fantasy, and is rich with details.

The Ninth Gate was the film adaptation (directed by Polanski and starring Johnny Depp) of The Dumas Club:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninth_Gate

The screenplay was written by Roman Polanski, Enrique Urbizu, and John Brownjohn. This link is to a page that has the screenplay (which is a good read in its own right, and which I made into an epub for my easier reading):

http://www.awesomefilm.com/script/ninthgate.txt

The central quest of the film and the book is… another book: “The Nine Doors To the Kingdom of Shadows”, also known as “De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis”, the "Nine Gates" for short. The book is written by one Aristide Torchia in Venice in 1666 and contains nine woodcut engravings rumoured to be copied from the apocryphal Delomelanicon, a book purportedly written by Lucifer himself. The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows is said to contain within its pages knowledge to raise the devil. The author was burned, along with all his works in 1667. Three copies are known to survive, one with Baroness Freida Ungern, one in the Fargas collection, and one last known to be in the possession of Enrique Taillefer, but recently sold to Boris Balkan.

This book within a book is a lot of fun to reconstruct, and several people have done so. Here is a tutorial on Michael Haspil’s website on how to print and make a leather-bound hard copy. It includes downloadable images of the nine woodcuts and frontispiece, some latin text for use and a suitable ancient font:

http://www.apocprod.com/props/tutori...dows-tutorial/

Or if you are rich, you could buy a copy from a professional book binder:

http://nonus-porta.blogspot.com/

For those of us who are e-book readers it could be fun to make an ebook of De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis. I managed to produce a epub for my own personal Calibre library, (filed under Torchia, Aristide, naturally) using the material on Michael Haspil’s website. The cover is an image of the film prop.

Sadly, this epub could not be used to raise the devil since the illustrations are not the correct set! If anyone succeeds in doing so, please report back to this thread with the details!