Like a play within a play, Calvino's [Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore] is both double and dual. Eleven chapters and ten incipits, the beginnings of as many unrelated, interrupted "novels," form one whole. The frame story is about nothing less than "ce vice impuni, la lecture," the pleasure of vicarious experience or of escape offered by the printed page and the many circumstances that contribute to it or stand in its way. In the early chapters we get an almost complete phenomenology of the book as artifact and text as we follow the Reader—the "tu" familiarly addressed by the author—in his acquisition of the book, his settling down to read it, his search for an undamaged copy to take the place of the one with missing pages that has been sold him: a pursuit which takes him to university library and publishing house and leads...