In the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the thieves from
the cave that Ali Baba steals from send a spy into the city to discover who the
robber was and where he lives. By a clever device, the spy finds Ali Baba’s
house and leaves a mark on it. Ali Baba, however, employs a clever maid,
Marjaneh, who discovers the mark and, suspecting some skullduggery, takes a
piece of chalk and marks other houses, thus bedeviling the band of thieves when
they come to town. This happens a couple
of times until the robber captain comes to town and, instead of marking the
house, “examined and observed it so carefully” that it was impossible for him
to mistake it.
As we know, the clever Marjaneh will thwart the thief captain at every turn. The story has another meaning, however, in Anton Tantner’s Die Hausnummer: Eine Geschichte von Ordnung und Unordnung – The house number: a history of order and disorder: here it throws a light into the premodern era of the city, where direction did not depend on addresses or housenumbers, but on acquaintance, appearance and landmarks, much the same way fishing craft navigated a shore.
Tantner’s book, along with Deidre Mask’s The Address Book, which features a chapter on him, are on the bookshelves of all right thinking address-freaks. Tantner is faithful to the Foucaultian creed of genealogy – there is no one source for these affordances of contemporary life. The housenumber appears sometimes in early modernity as a sort of score for the height of a house, sometimes an inventory number for the house as property, and only in the 18th century as a direction mark, a reference. In Vienna, where Tratner lives, the address was discussed by the town council in 1754, where it was touted as a guide that would help police find the “disreputable and the dangerous” – but it was voted down. The council feared popular unrest. The populace that was considered disreputable and dangerous by those in power knew exactly what the address was all about.
Ali Baba’s story itself was likely written in the 18th century by Antoine Galland, the translator of the One Thousand and one nights, who might have heard a core story somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. After Galland created the Ali Baba story and his translation became famous, the story was fed back, one might say, to its source, and Ali Baba reappears in collections of these tales in India and Egypt.
Galland died at an auberge, the Cerceau D’or, on the corner of Rue des Sept Voies and Rue des Chiens, on February 17, 1715. The auberge had no address, literally: the Rue des Sept Voies was renamed Rue Valette in the 19th century, which is when a wing of the Bibliotheque Saint Genevieve was built there, obliterating Rue des Chiens. One biographer, describing the auberge, writes that it was on the left or the even-numbered side of the street – a necessary anachronism for us, who come after the Chief Thief in Ali Baba’s tale.
The address system in the 18th century was the object of many a speculator’s reflections. Among others, Choderlos De Laclos (the author of Dangerous Liaisons) published a scheme for numbering the houses in Paris. But the turning point was, naturally, the municipal code published under Napoleon. Before, house numbers had been considered as a substitute for house signs. But the 1805 code treated addresses with regard to both to the system of streets and the places on the street – places that could contain a house, or a shop, or various hotels, courtyards, apartments, etc. In this way, it made navigation easier and the place less personal – or less, shall we say, feudal.
By such strokes the old family patterns were broken. By such strokes it was possible to find, tax and raid the inhabitant.
However, the drama of the address does not end there. Even now, the idea of distributing an address on the internet can cause an upset. Doxxing has become part of our vocabulary. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great doxx-ers were the newspapers. The bread and butter policing story – the theft, the murder, the assault, etc. – included addresses. When a rich man or woman died, where they died and even how much the property was worth was part of the story. The address, to me, has a siren power – I think of them as calling out, in their own sonic language, to their own communities. It strikes me that it is no coincidence that the abolished auberge where Galland died was possibly the same auberge, under a different name, that three hundred years before welcomed Erasmus when he came to Paris. And I think of what Borges might have made of the historical fact that a famous library, much visited by foreign students, is figuratively built on top of the death bed of the translator of the One Thousand and One nights – one of whose nights, at least, was written by him from errant memories of a story muttered by an old Turkish dervish.
As we know, the clever Marjaneh will thwart the thief captain at every turn. The story has another meaning, however, in Anton Tantner’s Die Hausnummer: Eine Geschichte von Ordnung und Unordnung – The house number: a history of order and disorder: here it throws a light into the premodern era of the city, where direction did not depend on addresses or housenumbers, but on acquaintance, appearance and landmarks, much the same way fishing craft navigated a shore.
Tantner’s book, along with Deidre Mask’s The Address Book, which features a chapter on him, are on the bookshelves of all right thinking address-freaks. Tantner is faithful to the Foucaultian creed of genealogy – there is no one source for these affordances of contemporary life. The housenumber appears sometimes in early modernity as a sort of score for the height of a house, sometimes an inventory number for the house as property, and only in the 18th century as a direction mark, a reference. In Vienna, where Tratner lives, the address was discussed by the town council in 1754, where it was touted as a guide that would help police find the “disreputable and the dangerous” – but it was voted down. The council feared popular unrest. The populace that was considered disreputable and dangerous by those in power knew exactly what the address was all about.
Ali Baba’s story itself was likely written in the 18th century by Antoine Galland, the translator of the One Thousand and one nights, who might have heard a core story somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. After Galland created the Ali Baba story and his translation became famous, the story was fed back, one might say, to its source, and Ali Baba reappears in collections of these tales in India and Egypt.
Galland died at an auberge, the Cerceau D’or, on the corner of Rue des Sept Voies and Rue des Chiens, on February 17, 1715. The auberge had no address, literally: the Rue des Sept Voies was renamed Rue Valette in the 19th century, which is when a wing of the Bibliotheque Saint Genevieve was built there, obliterating Rue des Chiens. One biographer, describing the auberge, writes that it was on the left or the even-numbered side of the street – a necessary anachronism for us, who come after the Chief Thief in Ali Baba’s tale.
The address system in the 18th century was the object of many a speculator’s reflections. Among others, Choderlos De Laclos (the author of Dangerous Liaisons) published a scheme for numbering the houses in Paris. But the turning point was, naturally, the municipal code published under Napoleon. Before, house numbers had been considered as a substitute for house signs. But the 1805 code treated addresses with regard to both to the system of streets and the places on the street – places that could contain a house, or a shop, or various hotels, courtyards, apartments, etc. In this way, it made navigation easier and the place less personal – or less, shall we say, feudal.
By such strokes the old family patterns were broken. By such strokes it was possible to find, tax and raid the inhabitant.
However, the drama of the address does not end there. Even now, the idea of distributing an address on the internet can cause an upset. Doxxing has become part of our vocabulary. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great doxx-ers were the newspapers. The bread and butter policing story – the theft, the murder, the assault, etc. – included addresses. When a rich man or woman died, where they died and even how much the property was worth was part of the story. The address, to me, has a siren power – I think of them as calling out, in their own sonic language, to their own communities. It strikes me that it is no coincidence that the abolished auberge where Galland died was possibly the same auberge, under a different name, that three hundred years before welcomed Erasmus when he came to Paris. And I think of what Borges might have made of the historical fact that a famous library, much visited by foreign students, is figuratively built on top of the death bed of the translator of the One Thousand and One nights – one of whose nights, at least, was written by him from errant memories of a story muttered by an old Turkish dervish.
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