Word Play
The names of many of the authors listed in The City of Dreaming Books are anagrams of famous authors. Below are a few listed in alphabetical order by the last name of the real-world author).
- Ergor Banco = Roger Bacon
- Lugo Blah (a Zamonian Gagaist) = Hugo Ball (a German Dadaist)
- Hornac de Bloaze = Honoré de Balzac
- Rashid el Clarebeau = Charles Baudelaire
- Bethelzia B. Binngrow = Elizabeth B. Browning
- Trebor Snurb = Robert Burns
- Selwi Rollcar = Lewis Carroll
- Auselm T. Edgecroil = Samuel T. Coleridge
- Asdrel Chickens = Charles Dickens
- Evsko Dosti = (Fyodor) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Doylan Cone (Author of Sir Ginel) = Conan Doyle (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle author of, among other works, Sir Nigel)
- Samoth Yarg = Thomas Gray
- Dolreich Hirnfiedler = Friedrich Hölderlin
- Ugor Vochti = Victor Hugo
- Honj Steak = John Keats
- Melvin Hermalle = Herman Melville
- Gramerta Climelth (Author of Gone with the Tornado) = Margaret Mitchell
- Perla la Gadeon = Edgar Allan Poe
- Inka Almira Rierre = Rainer Maria Rilke
- T. T. Kreischwurst = Kurt Schwitters
- Aliesha Wimperslake = William Shakespeare
- Elo Slooty = Leo Tolstoy
- Rasco Elwid = Oscar Wilde
- Wamilli Swordthrow = William Wordsworth
- Rimidalv Vokoban (author of "Love and the Generation Gap") = Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, about the paedophilic passion of a middle-aged European professor for the eponymous heroine)
- Gofid Letterkerl = Gottfried Keller
- Ertrob Slimu = Robert Musil
The City of Dreaming Books also contains a wealth of made-up words, which can be found in most of Moers' work. Some are omnomatopoeic, others are amalgamations of existing words or Indo-European root words; still others may have origins no more descript than the raw product of Walter Moers' imagination. Many such words can be found in Chapter 60, where Yarnspinner learns forgotten Zamonian words whose meanings are extremely subtle and specific. A sampling of these are listed below:
- "fructodism:" the sensation experienced when squeezing an orange until it becomes soft.
- "rumbumblion:" the sound produced by a volcanic eruption.
- "indigabluntic:" one of a number of derogatory epithets.
- "nasodiscrepant:" a person whose nostrils are notably different in size.
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Famous quotes containing the words word and/or play:
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)