Stoker's tale is passionately involved with new technology and it may be that this feature of the original has been displaced on to Dracula himself, since printing was invented in his lifetime. Furthermore, he has developed a posthumous interest in hand-press printing, one of the story's more unaccountable additions to vampire lore. At least it all makes a nice change from Templars and the Opus Dei, and, moreover, it is no bad thing to find Islam standing for order, virtue and civilisation.Īlthough nearly everybody in the novel is a researcher of some kind, the 'historian' of the title is Dracula himself, who turns out to be, rather like Sesame Street's 'Count who loves to count', a committed bibliomanaic. A diabolic fraternity - the Order of the Dragon - is eternally opposed by a sodality of descendants of janissaries, the Crescent Guard. But it is also a riff on the taste for books about 500-year-old conspiracies.
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