Jean-Claude Carriere vs. Umberto Eco

I also notice that when a banality or an outright piece of misinformation pops up, it always comes from Carriere. You would never have Eco stating, for example, that the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas is “a verbatim account of the words of Jesus,” or repeating an even hoarier canard, that St. Paul was “the real inventor of Christianity.”

So Philip Marchand writes in his review of a joint project carried out by the "two hardy veterans of the cultural industry" — Open Book: This is Not the End of the Book. Also in Eco's favor is this passage:

Eco’s collection is more focused than Carriere’s. It is a “collection dedicated to the occult and mistaken sciences.” It contains works, for example, by the misinformed astronomer Ptolemy but not by the rightly informed astronomer Galileo. “I am fascinated by error, by bad faith and idiocy,” Eco tells us. He loves the man who wrote a book about the dangers of toothpicks, and another author who produced a volume “about the value of being beaten with a stick, providing a list of famous artists and writers who had benefitted from this practice, from Boileau to Voltaire to Mozart.” He adores the hygienist who recommended, in his treatise, the practice of walking backwards.

Interestingly, "the practice of walking backwards" is widely held as beneficial in Oriental medicine. Go to any park in China or Korea and you can see older folks walking backwards.