big book, big evil

Callimachus is best known today for his verse. He is the author of the elegy to a fellow poet, Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, often anthologized in its translation by William Johnson Cory: ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.’ A proponent of shorter forms—hymns, elegies, epigrams—he is said to have coined the witticism mega biblion, mega kakon (‘big book, big evil’) to express his disdain for epic poetry. Nevertheless, it is his work not as a poet but as a scholar which will concern us, and here Callimachus was responsible for a very big book indeed, the Pinakes, said to have run to 120 papyrus scrolls.

[…]

Callimachus may have been passed over for the role of Chief Librarian [Library of Alexandria], but, in compiling the Pinakes, it was he who did most of all to preserve the library’s memory. Pinakes simply means ‘Tables’, as in writing boards or ‘tablets’, and the full title of Callimachus’s work was the Tables of Men Illustrious in Every Field of Learning and of Their Writing. It was a catalogue of all the works housed in the great library.

—Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (W. W. Norton, 2021) [31- 32]