William Poole will not be dining at Christ Church any time soon

I was looking at monuments to the dead in the antechapel of Wadham yesterday, having a stroll after lunch. I was ever-so-slightly pretending to be a tourist in the vain hope I might be challenged by some college official as I waved my camera phone at a Latin inscription on the piety of a departed doctor.

The monument I had come to see was that of a fellow who died young in 1614, whose memorial is a curious structure of carved books, bound and clasped with their edges outwards, as books were often shelved at the time.

It is the ideal academic statement: die amidst your books. Go and have a look: it’s on the north-east wall of the antechapel.

And if you get the taste for such things, go on to the university church and look for John Flaxman’s monument for Sir William Jones, featuring the most extraordinary combination of symbols and scripts, as befits the discoverer of ‘Indo-European’.

People get killed by books now and then. There’s plenty of it in fiction.

We all remember — don’t we? — that Leonard Bast was killed in Howard’s End by a toppling bookcase, and like the biblical prophets, Umberto Eco’s Venerable Jorge literally eats a poisoned book.

In The Duchess of Malfi, Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress, dies from kissing a poisoned bible.

In history, the hand-torturingly-hard piano composer Charles-Valentin Alkan was said to have been crushed by a falling Talmud in 1888; and I was pretty sure that one of the Heinsius family of scholars in the Renaissance was killed by a falling polyglot Bible, but I can’t seem to make this true.

Locally, it was reported that the great bibliographer and Provost of Queen’s College, Gerard Langbaine, died of cold from working overlong hours in the unheated Bodleian, in 1658.

Let us hope it wasn’t another Bible — the mythical connection between death and holy writ is rather strong.

There are architectural fancies featuring books all over Oxford, but there are also architectural fantasies in books too, most notably the various designs for bits of Oxford never built.

A few years ago I was looking at the calligraphic initials in the benefactors’ book in Magdalen College from the early 18th century, when they were raising money for rebuilding.

In an initial from 1720 there is an extraordinary sight: a drawing of Magdalen rebuilt as a crescent. Thankfully this did not happen, but if it had, Magdalen would have been the first crescent in English architecture.

Other memorable sights of unbuilt Oxford include Christ Church as it would have been, had not ‘Cardinal’s College’ failed with the fall of its founder, Cardinal Wolsey.

Wolsey had intended what is now Tom Quad to be considerably grander, with a vast Gothic chapel running all the way down the north side, flanked by a cloister — had Wolsey survived we would have had something to overtop King’s College, Cambridge. Such grand plans! Whereas now that college is a prostitute to Harry Potter fans, as is alas my own poor society.

For unbuilt Oxford, endlessly fascinating, read Howard Colvin’s wonderful book of that name.

n Dr William Poole is a tutor in English and Fellow at New College. He is researching intellectual and scientific history