The first part of Don Quixote was originally published in Madrid in 1605; fewer than twenty copies of the first edition survived. “All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.” Don Quixote has read himself into madness by reading too many books of chivalry, and so sets out to emulate the knights of old, first by getting himself some armour (out of pasteboard) and a steed (a broken-down nag), and then by getting himself knighted. He goes to an inn, which he thinks a castle, meets prostitutes whom he thinks high-born ladies, addresses them and the innkeeper, who is a thief, in language so literary that they cannot understand it, and then seeks to get himself knighted by standing vigil all night over his armour. The ludicrous transformation of the sacred rituals of knighthood into their ad hoc material equivalents parallels a similar desacralizing going on Europe at the time. In all this it is the knowing reader, rather than the characters or the action, that is the implied subject of address. Cervantes here invents the novel form published a second book in which Don Quixote becomes not the character reading but the character read, as many of the people he meets have read Book I and know all about him. Indeed this combination of the always already read and the force of of perpetual reinvention is what continues to draw the reader in. JP