ABSTRACT
It has been claimed (though unverified) that George Bernard Shaw was once engaged in a debate about whether reading the “wrong” books could corrupt the morals of the innocent. He tried to clinch his anticensorship position with the quip, “I never heard of a woman who got pregnant while reading a book.” Christian mythology begs to differ with Shaw. One of the central miracles of the Christian religion is that of the virgin birth, and one of the details that has come to be accreted to many representations of the story is that the Virgin Mary was engaged in the act of reading a book just a moment before Christ’s miraculous conception. This scene is always referred to as The Annunciation. 1
