Medieval scribes complaining about how drunk they are and how much the work sucks in the margins and colophons is fun, but for my money the imprecations they sometimes included against thieves and vandals are where the real entertainment is. One of my favourites goes something along the lines of “if anyone steals this manuscript, may he die the death” – and I’m sure which particular mechanism of demise “the death” is referring to here would have been obvious in context to contemporary readers, but looking back a thousand years later it’s wonderfully cryptic.