The committed bibliophile is
cousin to the obsessive, an easily seduced accumulator frequently
struck with frisson. Cram your home with books, and you’re lovingly called
a collector; cram it with old newspapers, and you’re derisively called a
hoarder. But be honest: The collector is a hoarder, too—a discriminating and
noble-minded hoarder, perhaps, but a hoarder just the same.
Not long into George Gissing’s
1903 novel The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, you find a scene
that no self-respecting bibliophile can fail to forget. In a small bookshop in
London, the eponymous narrator spots an eight-volume first edition of Edward
Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“To possess those clean-paged quartos,” Ryecroft says, “I would have sold my
coat.” He doesn’t have the money on him, and so he returns across town to his
flat to retrieve it. Too broke for a ride on an omnibus, and too impatient to
wait, he twice more traverses the city on foot, back and forth between the
bookshop and home, toting a ton of Gibbon. “My joy in the purchase I had made
drove out every other thought. Except, indeed, of the weight. I had infinite
energy but not much muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me
upon a chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching—exultant!”
A pleasing vista onto the
early twentieth-century life of one English writer, Gissing’s autobiographical
novel is also an effusive homage to book love. “There were books of which I had
passionate need,” says Ryecroft, “books more necessary to me than bodily
nourishment. I could see them, of course, at the British Museum, but that was
not at all the same thing as having and holding them”—to have and to hold—“my
own property, on my own shelf.” In case you don’t quite take Ryecroft’s point,
he later repeats “exultant” when recalling that afternoon of finding the
Gibbon—“the exultant happiness.”1 Exultation is, after
all, exactly what the bibliophile feels most among his many treasures.
Those of us who dwell within
mounts of books—a sierra of them in one room, an Everest in another; hulks in
the kitchen, heaps in the hallway—can tell you that, in addition to the special
bliss of having and holding them, it’s a hefty, crowded, inconvenient life
that’s also an affront to the average bank account. (New hardback books are
expensive to buy and economically neutered the second you do.) What’s more,
your collection is a fatal Niagara if it falls. Every collector knows the
probably apocryphal story of the nineteenth-century composer and bibliophile
Charles-Valentin Alkan, found dead in an avalanche of his own books, crushed
when his shelves upended onto him. Like the sex addict who suffers an aortic
catastrophe during coitus, Alkan, at least, died smiling.
Although some see a
distinction between the bibliophile and the collector, your Merriam Webster’s
nicely insists that “bibliophile” means both one who loves books and one who
collects them, which makes supreme sense to me—I can’t conceive of one who
loves books but doesn’t collect them, or one who collects books but doesn’t
love them. I employ “collector” as Robertson Davies does in his essay “Book
Collecting”: not as a quester after books both rare and valuable, but as a
gatherer of all books that match his interests. If you have lots of interests,
you better have lots of rooms, and mighty floorboards to boot.2
What does it mean when what
you own is essential to who you are? In our everyday grasp of owning things, we
tag it materialism, consumerism, consumption. But I trust you’ll agree that the
possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes: Someone with a
thousand books is someone you want to talk to; someone with a thousand shoes is
someone you suspect of belonging to the Kardashian clan. Books are not objects
in the same way that shoes are objects. This is what Milton means in his
sublime “Areopagitica,” as necessary now as it was in 1644, when he asserted
that “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in
them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do
preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living
intellect that bred them.” Potency of life, purest efficacy, living
intellect: These are the world-enhancing elements you have in any well-made
book worth reading.
For many of us, our book
collections are, in at least one major way, tantamount to our children—they are
manifestations of our identity, embodiments of our selfhood; they are a dynamic
interior heftily externalized, a sensibility, a worldview defined and
objectified. For readers, what they read is where they’ve been, and their
collections are evidence of the trek. For writers, the personal library is the
toolbox which contains the day’s necessary implements of construction—there’s
no such thing as a skillful writer who is not also a dedicated reader—as well
as a towering reminder of the task at hand: to build something worthy of being
bound and occupying a space on those shelves, on all shelves.
The personal library also heaves in reproach each time you’re tempted to grab
the laptop and gypsy from one half-witted Web page to another. If you aren’t
suspicious of a writer who isn’t a bibliophile, you should be.3
But you might have noticed:
The book as a physical, cultural object is worth very little and losing value
every quarter, it seems. As any urbanite knows, you’ll find them in boxes in
alleyways on the first of every month—people can’t give them away.
And now that more readers are choosing the electronic alternative, the
illuminated convenience of downloading books and storing them in the
troposphere where they remain accessible but simulated ... well, I’ll let James
Salter pull the alarm. “A tide is coming in,” he wrote in 2012, “and the
kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of
solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years,
of being washed away. The physical possession of a book may become of little
significance.”
One tide or another is always
surging in on us—technology always makes certain modes of consumption obsolete,
and for much of that obsolescence we can be grateful—but perhaps we should heed
Salter’s anxiety here, because bibliophiles won’t be the only ones left denuded
should the physical book be put to death.
My own book collecting began in
high school, at just about the time I was certain that literature would be my
life—not an occupation but an existence. It’s been a back-aching, U-Hauling two
decades because I’ve resided in a dozen homes across four different states.
I’ve also inherited a book collection from a beloved mentor, a colossus that
sits boxed and bulging in my grandparents’ basement in New Jersey—I can’t wedge
any more books into our Boston home without inciting my spouse and children to
mutiny. In the mid-’90s, when my grandparents lived near the Raritan River, I
stored several hundred titles in a first-floor bedroom, and when the river
swallowed half the town one year, all those books were swallowed, too. After
the waters retreated, I laid the books out in the sun on the sidewalk,
cataloging my losses in a kind of requiem.4 In 1941, Rose Macaulay
wrote beautifully about losing her library, her whole apartment, in the
Blitz—“a drift of loose, scorched pages fallen through three floors to
street-level, and there lying sodden in a mass of wreckage smelling of
mortality”—and I’ve never read that essay without blurred vision.
When a bibliophile reads a
classic, he tends to remember most vividly those portions that might by chance
speak to an ardor for books—he’s pleased to find some kinship with the
greats—and so some of my most dominant memories of Rousseau’s Confessions or
Boswell’s Life of Johnsonor Waugh’s A Handful of Dust or
Woolf’s Night and Day or Orwell’s Coming Up for Air happen
to be those swaths of prose which confirm my own hunch that a life with books
is more meaningful than a life without books. As a child reading Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I was spun around by that mention of
Captain Nemo’s personal library aboard his vessel, all 12,000 tomes of it. The
narrator, Pierre Aronnax, comments that Nemo must have “six or seven thousand
volumes,” and Nemo replies, “Twelve thousand, M. Aronnax. These are the only
ties which bind me to the earth.” If Nemo indeed owned 12,000 books, I knew,
the way a beast knows the coming season, that I wanted 12,000, too.
One collects books for reasons
that are, of course, acutely personal, but I have a memory of the afternoon
when I was shown how others perceive the flexing brawn of a book collection. At
19 years old, in surrender from an unkillable Northeast winter, I moved to
South Carolina, and one day a police officer arrived at my apartment to
question me about cash that had been thieved from someone with whom I’d spent a
night—she thought the thief was me and not, as it turned out, her roommate.
There were prints on the box from which the cash had been stolen, and the
officer asked if I’d be willing to go to the station to have my own prints
taken. Of course I would, I said, and as I asked for driving directions, he
squinted at the bookshelves. “All those books,” he said, and then asked the
infamous cliché of a question, the question that occurs only to nonreaders:
“You read all those books?” I told him that I’d read fewer than half—the truth
was that I’d read fewer than half of half—and he said, “Well clearly the
thief’s not you. No one smart enough to read all those books is dumb enough to
steal cash from such a pretty gal.” And then he began walking his fingertips
along the spines as if he’d just realized that the books might confer on him
some magical capacity.5
He’d have been right about the
capacity but wrong about the magic. A life with books is a life of pleasure,
yes, but also a life of work. Not just the work of lugging their heft each time
you move, but the work of reading them, the work of discernment, of accepting
the loquacity of the world’s bliss and hurt and boredom, of welcoming both
small and seismic shifts to your selfhood, of attempting to earn those
intimations of insight that force the world briefly into focus. That’s the
reason the cop was wrong in thinking that readers are smart by default:
Dedicated readers are precisely those who understand the Socratic inkling that
they aren’t smart enough, will never be smart enough—the wise
are wise only insofar as they know that they know nothing. In other words:
Someone with all the answers has no use for books. Anthony Burgess once
suggested that “book” is an acronym for “Box Of Organized Knowledge,” and the
collector is pantingly desperate for proximity to that knowledge—he wants to be
buffeted, bracketed, bulletproofed by books. Leigh Hunt wrote of literally
walling himself in with his collection: “I entrench myself in my books equally
against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look
about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables. ...
When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to
lean my head against them.”
The physicality of
the book, the sensuality of it—Oliver Wendell Holmes called
his collection “my literary harem”—the book as a body that permits you to open
it, insert your face between its covers and breathe, to delve into its essence,
its offer of reciprocity, of intercourse—this is what many of us seek in the
book as object. In his bantam essay on book love, Anatole France starts off
swinging: “There is no true love without some sensuality. One is not happy in
books unless one loves to caress them.”6 There was little that
escaped the Updikian caress, and he wrote more than once about the pleasures
and peculiarities of book collecting. In an essay called “The Unread Book
Route,” about A History of Japan to 1334, Updike wrote: “The
physical presence of this book, so substantial, so fresh, the edges so trim,
the type so tasty, reawakens in me, like a Proustian talisman, the emotions I
experienced when, in my youth, I ordered it.” Leave it to the unerringly
sensual and curious Updike to a) refer to book type as “tasty,” and b) think as
a youth that he needed to know something about Japan prior to 1334.
Updike’s point about the
Proustian talisman is a crucial one for bibliophiles: Their collections are not
only proof of their evolution but monuments to their past, fragrant and visual
stimulators of recall. Gissing’s hero Ryecroft says just that: “I know every
book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between
the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.” Across a collector’s
bookshelves, upright and alert like uniformed sentinels, are segments of his
personal history, segments that he needs to summon in order to ascertain
himself fully, which is part of his motive for reading books in the first
place—whatever else it is, a life with books is incentive to remember, and in
remembering, understand. Borges said: “My father’s library was the capital
event in my life. The truth is that I have never left it.” Borges’s own books,
then, are both collection and connection, an emotional umbilical to his father.
In his autobiography The Words, Sartre spends several pages of the
first chapter recalling his grandfather’s book love and the sanctity of the old
man’s library, how as a boy Sartre secretly touched those much revered tomes,
“to honor my hands with their dust,” and in that honoring, the honing of
affection for his dear grandfather.7
Since bibliophiles are happy
to acknowledge the absurdity, the obese impracticality of gathering more books
than there are days to read them, one’s collection must be about more than
remembering—it must be about expectation also.8 Your personal library,
swollen and hulking about you, is the promise of betterment and pleasure to
come, a giddy anticipation, a reminder of the joyous work left to do, a prompt
for those places to which your intellect and imagination want to roam. This is
how the nonreader’s question Have you read all these books? manages
to miss the point. The tense is all wrong: Not have you read all, but will
you read all, to which, by the way, the bibliophile’s answer must still be
no. Agonizingly aware of the human lifespan, the collector’s intention is not
to read them all, but, as E.M. Forster shares in his essay “My Library,” simply
to sit with them, “aware that they, with their accumulated wisdom and charm,
are waiting to be used”—although, as Forster knows, books don’t have to be used
in order to be useful.9
One of the most imperishable
notions ever set down about a personal library can be found inside Sven
Birkerts’s essay “Notes from a Confession.” Birkerts speaks of “that kind of
reading which is just looking at books,” of the “expectant tranquility” of sitting
before his library: “Just to see my books, to note their presence, their
proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity.” Expectant
tranquility and sense of futurity—those are what the
noncollector and what the downloader of e-books does not experience, because
only an enveloping presence permits them.
Forgoing physicality, readers
of e-books defraud themselves of the communion which emerges from that
physicality. Because if Max Frisch is correct in defining technology as “the
knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it,” then one
might argue that we aren’t really experiencing a novel or poems on our
e-readers. We might be reading them—although I find that an
e-reader’s scrolling and swiping are invitations to skim, not to read—but fully experiencing them
is something else altogether.
You scroll and swipe and click
your way through your life, scanning screens for information and interruption,
screens that force you into a want of rapidity. Why you’d welcome another
screen in your life, another enticement to rapidity and diversion, is a
question you might ask yourself.Paradise Lost will not put up with
rapidity and diversion, and that is exactly why, for some of us, a physical book
will always be superior reading, because it allows you to be alone with
yourself, to sit in solidarity with yourself, in silence, in solitude, in the
necessary sensitivity that fosters development and imagination. A physical book
makes it possible to fend off the nausea roused by the electronic despotism
we’ve let into our lives—it doesn’t permit blinking, swiping, scrolling,
popping-up impediments to your concentration, doesn’t confront it with a
responsive screen trying to sell you things you don’t need. On a train with
only a paperback of Paradise Lost, you are forced into either an
attempt at understanding and enjoyment or else an uninterrupted stare out your
window. Your Kindle Fire is so named because Amazon understands that we
Americans rather enjoy the hot oppression of endless choices, the arson of our
calm. At the first signs of Milton’s difficulty, you can nix the whole
excursion and romp around with a clattering of apps.
Let me pre-empt certain
mumbles by saying that I can recognize the value of electronic reading and
would not wish it away. The e-reader is a godsend to those travelers who want
to carry all eight volumes of Gibbon with them. (Although you can question if a
traveler would really make use of Gibbon’s dreadnought while traipsing through
foreign climes. Aldous Huxley has a funny essay called “Books for the Journey”
in which he writes: “Thick tomes have traveled with me for thousands of
kilometers across the face of Europe and have returned with their secrets
unviolated.”) E-books have aided an infirm publishing industry while offering
an inexpensive option to those who would never spend $35 on a hardback. The
e-reader is also sometimes the only way to have a book if you don’t live near a
library and if the postal carrier has trouble reaching your wilderness grot.
At my alma mater recently I
gave a lecture on the importance of literature in this digital age, and I might
have half-earnestly referred to the Internet as an insane asylum where the
misanthropic and lonesome go to die, because afterward a 90-year-old woman
three-pronged her way to the podium to give me a deserved lashing. Without the
Internet, she said, without e-books blaring forth from an illuminated screen,
she wouldn’t be able to read at all, such was the condition of her eyesight
after 85 years of reading. How does the cyberskeptic counter that?
He doesn’t.
You can easily locate the
science that says we read more comprehensively when we read on paper, the
neurological data that shows how our memories are motivated, soldered by the
tactile, how we learn most fruitfully when our senses are stroked, but those
are not what truly vex the bibliophile. The point, like so many literary points
worth emphasizing, is an aesthetic one—books are beautiful. What you hear in
the above anxiety by James Salter is not really a condemnation of e-readers,
but an anxiety about a loss of beauty. Robertson Davies got it right when he
wrote this about beautiful editions of good books: “We value beauty and we
value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like
our heroes to be appropriately dressed.” Gissing’s narrator in The
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft admits: “The joy of reading the Decline
and Fall in that fine type! The page was appropriate to the dignity of the
subject; the mere sight of it tuned one’s mind.” The dignity of the
subject—remember that formulation, and savor the excellence of that last
metaphor, one’s mind tuned by the fine type of such sweet
pages.
I feel for Salter’s anxiety,
and I agree with Burgess when he wrote, commenting on those delectable editions
produced by The Folio Society in London: “We have to relearn pride in books as
objects lovely in themselves.” But allow me to assure you of this truth: Like
the bicycle, the book is a perfect invention, and perfection dies very, very
hard. The car hasn’t murdered the bike, and the Web won’t murder the book.
There are innumerable readers for whom the collecting of physical books will
remain forever essential to our selfhoods, to our savoring of pleasure and
attempted acquisition of wisdom, to our emotional links with our past and our
psychological apprehension of others—essential not just as extensions of our
identities but as embodiments of those identities. Books, like love, make life
worth living.
1
I can’t help noticing that “exultation” is the term
marshaled by Leigh Hunt in his 1823 bibliophilic essay “My Books,” and also by
Somerset Maugham in his novel The Razor’s Edge, when he writes
of one character’s leisure with a copy of Spinoza.
2
Eugene Goodheart wrote this in his memoir Confessions
of a Secular Jew: “My personal library is an accumulation rather than a
collection, which means I never quite know where a book I need is. I begin
looking for a book I had misplaced, but to no avail. Another book catches my
eye. … I pick it up and peruse it”—and that’s called serendipity. The same
rewarding surprise can happen when you grab the big red copy of your Merriam
Webster’s instead of seeking your definition online, just as you can discover
the gem you didn’t know you needed every time you choose a brick-and-mortar
bookshop over Amazon.
3
It’s not hard to nod along with Leigh Hunt when he
admits: “I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.”
It’s really the rudimentary qualification every reader should demand of a
writer.
4
For weeks after that flood I walked around with a hole
in my chest. I’d welcome a hack with a scalpel if only it were possible to
excise that memory. I made a list of the deceased copies and vowed to replace
every last one, a vow I’m still fulfilling.
5
Before the officer left that day, I told him to choose
a book from my shelf, my gift to him for his interest and his kindness toward
me, and he chose a paperback copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther,
pronouncing Goethe’s name “goeth,” as in “the sun goeth down.” For two
decades I’ve wondered what this officer of the peace thought of the novel that
in the late eighteenth century sent a shockwave of suicides across Deutschland.
6
France also has this to say to those negligent readers
who don’t esteem physical books as works of art: “You have no fire and no joy,
and you will never know the delight of passing trembling fingers over the
delicious grain of a morocco-bound volume.”
7
You see, then, what Anatole Broyard means when he dubs
the personal library “an ancestral portrait”—this is exactly what Borges and
Sartre were getting at.
8
Here’s Susan Sontag, in her novel The Volcano
Lover, writing about art, but any bibliophile will feel a tremor of
recognition: “A great private collection is a material concentrate that
continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be
added to, but because it is already too much. The collector’s need is precisely
for excess, for surfeit, for profusion. It’s too much—and it’s just enough for
me. … A collection is always more than is necessary.”
9
I’m reminded that the human lifespan is also part of
Harold Bloom’s argument for why one should read only the best books. There’s
not time enough for junk. Paradise Lost alone takes half a
lifetime of rereading to understand fully. This is what Nabokov means by:
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good
reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”
William Giraldi is the author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold
the Dark.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121560/bibliophiles-defense-physical-books
"Afirmo, señores, que las reducciones propuestas en el presupuesto especial de las ciencias, las letras y las artes son doblemente perversas –argumentaba Victor Hugo frente a una propuesta ministerial de recortar fondos para la cultura en 1848–. Son insignificantes desde el punto de vista financiero y nocivas desde todos los demás puntos de vista".
"Muchas veces me he preguntado qué quiere decir la gente cuando habla de una 'experiencia' maravillosa. Yo soy técnico y estoy acostumbrado a ver las cosas tal como son. Veo perfectamente a qué se refieren: no estoy ciego. Veo la luna sobre el desierto de Tamaulipas - mas clara que nunca, tal vez sí, pero la considero una masa calculable que gira alrededor de nuestro planeta, un objeto de gravitación, interesante, pero ¿por qué una experiencia maravillosa? ..." (23)
