IN PRAISE OF BIBLIOMANIA

 

Using my own rudimentary arithmetic to arrive at an estimate of how many volumes I've collected over the past thirty years and I've arrived at around 3,000 books, which though paltry when compared to the vast hoard of the black-clad vampiric fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's 300,000, is within spitting distance of Ernest Hemingway (9,000), Thomas Jefferson (6,487), and Hannah Arendt (4,000). "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, and of course.

People ask me if I've read them all, to which I waggishly respond that I've opened all of them (mostly), but while there is the stereotype of the book collector valuing status more than knowledge, whether the fool in Brandt's illustration or Jay Gatsby with his uncut volumes, for me these titles represent the knowledge I'm anxious to acquire but which mortality prevents me from ever fulfilling. In this way, I hope that I'm much closer (if nothing else) to an Erasmus or an Eco. There is, within my larger library, a contingent of books that I'm trying to read at any given time, a mercurial syllabus that I'm always adding and subtracting from, moving the pile of volumes from room to room over the course of a day. Much of my day, it seems to me, is parsing what I'm including or not, figuring out what I'll be reading next while I'm in the midst of my current book, like a hungry man at lunch deciding on dinner.

Personal libraries are assembled for reasons that are different from other collections. For sure there is overlap; when the Ptolemaic pharaohs confiscated every book in-port at Alexandria to add to their celebrated library, this was equal parts about knowledge and power. But in general, the private book hoarder is motivated by different impulses than to serve the public (as with the New York Public Library guarded by Fifth Avenue's stone lions), create a center for scholarly research (as with the glass-cube that house's Yale's Beinecke), or collate everything that has ever been published (the Library of Congress, at least for now).

These libraries are keepers of knowledge, which a private citizen can also be, but the latter's reasoning is often of its own sort. "By the books we call ours we will be judged," writes bibliophile Alberto Manguel in The Library at Night. Banker J.P. Morgan's private holdings, including a thirteenth-century illuminated Bible, Catherine of Cleves' fourteenth-century Book of Hours, and a complete copy of John Audobon's exceedingly rare The Birds of America, was a testament to his wealth more than to his learning. Furthermore, there is little it would seem that Bill Gates can learn from his ownership of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester, the most expensive book in the world at $65.3 million dollars, but there is, however, much we can learn about Gates when we consider that manuscript squirreled away in some dark, temperature-controlled vault.

A Morgan or Gates exhibit the impulse which causes the wealthy to bid over a half-million dollars on a 1945 bottle of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti or to spend $33 million on Tsar Alexander III's Third Imperial Faberge Egg. Yet as the true bibliomaniac understands, fruit juice and easter eggs are one thing, but books are entirely different. Margaret Cavendish, the Restoration-era writer, called books "paper bodies," and it speaks to how they can never be mere commodities. Even a mass-produced book acquires its own individuality, the nicks and notes, wounds and dog-ears that transform this inert mass of paper, glue, cardboard, and thread into a strangely human thing. Those who agree with Manguel that "Unpacking books is a revelatory activity" are lonely without this crowd of paper bodies; they understand how the cover is a flesh, the binding a nervous system, the chapters as organs, sentences veins, and the words the very blood that circulates meaning.

Book collecting is a vocation assisted by money (they all are), but it's also rewarded with patience. There are some 20,000 books in Morgan's collection, but Anke Gowda, a former worker in a Karnataka, India sugar plant, amassed nearly two-million books, mostly titles decommissioned by public libraries and given away for free (there is presumably no Medieval Book of Hours amongst the collection). Photos of his cramped house, where trenches have been made out of piles of books, make me simultaneously anxious and envious. I suspect that ours is a difference of degree rather than of kind, for like myself, Gawda is very much a reader, but being a reader alone doesn't make a bibliomaniac (nor is the opposite the case). Plenty of vociferous readers can sustain themselves by library card alone, but the coveting of the physical object of the codex is its own thing.

Books are possessed and possessing, they exist to fortify, to preserve, to radiate their own charged auras. Owning them isn't the same as possessing the knowledge within, but it's the second-best thing. There is a sense that I'm keeping these books for when I need them, what Eco compares to having a stocked medicine cabinet for when a certain ailment might strike. Sometimes, like a monk eyeing the encroaching vandals, I feel like I'm fortifying myself as I pile them up on windowsills, leaving the ever more-prevalent censors on the other side. Their very physicality is central to this, because unlike an e-book or text entombed in the cloud, my books don't rely on the good will of algorithms or tech billionaires; they'll still be readable long after the lights have gone out (at least by daylight).

To read the complete article, see:
Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania (https://lithub.com/nothing-better-than-a-whole-lot-of-books-in-praise-of-bibliomania/)

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