I’ll start the new year off with one of my favorite things (e.g.), writing in praise of books — to wit, Ed Simon’s Literary Hub essay Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania:
Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.
In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.
In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.
Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus. From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.
As with the metempsychosis of souls from body to body, this copy made its way across libraries and collections until it was purchased for the equivalent of seventy cents in 1970 by a 22-year-old Umberto Eco, this copy of Aristotle joining some 50,000 others as the philosopher built one of the largest personal libraries on the continent. “We live for books,” says a character in Eco’s 1980 philosophical Medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, that novel directly inspired by his Aristotle discovery. If you’re reading a site named Literary Hub, I’m going to assume that you understand that sentiment well. […]
There was a period when first building my collection from used-book stores and yard-sales, Half Priced Books and Barnes & Noble, where (like the bibliomaniac with his fan) I’d take a ruler and carefully inspect that as my treasures sat on the shelf the back edges of each volume were perfectly lined up so that the pages of the paperbacks wouldn’t curl outward around each other. Today I’m less anal retentive—mostly—but I still dedicate time to continually reorganizing my books, which are stored on nightstand and dresser, in my closets and on tabletops, and in a grand wooden shelf that spans the entirety of our living room. Books crammed in every room, in my campus office, and yes, in my trunk. Frayed paperbacks with mid-century modernist covers purchased from used bookstores and advance reader copies from publishers, massive reference works and beloved hardbacks bought at (that ever increasing) full price.
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. […]
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. […]
There is a reason why the apocalyptic bromides about the state of print haven’t come to fruition, other than for disposable periodicals and newspapers. As any author looking at the generous royalties stipulated for e-books in many publishing contracts can attest, the digital hasn’t supplanted print. No Spotify or Netflix exists for literature, where (other than with some exceptions, such as for vinyl collectors) the medium and the message are more easily disentangled, but the codex has endured for two millennia whereas the CD and the DVD lasted barely two decades. Manuscripts are things of goat vellum and iron-gall ink, but even print bares the marks of embodiment, that Renaissance device constructed by goldsmiths, who worked with the metal of type, and vintners who understood how to use a press. Smith calls this “bookhood” and Keith Houston in The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of our Time refers to it as “bookness,” the love of this object that has “mass and odor, that fall in your hands when you ease them out a bookcase and that make a thump when you put them down.”
Enjoy your e-reader all you want, but a soul without a body is just a ghost, apt to suddenly flicker out of existence. My budget is closer to Gawda’s than Morgan’s, so other than a (brief and foolish) mania for purchasing seventeenth-century print on eBay a decade ago, my library is less a collection than a biography. No copy of Audubon, but rather The Norton Shakespeare given to me by Professor Barbara Traister upon her retirement and containing her learned marginalia (some of it frustratingly in Latin), the college rhetoric textbook from 1959 that my since-passed father gave me, and the century-old compendium of poetry—with advertisements in it!—which my great-aunt taught in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, once mine and now my son’s, that uninterrupted chain of stewardship between those fortunate to possess a book for a bit until it’s passed on in a process that some call collection, but which is better called love.
My equivalent of Goodnight Moon is Marjorie Torrey’s The Three Little Chipmunks, which was read to me seven or so decades ago, which I read to my grandsons a couple of decades ago, and which I hope they will read to whatever offspring they may have. I am pleased to say that they already have an abiding love of books.
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