January 21, 2022
Why do some of us develop such a deep love of books? We love books because we love reading, of course, but that is not a completely satisfying answer, because I mean “books” as physical objects. I can read books on a Kindle or a computer; I can listen to them on an audiobook. And after all, there was a time when books did not even exist: literacy is a relatively recent invention. Poetry and storytelling existed as oral performances, as they still do in public readings and bedtime stories. Nevertheless, it did not take long after the invention of printing made books generally, cheaply available for the phenomenon of the bibliophile to manifest itself. And as the love of reading may develop into a love of books, the love of books may develop into the love of collecting books.
I was a collector of books from the time I became a reader. I cannot remember a time when I did not have my collection, helped by my mother. I have her copy of Heidi, the famous children’s book by Johanna Spyri, first published in 1881, which she read to us despite its length. Inside is handwritten “Library of Beaverdam School, 1933,” my mother’s grade school. My mother would never have stolen a book, so this must have been a gift or a discard. I also have a 1950 edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, clearly bought for her two sons, in addition to a few of what was once a whole collection of Little Golden Books with the distinctive Timken Roller Bearing tape from my father’s workplace repairing their spines. My mother never had her own collection of books until after her retirement, when she explicitly asked us to give her books for holiday gifts—good books, not the steamy romances that her sister bought by the dozens and dumped by the bagful on my mom when she had whipped through them. I doubt whether the contents were actually as steamy as the covers suggested, but the romantic imagination has no expiration date: my aunt was in her 80’s when she was reading those things.
From the male side of the family I inherited one book, Tom Swift and His Sky Racer, which I was told originally belonged to my uncle. The hero of a whole series of books, Tom Swift was a young genius inventor in the Thomas Edison mold. In the volume I own, dated 1911, the second year of the series, Tom invents a plane that can travel over 100 mph, which, three years after Kitty Hawk, was in the realm of science fiction. Interestingly, my uncle later became an Army helicopter pilot. I myself collected, and still own, almost the entire run of the Tom Swift, Jr. series, whose hero was the 18-year-old son of the original Tom Swift.
I loved reading before I could read, thanks to my mother’s unfailing ritual of reading us bedtime stories: as in human history, the oral tradition preceded the literate. From the moment I learned to read, I never stopped: what relatives tend to remember of me was the kid who always had his face in a book. My dad said that I was the only grandchild that my step-grandmother really liked, because I would sit at the table and read while the other kids were tearing through the house. What she didn’t know was that I was also sneaking cookies from the red plastic (yes, racist) Aunt Jemima cookie jar on the table. But in a symbiotic relationship with my love of reading was a love of collecting books: I tended my little collection with the same kind of loving care with which some people nurture their gardens, and, like a garden, it slowly grew. Having a private library is a development out of the pleasure of reading but is itself a separate pleasure: plenty of people love to read books who have no particular desire to collect them. Yet it is common enough. Students have come into my office over the years and looked at the walls of books with a wistful yearning. Often, they have their own small collection and hoped it might grow to the size of mine over the years.
Be careful what you wish for. The initial impulse for writing about book collections was reading a delightful book, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions (2018) by Alberto Manguel. By the kind of meaningful coincidence that Jung calls synchronicity I too recently had to pack the half of my library that had resided at my office for 32 years until my retirement, to be joined with the half that was here at home. It was both an emotionally and physically demanding experience, though I was aided by the extraordinary generosity of my former wife Stacey, who put together 13 bookcases to hold them while I did the actual packing, moving, and unpacking. I had dreaded this moment for many years, fearing that there would never be enough room, and that I would have to enclose the back patio to hold them or else buy a small build-it-yourself barn, things we could not afford—that or downsize my collection, which would have been heartbreaking. But with ingenuity, it worked: the books all fit without creating the impression of living in a warehouse. My research for this newsletter was to come up with an estimate of how many books I own: very roughly, the answer is about 7500. As personal libraries go, that is not impressive (not that I am trying to impress). Manguel had to buy a house with a barn to hold his, which eventually grew to some 40,000 volumes. It was when he donated this library to the city of Lisbon, Portugal, where he now heads a Center for the Study of Reading, that he had to undergo the death-and-rebirth ritual of packing his books.
When a second synchronicity followed the first one, I knew the imagination was making me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I had already made some notes about personal libraries when an article titled “A Library the Internet Can’t Get Enough Of” by Kate Dwyer appeared in the January 15, 2022 issue of the New York Times.
A photograph of the personal library of Richard Macksey, a professor of humanities and comparative literature, has gone viral more than once on the Internet, even though now, after Macksey’s death, it no longer exists. The photo is arresting: 51,000 books fill every square foot of space from floor to ceiling. I confess I find it a bit disturbing: tracks running along the walls seem to indicate that the books at the ceiling level had to be accessed with a ladder, but they must be 25-30 feet in the air, and I am afraid of heights (so much for being the next Tom Swift aviator).
My library was partly a deliberate project but partly, like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it “just growed.” In either case, what impulse motivated collecting these books over a lifetime? Or impulses: there has been a practical, professional motivation but, underlying it, a deeper and more emotional one. I have not collected books as commodities. My books are reading copies, not “collectibles.” I have no knowledge of first editions and other forms of rarity, and my library is neither an investment nor some kind of status symbol. It was a pleasure to learn that Manguel’s collection is much the same, older books rubbing shoulders with cheap paperbacks. The kind of criticism I do usually involves a new look at some readily available texts and does not demand consulting rare editions, so it is enormously practical to have the books I need most often at my fingertips. In this I resemble my mentor Northrop Frye, who said that there were critics who can find things of value in the Public Records Office and critics like himself who could not find the Public Records Office. The one exception is my collection of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, many of which are long out of print and sometimes available only in a few research libraries with holdings that include popular culture. Some of these were among the first books I bought, at a time when the price of a paperback was 35 cents, soon to increase to 50 cents. The pandemic has provided a kind of regrettable vindication of my conviction that I needed to have a basic library close at hand. Suddenly, both public and academic libraries were closed to the public, and access to their books on a bring-to-the-curb or interlibrary loan basis at times limited by lack of staffing. I felt as Noah must have felt, having gathered all those animals ahead of time into his ark just as the first drops of rain began to fall.
That analogy begins to shift towards the deeper, more emotional motive for having a personal collection, which is one of preservation. This sounds, and may be, I suppose, a bit neurotic, like one of those people who built fallout shelters in their back yards in the 50’s. But I am hardly the only one haunted by an anxiety that books and other records can so easily be lost, an anxiety for which the burning of the great Library of Alexandria in the ancient world has become a symbol. Books may disappear from libraries even without a physical disaster. The library of the small university at which I teach holds only a fraction of the number of books it had when I was a student there, for a number of reasons. I remember paging around in the full 12-volume set of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough when I was a student, learning about dying god figures. There is no budget for such acquisitions any longer, nor do many undergraduates consult physical books. Nothing is commoner than to pick a book off a shelf there and find that it was last checked out in 1986. Copies of the unabridged Golden Bough now reside in the relatively few large research institutions. This is not the fault of our library, which is simply bowing to the inevitable, but it is sad to think of the downsizing of so many academic holdings. The library at Baldwin Wallace University was first started by the granddaughter of its founder, Philura Gould Baldwin, who bequeathed her personal collection to the college before dying at the age of 27. There is still a White Rose Ceremony once a year celebrating her dedication to books and learning, but her ghost perhaps mourns the partial diminishment of her legacy.
Many library resources have been of course digitalized, but I for one do not trust the promises of electronic immortality. The Internet has every capacity to become a kind of digital Bermuda Triangle in which texts may not simply cease to exist but are somehow lost in the cloud. Electronic resources must be maintained, and the assurance that they will be maintained in perpetuity is not very believable in a society not known for its dedication to the long term. That leaves aside the more paranoid possibilities. The cloud is not disembodied and transcendent: it exists on servers, and it is the Holy Grail of hackers, both private and those working for foreign governments, to cripple those servers.
I am not claiming that my impulse to rescue books by taking them into my small collection is rational. Nothing outlasts the effects of time, but that does not matter. As well to say there is no use having pets or even children because, hey, they only get old and die, you know. I have a photograph, cut out of some magazine and framed so long ago that I cannot remember where and when I found it, of a man with a book in his hand and an ecstatic look on his face. Underneath it is a caption attributed to Henry Ward Beecher: “Nowhere is human nature so weak as in a bookstore.” Manguel says, “Petrarch doesn’t possess his library as much as his library possesses him. ‘I’m haunted by an inexhaustible passion that up to now I have not managed or wanted to quench. I feel that I have never enough books’” (15). I don’t think this is simply hoarding: hoarding is not the same as collecting, and in fact I am not a hoarder generally. I feel the urge to buy more books especially in used bookstores and library discard sales, where I have acquired the greater part of my library. Odd as it may sound, there is a bittersweet pleasure at moving amidst so much that has been abandoned and forgotten, about standing among hundreds of books that have been remaindered, discarded, traded in for credit, and otherwise abandoned. And yet I feel strangely at home in what amounts to a community of the outcast, whatever that says about me. Here is a book that might have been a best seller in 1938, or an author who might have been a promising new voice, now exhumed from a box underneath a library discard table or found jammed on a bowed shelf in the musty, overheated basement of a used bookstore. Inscriptions in the books speak with the poignancy of headstones in a cemetery—“To Mary, Christmas, 1912”—especially when both giver and recipient are by now no doubt beneath their respective headstones somewhere.
Sometimes I might find a volume I have been hunting for, but I have also stumbled upon authors that were unknown to me yet who looked intriguing, so I took a chance on them. A blind date: it is very much like falling in love. Some of those authors have come to be very important to me, even if they are not important to the outside world. Manguel delights me by understanding this: he says that “My salvation might depend on having read a certain book” and then goes on to list several authors, one of which is William Saroyan (50). I was astonished: who reads William Saroyan anymore, even though he once won (and turned down) the Pulitzer Prize? But at a library discard sale when I was young I came across a copy of After Thirty Years: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1964), in which Saroyan sets himself the challenge of repeating his feat of thirty years previously, writing a short story a day for thirty days, followed by a brief essay about writing and being a writer. It was the essays that influenced me more than the stories, and are no doubt an early influence on these newsletters. I have read an Internet article gently accusing Manguel of quirkiness in his love of certain books, of paying insufficient attention to quality. That misses the point: “great” or not, that book was the right book for me, and I remain grateful to Saroyan for having written it. It was one of the books I was possessed by, to revert to last week’s conversation about “possession” (inspired by the book of that title by Manguel’s partner Craig Stephenson).
Needless to say, not every used book has been some kind of failure: it is perfectly possible to pick up a used copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. But even that is on sale presumably because it is showing its age: it is not the most recent edition, it is a bit battered, and so on. Yet, far from feeling slightly depressed in the presence of mass superannuation, I always feel that used bookstores and sales are places of hope. No matter how long it takes, there is still a chance that a book may be discovered and valued by someone, and not even just works of literature. In the past year, I have spent some time trying to learn a bit of Italian using Hossfeld’s New Practical Method for Learning the Italian Language, by A. Rota, revised and enlarged by W.N. Cornett, published in 1924. I wish I had a way to let Rota and Cornett know that their textbook is still useful to a grateful student a century after they published it, even if it does not give me the Italian for “smartphone.” I actually enjoy the thought of a copy of my own book on a table or shelf of used books—maybe someone will find it as I found hidden treasures in such places. Maybe it will be a half century from now, when I am gone. In my first piece of serious writing, at the age of 16, another nonfiction precursor of these newsletters, I spoke of writing as a message in a bottle, cast into the sea to be found by who knows whom. Now I look at my weekly Substack stats, whose numbers are small and yet slightly but persistently growing, and wonder how all these readers managed to find me: there are too many simply to be my friends and former students. How did my newsletter manage to wash up out of the Internet ocean onto their shores?
A personal library is individualized. My selection of books is idiosyncratic, reflecting my personality and what is important to me. Moreover, when you own so many books, you have to organize and categorize them or you will never find anything, or at least not until two weeks after you want it. Another elective affinity between me and Manguel is that we both organized our books according to principles sure to drive other people to distraction. He says, “I set up my library according to my own requirements and prejudices. Unlike a public library, mine demanded no common codes that other readers could understand and share. A certain zany logic governed its geography….I allowed myself, however, many exceptions. Certain subjects…had separate sections. Certain authors and certain genres were privileged” (3-4).
Yet Manguel went on to become the director of the National Library of Argentina, and public libraries can have some of the magic of bookstores. The public library in my hometown of Canton, Ohio, now demolished, had, of all things, translucent glass floors in which the dim outlines of other visitors could be seen above you. (I might add that the “new” public library that replaced it was built on the site of the old Mercy Hospital where I was born). The larger used bookstores and public libraries become labyrinths in which the object is to become lost—that is, to browse. It is wonderful that used bookstores have an online presence, greatly expanding availability, but the promise of browsing is that you might accidentally discover books you would otherwise never have known about. You wander the aisles, possibly looking for something specific, yet also open to serendipity. The larger the bookstore, the greater the promise.
Mind you, there might be such a thing as too large. The biggest bookstore I have ever been in was Zubal’s used and antiquarian books, a Cleveland landmark for decades, now closed to the general public, accessible by appointment only—and I guiltily wonder whether I might not have helped precipitate that closing. Zubal’s was housed in a literal warehouse of at least five stories when I visited it on a lazy Saturday with my friend Maggie decades ago. We were the only customers, and the attendant warned us that closing time was 2:30. Although we made sure to get back to the entrance before that time, we found that the clearly bored attendant had either forgotten we were in there or assumed we had already left, so he had gone home early, leaving us locked inside, alone with a resident cat. We were forced to call the police, who, unable to reach the owner, broke a window to get us out. No security alarm: perhaps John Zubal had not foreseen the possibility that someone might want to break out of his store. It is only fitting that one of the few moments of drama in my uneventful life transpired in a bookstore.
The one and the many: last week I spoke of possession by a single book or single author. This week I am speaking of libraries, of collections of books, some of them vast. What is the connection? If some of my feelings about books are so idealistic as to risk seeming sentimental, at least I am in good company. In his great prose work Areopagitica, Milton declares, “For 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.” In the same paragraph, he says, “as good almost kill a man as kill a good book….Many a man lives a burden to the earth: but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” Books are alive. They are fellow creatures, which is why our relationship to them can be as intense and precious as any other human interaction. There is a direct line between Areopagitica’s argument against censorship and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which dissidents save banned books from destruction by possessing them in a very direct way. Each person chooses a book and memorizes it. In the final scene of Truffaut’s film version, people walk up to the protagonist and introduce themselves by saying things like, “Hi, I’m David Copperfield.” All very well unless you happen to have chosen Moby Dick or Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.
As its title indicates, the skeptical counter-argument to Milton is something like Borges’ famous story “The Library of Babel.” The books in that library contain collections of signifiers, signifying nothing. They are merely permutations of all possible combinations of signifiers. The story, if I understand it correctly, plays upon the old notion that if you give monkeys typewriters and infinite time, they will eventually produce the combination of signifiers we call Hamlet. But it would not actually be Hamlet, because there would be no signified, no meaning expressed by the signifiers, just an accidental arrangement. Indeed, because the monkeys produce all possible combinations, not just Hamlet but all books have already been written, their combination of signifiers necessarily appearing somewhere in the library’s infinite corridors. Thus we are locked in a labyrinth far more sinister than Zubal’s warehouse, and one blind writer implicitly responds to another. Yet is Borges really suggesting that all language is signifiers without signification, he who became the director of the National Library in Argentina? One person who played seriously with that idea was the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose philosophy of deconstruction presents a vision of signifiers forever chasing the illusion of a signified. In deconstruction, meaning never arrives, is always absent, and authors do not exist: there is only an unending play of “textuality.” The person who organized the conference at which Derrida introduced his ideas in the United States was Richard Macksey, he of the vast personal library. And, for that matter, as a young man Alberto Manguel became one of Borges’ readers after Borges visited the bookstore in which he was working.
I do not think either Derrida or Borges “believed in” a philosophy of nihilistic, meaningless textuality. They are conducting a thought experiment, following a line of thought rigorously to its logical conclusion in a series of paradoxes. They seem more aware of those paradoxes than some of the AI researchers, with their idea that consciousness is nothing more than patterns of information. They present us with a vision of what has been called “the prison-house of language,” a labyrinth in which we are caught, a vision of death as Milton’s is a vision of life. It is not an argument that can be refuted, but a construct that can only be decreated and recreated. What would such a recreation look like?
If books are alive in a non-literal and yet real sense, the same is true of them as of human beings—no book is an island. The passage Manguel quotes from Petrarch continues, “an individual book does not insinuate itself alone into our spirit, but leads the way for many more, and thus provokes in us a longing for others” (16). Books are interconnected in all the ways human beings are interconnected, by love, by hate, by ambivalence. They converse with one another, form communities with one another, fight mental wars with one another. They are a community, what Northrop Frye called the “order of words,” of which libraries, whether personal or public, are the visible symbol. They are the house the imagination has built for itself, and in it are many mansions. The order of words is not a vision of perfection, because, as Wallace Stevens said, the imperfect is our paradise. Or, as Polly Garter puts it in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, “Isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?” In Deuteronomy 30:19, God says, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.” That is what the imagination does: it sets before us models, and asks us then to choose.
Reference
Alberto Manguel, Unpacking My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions. Yale University Press, 2018.