Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

  I trailed George along the sleepy main street and down a steep hill.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  Then I saw it: a weather-beaten little shop, perched on such a declivitous slope that it looked in danger of sliding into the Hudson River, with a faded blue sign over the door that said BOOKSTORE. Inside were an unkempt desk, a maze of out-of-plumb shelves, a flurry of dust motes, and 300,000 used books.

  Seven hours later, we emerged from the Riverrun Bookshop carrying nineteen pounds of books. (I weighed them when we got home.)

  Now you know why I married my husband. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar. You may prefer Veuve Clicquot for your birthday, but give me (actually, you can’t, because George beat you to it) a nine-dollar 1929 edition of Vincent Starrett’s Penny Wise and Book Foolish, a tender paean to book collecting that contains the following sentence: “Every new search is a voyage to the Indies, a quest for buried treasure, a journey to the end of the rainbow; and whether or not at the end there shall be turned up a pot of gold or merely a delightful volume, there are always wonders along the way.”

  Not everyone likes used books. The smears, smudges, underlinings, and ossified toast scintillae left by their previous owners may strike daintier readers as a little icky, like secondhand underwear. When I was young I liked my books young as well. Virginal paperbacks, their margins a tabula rasa for narcissistic scribbles, were cheap enough to inspire minimal guilt when I wrote in them and bland enough to accept my defacements without complaint. In those days, just as I believed that age would buffet other people’s bodies but not my own, so I believed my paperbacks would last forever. I was wrong on both counts. My college Penguins now explode in clouds of acidic dust when they are prized from their shelves. Penny Wise and Book Foolish, on the other hand, remains ravishing at the age of sixty-eight, its binding still firm and its bottle-green cover only slightly faded.

  After paperbacks lost their allure, I converted to secondhand books partly because I couldn’t afford new hardbacks and partly because I developed a taste for bindings assembled with thread rather than glue, type set in hot metal rather than by computer, and frontispieces protected by little sheets of tissue paper. I also began to enjoy the sensation of being a small link in a long chain of book owners. The immaculate first editions cherished by rare-book collectors—no notes, no signatures, no bookplates—now leave me cold. I have come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room for everyone—the more, the merrier. In fact, the only old book I am likely to approach with unease is one with uncut pages. On an earlier birthday, George gave me a two-volume set of Farthest North, Fridtjof Nansen’s account of his unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole by ship. The edges were unopened. As I slit them with an unpracticed fingernail, I was overcome with melancholy. These beautiful volumes had been published in 1897, and not a single person had read them. I had the urge to lend them to as many friends as possible in order to make up for all the caresses they had missed during their first century.

  “Alas,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher. “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!” Mine is relatively strong at Barnes & Noble, because I know that if I resist a volume on one visit, and someone else buys it, an identical volume will pop up in its place like a plastic duck in a shooting gallery. And if I resist that one, there will be another day, another duck. In a secondhand bookstore, each volume is one-of-a-kind, neither replaceable from a publisher’s warehouse nor visually identical to its original siblings, which have accreted individuality with every change of ownership. If I don’t buy the book now, I may never have another chance. And therefore, like Beecher, who believed the temptations of drink were paltry compared with the temptations of books, I am weak.

  At least my frailty places me in good company. Southey, noted one observer, could not pass a bookstall without “just running his eye over for one minute, even if the coach which was to take him to see Coleridge at Hampstead was within the time of starting.” Of Macaulay, it was said there was “no one so ready to mount a ladder and scour the top shelf for quarto pamphlets, or curious literary relics of a bygone age, and come down after an hour’s examination covered with dust and cobwebs, sending for a bun to take the place of his usual luncheon.” And when the eighteenth-century London bookseller James Lackington was a young man, his wife sent him out on Christmas Eve with half a crown—all they had—to buy Christmas dinner. He passed an old bookshop and returned with Young’s Night Thoughts in his pocket and no turkey under his arm. “I think I have acted wisely,” he told his famished wife, “for had I bought a dinner we should have eaten it tomorrow, and the pleasure would have been soon over, but should we live fifty years longer, we shall have the Night Thoughts to feast upon.”

  When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos to fuel my fantasies of stumbling on, say, a copy of Poe’s Tamerlane, like the one a fisherman found under a stack of agricultural tracts in a New Hampshire antiques barn in 1988 and purchased for fifteen dollars. It was auctioned at Sotheby’s later that year for $198,000. I might note that people too well bred to mention money in other contexts do not hesitate, if they think they have gotten a bargain, to quote the sum they have spent for a used book. Lamb wrote Coleridge, “I have lit upon Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bullen, for half-a-crown. Rejoice with me.” And he wrote Southey, “I have picked up, too, another copy of Quarles for ninepence!!! O temporal! O lectores!” (I came across Lamb’s cries of jubilation in volume 1 of The Life and Works of Charles Lamb, an undated two-volume “Edition de Luxe,” complete with illustrations, which I purchased for fifteen dollars. Rejoice with me.)

  The only problem with lugging home nineteen pounds of books from Hastings-on-Hudson was that several thousand pounds of books already overcrowded our shelves. Over the years, as our loft has come to look less and less like a home and more and more like a secondhand bookstore, I have frequently fantasized about making the designation official. Wouldn’t it be fun, when the children are grown, to become bookdealers ourselves—“COLT & FADIMAN, Old Books Bought and Sold, Dog-Eared Volumes Our Specialty”?

  Alas, I fear the reality might be a rude awakening. In a 1936 essay titled “Bookshop Memories,” George Orwell recalled his days as a clerk in a secondhand bookstore. The hours were long, the shop was freezing, the shelves were strewn with dead bluebottle flies, and a large fraction of the customers were lunatics. Worst of all, the books themselves gradually lost their luster. “There was a time when I really did love books,” he wrote, “loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction … . But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening.”

  Was this an inevitable response, akin to the ice-cream disenchantment that reportedly overtakes every Baskin-Robbins employee, or was it (as I hoped) just Orwellian cynicism? I consulted my friend Adam, who had spent every Saturday of his sophomore and junior years at Harvard working in the Pangloss Bookshop in Cambridge. He confessed that he had been similarly disillusioned.

  “I came to feel that a book without a home is a pointless thing,” he said, “and in a bookshop, that’s all you have. This hit me very powerfully when I visited the apartment of John Clive, the historian, after he died in 1990, to pack up his library and move it to our store. I had taken Clive’s class on the British Empire that semester, but he was an unflashy lecturer and I didn’t feel I’d gotten to know him. It was only when I saw his bookshelves—James Bond paperbacks cheek by jowl with nineteenth-century parliamentary proceedings—that I got a sense of who Clive really was. His intellectual furnishings explained him in a way his
lectures hadn’t.

  “We took the books back to the store and divided them up by topic—history on the left wall, literature on the right wall, philosophy in the back alcove—and somehow, all of a sudden, they weren’t John Clive anymore. Dispersing his library was like cremating a body and scattering it to the winds. I felt very sad. And I realized that books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.

  “When I was leaving work that day, I noticed that the proprietor had put one of Clive’s books in the fifty-cent cart we kept on the sidewalk. It was an Edwardian compact Shakespeare with an ugly typeface and garishly colored plates. Inside, in a round adolescent hand that must have dated from his teens or early twenties, Clive had written his name and the lines from The Tempest ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’”

  I asked Adam what he had done with the book.

  “I bought it,” he said, “and took it home.”

  Also by Anne Fadiman

  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

  Anne Fadiman

  Ex Libris

  Anne Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar. Recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award for her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (FSG, 1997), she has written for The New Yorker, Civilization, Harper’s, Life, and The New York Times, among other publications. She and her family recently moved from New York City to western Massachusetts.

  Praise for Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris

  “In the literary Eden that forms Anne Fadiman’s life, the air remains pure allusion, the marginalia flows, and the only snake in the grass is a typo.”

  —Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review

  “It is not just that she is erudite (which she is), or that an outlandish word will send her to the dictionary (which it will). It’s that a book will set her pulses racing, whether it’s Livy’s account of the battle of Lake Trasimene or Beatrix Potter’s ‘The Story of the Fierce Bad Rabbit.’ More to the point, perhaps, she can set ours racing too.”

  —The Economist

  “Anne Fadiman reveals the delights of her bibliographic life, where reading, writing, and collecting books is not just a profession, but an abiding, self-affirming, and shared passion, thanks to her equally hooked-on-books husband.”

  —Elle

  “These 18 stylish, dryly humorous essays … pay tribute to the joys of reading, the delights of language, and the quirks (yes, there are a few) of fellow bibliophiles … [A] charmingly uncommon miscellany on literary love.”

  —Megan Harlan, Entertainment Weekly

  “Witty, enchanting and supremely well-written … One of the most delightful volumes to have come across my desk in a long while, a book of essays in celebration of bibliophilia that will appeal to anyone who’s ever rootled about in a secondhand bookshop and who loves books.”

  —Robert McCrum, London Observer

  “The perfect gift for any book-lover-but don’t be surprised if once the recipient unwraps it, he becomes oblivious to all else.”

  —Ann Lloyd Merriman, Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “A book lover’s mash note to the writers who have brought her joy.”

  —Andy Steiner, UTNE Reader

  “A rapturous reminder that bookworms may have been forced underground, but theirs is a rich and happy life.”

  —J. Peder Zane, The News & Observer (Raleigh)

  “Each essay is a model of clarity and lightly worn erudition.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A smart little book that one can happily welcome into the family and allow to start growing old.”

  —The New York Times

  “It’s a lovely collection of essays on a family’s love affair with books and words, a passion passed from her parents to her children.”

  —USA Today

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Most good secondhand bookstores have a shelf labeled “Books About Books.” That no such shelves exist in new bookstores is both a dispiriting reflection of readers’ changing interests and an explanation of why so many of the following titles are out of print—some, in fact, for more than a century.

  My favorite book about books happens to be called The Book About Books: The Anatomy of Bibliomania. It is a monumental compendium by Holbrook Jackson, based in form and style on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, whose chapter titles alone (“Bibliopegic Dandyism”; “Symptoms of Bibliophily”; “Bibliobibacity with a Digression of Ecstasy”) are whiffs of opium beckoning the book addict into a den from which he or she is likely to emerge several weeks later, tottering with intoxication. Other useful compilations of book lore and quotations include Bookman’s Pleasure, also edited by Holbrook Jackson; The Book-Lover’s Enchiridion, edited by Alexander Ireland; and Books, edited by Gerald Donaldson.

  I recommend the following anthologies of essays on books and reading: Bookworms, edited by Laura Furman and Elinore Standard; Reading in Bed, edited by Steven Gilbar; The Romance of the Book, edited by Marshall Brooks; The Most Wonderful Books, edited by Michael Dorris and Emilie Buchwald; What Is a Book?, edited by Dale Warren; Bouillabaisse for Bibliophiles and Carrousel for Bibliophiles, both edited by William Targ; and Men and Books, edited by Malcolm S. MacLean and Elisabeth K. Holmes. The Literary Gourmet, by Linda Wolfe, is a succulent anthology of food literature, complete with recipes for Gogol’s stuffed sturgeon and Maupassant’s crayfish bisque. A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel; The Evolution of the Book, by Frederick G. Kilgour; and The Kingdom of Books, by William Dana Orcutt, contain valuable historical material. Among the many volumes on book collecting, I am particularly fond of Penny Wise and Book Foolish, by Vincent Starrett, and A Gentle Madness, by Nicholas A. Basbanes. ABC for Book Collectors, John Carter’s classic dictionary of book-related terms, is indispensable for the sort of reader who has always wanted to know the difference between a free endpaper and a pastedown endpaper.

  Those who seek inspiration for reading aloud will find an abundance in Charles Dickens as a Reader, by Charles Kent, and “The Blue Room,” an autobiographical essay by Adam Gopnik published in The New Yorker and, for reasons I can’t fathom, never anthologized; “Reading Aloud,” from The Size of Thoughts, by Nicholson Baker, focuses on the pitfalls of the art and thus cannot be classed as inspirational, but it should be read anyway because it is so funny. On the subject of arranging one’s library, readers of this book will already know that I cherish On Books and the Housing of Them, by W. E. Gladstone.

  Anyone interested in the intersection of literature and life should read The Common Reader and The Second Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf.

  Six essays on books and reading have made an indelible impression on me: “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse,” from Essays, by Michel de Montaigne; “1808 Lectures on the Principles of Poetry,” lecture 3, from Lectures 1808—1819 on Literature, volume 1, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” from The Last Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb; “On Reading Old Books,” from The Plain Speaker, by William Hazlitt; “Bookshop Memories,” from An Age Like This, volume 1 of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Onvell; and “Unpacking My Library,” from Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Five years ago I got a call from an editor named Stephen G. Smith asking whether I would like to help found Civilization . Over the phone I could hear neither the uppercase C nor the italics, and thus believed for a few heady moments that I was to be a latter-day Romulus, called from my desk to get suckled by she-wolves and rout barbarians. The truth, though it dashed my fantasies, was not altogether different. During my happy tenure there, I came to see Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, as a kind of utopian city. The infinitive-splitters and the modifier-danglers were pounding at the gate, but even though we could hear the thump of their battering rams, our walls
were thick and our little metropolis was safe.

  When I told Steve Smith I wanted to write a column called “The Common Reader,” he rashly said yes. He informed me that I was to forget about reportage and write about myself and my family, a fiat that was initially alarming but ultimately emancipating. The resulting essays—some of which I’ve renamed or lengthened or fiddled with—became this book. Steve edited most of them, with such meticulous expertise that I was sometimes tempted to junk my own words and publish his marginalia.

  I would also like to thank the members of Civilization’s staff—Leah Edmunds, Gretchen Ernster, Rachel Hartigan, Elizabeth Hightower, Aaron Matz, Katie O’Halleran, Diantha Parker, David Vine, and Charles Wilson—who disinterred and checked odd facts. William Mills of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, provided information about Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic base camp; Carolyn Chadwick of the Center for Book Arts, in New York City, explained how the volume I inherited from my great-grandmother was printed and bound; and P. J. Williams of St. Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden, Wales, sent useful material about W. E. Gladstone’s library.

  At Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I was fortunate to be sheltered under the generous editorial wings of Jonathan Galassi and Natasha Wimmer. Susan Mitchell and Jonathan Lippincott made the book look beautiful, outside and in. After Karla Reganold copyedited it, I realized I wasn’t nearly as good a proofreader or grammarian as I had previously thought.

  Adam Goodheart deftly edited several of the essays, suggested material, and spent innumerable hours talking with me about books. Many other friends also got used to my telephone calls: “Do you dog-ear your books?” “Do you know the meaning of opopanax?” “What dirty books did you steal from your parents’ shelves?” Bill Abrams, Ross Baughman, Charles Bell, Laurence Bergreen, John Bethell, Sara Bethell, Lisa Colt, Sandy Colt, Byron Dobell, Lars Engle, Rob Farnsworth, Campbell Geeslin, Eric Gibson, Paula Glatzer, Peter Gradjansky, Maggie Hivnor, Kathy Holub, Rhonda Johnson, Pepe Karmel, Susan McCarthy, Charlie Monheim, Mark O’Donnell, Dan Okrent, Julie Salamon, Kathy Schuler, Carol Whitmore, and Sherri Yingst fielded my questions with good grace. Jon Blackman and Maud Gleason came in for more than their share of interrogation and were kind enough not to complain. Gary Hovland, Robert Lescher, Brian Miller, Barbara Quarmby, Carol Sandvik, Frances Stead Sellers, and, especially, Monica Gregory provided help of various kinds. My dear friends Jane Condon and Lou Ann Walker encouraged me from start to finish, as they have with all my projects for more than twenty years.