Unlike the stationery shop of my childhood, a bookstore today carries not only the books marketed for women by outside commercial interests, to determine and limit that which a woman should read, but also the books created from within the group, in which women write for themselves that which is absent in the official texts. This sets out the reader’s task, which the Heian writers may have foreseen: to climb over the walls: to take whatever book seems appealing, strip it of its colour-coded covers and place it among those volumes which chance and experience have put upon her bedside shelf.
The possessive reader, Count Guglielmo Libri. (photo credit 16.3)
STEALING BOOKS
am once again about to move house. Around me, in the secret dust from unsuspected corners now revealed by the shifting of furniture, stand unsteady columns of books, like the wind-carved rocks of a desert landscape. As I build pile after pile of familiar volumes (I recognize some by their colour, others by their shape, many by a detail on the jackets whose titles I try to read upside down or at an odd angle) I wonder, as I have wondered every other time, why I keep so many books that I know I will not read again. I tell myself that, every time I get rid of a book, I find a few days later that this is precisely the book I’m looking for. I tell myself that there are no books (or very, very few) in which I have found nothing at all to interest me. I tell myself that I’ve brought them into my house for a reason in the first place, and that this reason may hold good again in the future. I invoke excuses of thoroughness, of scarcity, of faint scholarship. But I know that the main reason I hold onto this ever-increasing hoard is a sort of voluptuous greed. I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves, full of more or less familiar names. I delight in knowing that I’m surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life, with intimations of my future. I like discovering, in almost forgotten volumes, traces of the reader I once was — scribbles, bus tickets, scraps of paper with mysterious names and numbers, the occasional date and place on the book’s flyleaf which take me back to a certain café, a distant hotel room, a faraway summer so long ago. I could, if I had to, abandon these books of mine and begin again, somewhere else; I have done so before, several times, out of necessity. But then I have also had to acknowledge a grave, irreparable loss. I know that something dies when I give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia. And now, with the years, my memory can recall less and less, and seems to me like a looted library: many of the rooms have been closed, and in the ones still open for consultation there are huge gaps on the shelves. I pull out one of the remaining books and see that several of its pages have been torn out by vandals. The more decrepit my memory becomes, the more I wish to protect this repository of what I’ve read, this collection of textures and voices and scents. Possessing these books has become all-important to me, because I’ve become jealous of the past.
The French Revolution attempted to abolish the notion that the past was the property of a single class. It succeeded in at least one aspect: from an aristocratic entertainment, the collecting of ancient things became a bourgeois hobby, first under Napoleon, with his love for the trappings of Ancient Rome, and later in the republic. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the displaying of fusty bric-à-brac, of old masters’ paintings, of early books, had become a fashionable European pastime. Curiosity shops flourished. Antique dealers amassed caches of pre-revolutionary treasures which were bought and then displayed in the home museums of the nouveaux riches. “The collector,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “dreams that he is not only in a distant or past world but also, at the same time, in a better one in which, although men are as unprovided with what they need as in the everyday world, things are free of the drudgery of being useful.”1
In 1792 the Louvre Palace was turned into a museum for the people. Voicing a haughty complaint against the notion of a common past, the novelist Viscount François-René de Chateaubriand protested that works of art thus assembled “had no longer anything to say either to the imagination or to the heart”. When, a few years later, the artist and antiquarian Alexandre Lenoir founded the Museum of French Monuments to preserve the statuary and masonry of the mansions and monasteries, palaces and churches that the revolution had plundered, Chateaubriand dismissively described it as “a collection of ruins and tombs from every century, assembled without rhyme or reason in the cloisters of the Petits-Augustins.”2 In both the official world and the private world of collectors of the past’s ruins, Chateaubriand’s criticism went staunchly unheard.
Books were among the most copious remains left behind by the revolution. The private libraries of eighteenth-century France were family treasures, preserved and expanded from generation to generation among the nobility, and the books they contained were as much symbols of social standing as finery and deportment. One imagines the Count d’Hoym,3 one of the most celebrated bibliophiles of his time (he died at the age of forty in 1736), drawing from one of his overpopulated shelves a volume of Cicero’s Orations, which he would regard not as one among many hundreds or thousands of identical printed copies dispersed through numerous libraries but as a unique object, bound according to his specifications, annotated by his hand and bearing his family arms embossed in gold.
From roughly the end of the twelfth century, books became recognized as items of trade, and in Europe the commercial value of books was sufficiently established for money-lenders to accept them as collateral; notes recording such pledges are found in numerous medieval books, especially those belonging to students.4 By the fifteenth century the trade had become sufficiently important for books to be placed on the schedule of goods sold at the trade fairs of Frankfurt and Nördlingen.5
Some books, of course, were unique because of their rarity, and were valued at exorbitant prices (the rare Epistolae of Petrus Delphinus, of 1524, was sold for 1,000 livres in 1719 — about US $30,000 in today’s currency),6 but most had the value of intimate objects — family heirlooms, objects that only their hands and the hands of their children would ever touch. For that reason, libraries became one of the obvious targets of the revolution.
The raided libraries of the clergy and aristocracy, symbols of the “enemies of the republic”, ended up in huge depots in several French cities — Paris, Lyons, Dijon and others — where they waited, preyed upon by humidity, dust and vermin, for the revolutionary authorities to decide on their fate. The problem of storing such quantities of books became so serious that the authorities began organizing sales to rid themselves of part of the booty. However, at least up to the creation of the Bank of France as a private institution in 1800, most French bibliophiles (those who were not dead or in exile) were too impoverished to become customers, and only foreigners, mainly English and Germans, were able to profit from the situation. To satisfy this foreign clientele, local booksellers began acting as scouts and agents. In one of the last expurgatory sales, in Paris in 1816, the bookseller and publisher Jacques-Simon Merlin bought enough books to fill from cellar to attic two five-storey houses that he had acquired specially for the purpose.7 These volumes, in many cases precious and rare, sold for the weight of the paper, and this at a time when new books were still very expensive. For instance, during the first decade of the nineteenth century a recently published novel would have cost one-third of a French farmhand’s monthly wages, while a first edition of Paul Scarron’s Le Roman comique (1651) might have been picked up for a tenth of that sum.8
The books which the revolution had requisitioned and which had been neither destroyed nor sold abroad were eventually distributed among public reference libraries, but few readers made use of them. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the hours of access to these bibliothèques publiques were restricted, a dress code was enforced, and the precious books once again gathered dust on the shelves,9 forgotten and unread.
But not for long.
Guglielmo Bruto Icilio Timoleone, Conte Libri-Carucci della Sommaia, was born in Florence in 1803 of an old and noble Tuscan family. He studied
both law and mathematics, and became so successful at the latter that at the age of twenty he was offered the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa. In 1830, supposedly under threats from a nationalistic organization, the Carbonari, he emigrated to Paris and shortly thereafter became a French citizen. His resounding name reduced now to Count Libri, he was welcomed by French academics, elected a member of the Institut de France, made a professor of science at the University of Paris and awarded the Legion of Honour for his scholarly credentials. But Libri was interested in more than science; he had also developed a passion for books, and by 1840 he had amassed a notable collection and was trading in manuscripts and rare printed volumes. Twice he tried to obtain a post at the Royal Library, and failed. Then, in 1841, he was appointed secretary of a commission charged with overseeing the official “general and detailed catalogue of all the manuscripts, in tongues both ancient and modern, existing today in all departmental public libraries”.10
This is how Sir Frederic Madden, keeper of the Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum, described his first encounter with Libri, on May 6, 1846, in Paris: “In his external appearance [he] seemed as if he had never used soap and water or a brush. The room, in which we were introduced, was not more than about 16 feet wide, but filled with manuscripts on shelves up to the ceiling. The windows had double sashes and a fire of coal and coke burnt in the grate, the heat of which, added to the smell of the pile of vellum around, was so unsufferable, that I gasped for breath. M. Libri perceived the inconvenience we suffered and opened one of the windows, but it was easy to see that a breath of air was disagreeable to him, and his ears were stuffed with cotton, as if to prevent his feeling sensible of it! M. Libri is a rather corpulent person, of good humoured but broad features.”11 What Sir Frederic did not know — then — was that Count Libri was one of the most accomplished book thieves of all time.
According to the seventeenth-century gossipmonger Tallemant des Réaux, stealing books is not a crime unless the books are sold.12 The pleasure of holding a rare volume in one’s hands, of turning pages which no one else will turn without one’s permission, no doubt prompted Libri to some degree. But whether the sight of so many beautiful volumes unexpectedly tempted the learned bibliophile, or whether the lust for books had prompted him to seek out the position in the first place, we will never know. Armed with official credentials, dressed in a huge cloak under which he concealed his treasures, Libri gained access to libraries across France, where his specialized knowledge enabled him to pick out the hidden plums. In Carpentras, Dijon, Grenoble, Lyons, Montpellier, Orléans, Poitiers and Tours, he not only stole entire volumes but also cut out single pages, which he then exhibited and sometimes sold.13 Only in Auxerre did he not carry out his spoiling. The obsequious librarian, anxious to please the official whose papers announced him as Monsieur le Secrétaire and Monsieur l’Inspecteur Général, willingly authorized Libri to work in the library at night, but insisted that a guard be at his elbow to attend to monsieur’s every need.14
The first accusations against Libri date from 1846, but — perhaps because they sounded so improbable — they were ignored, and Libri continued to raid the libraries. He also began to organize important sales of some of the stolen books, sales for which he prepared excellent and detailed catalogues.15 Why did this passionate bibliophile sell the books he had stolen at such great risk? Perhaps he believed, like Proust, that “desire makes all things flourish, possession withers them all”.16 Perhaps he required only a precious few which he selected as the rare pearls of his booty. Perhaps he sold them out of mere greed — but that is a far less interesting supposition. Whatever his reasons, the sale of stolen books could no longer be ignored. The accusations grew, and a year later the public prosecutor initiated discreet enquiries — which were hushed up by the president of the Ministerial Council, M. Guizot, a friend of Libri’s and a witness at his marriage. It is probable that the affair would not have gone any further had not the Revolution of 1848, which ended the July Monarchy and proclaimed the Second Republic, uncovered Libri’s file hidden away in Guizot’s desk. Libri was warned and he and his wife escaped to England, but not without taking along eighteen cases of books valued at 25,000 francs.17 At the time, a skilled labourer was earning about 4 francs a day.18
A host of politicians, artists and writers rallied (in vain) to Libri’s defence. Some had profited from his schemes and didn’t want to be implicated in the scandal; others had accepted him as an honourable scholar and didn’t wish to appear as dupes. The writer Prosper Mérimée in particular was ardent in Libri’s defence.19 Libri had shown Mérimée, at the apartment of a friend, the celebrated Tours Pentateuch, a seventh-century illuminated volume; Mérimée, who had travelled widely through France and visited numerous libraries, remarked that he had seen this Pentateuch in Tours; Libri, quick on his feet, explained to Mérimée that what he had seen was a French copy of the original acquired by Libri himself in Italy. Mérimée believed him. Writing to Édouard Delessert on June 5, 1848, Mérimée insisted, “For me, who has always said that the love of collecting leads people to crime, Libri is the most honest of collectors, and I know of no man except Libri who would return to the libraries the books that others have stolen.”20 Finally, two years after Libri had been found guilty, Mérimée published in La Revue des Deux Mondes21 such a loud defence of his friend that the courts ordered him to appear before them, accused of contempt.
Under the burden of evidence, Libri was condemned in absentia to ten years in prison and loss of his public postings. Lord Ashburnham, who had bought from Libri through the intermediary of the bookseller Joseph Barrois another rare illuminated Pentateuch (this one he had stolen from the public library of Lyons), accepted the proofs of Libri’s guilt and returned the book to the French ambassador in London. The Pentateuch was the only book Lord Ashburnham returned. “The congratulations addressed from all sides to the author of such a liberal act, did not prompt him however to repeat the experience with other manuscripts in his library,” commented Léopold Delisle,22 who in 1888 assembled a catalogue of Libri’s spoils.
But by then Libri had long turned the final page of his last stolen book. From England he left for Italy and settled in Fiesole, where he died on September 28, 1869, unvindicated and destitute. And yet, in the end, he had his revenge on his accusers. The year of Libri’s death, the mathematician Michel Chasles, who had been elected to fill Libri’s chair at the Institut, purchased an incredible collection of autographs which he was certain would bring him envy and fame. It included letters from Julius Caesar, Pythagoras, Nero, Cleopatra, the elusive Mary Magdalen — and they were all eventually proved to be fakes, the handicraft of the famous forger Vrain-Lucas, whom Libri had asked to pay his successor a visit.23
The theft of books was not a new crime in Libri’s time. “The history of bibliokleptomania,” writes Lawrence S. Thompson, “goes back to the beginning of libraries in Western Europe, and undoubtedly can be traced back even further through the history of Greek and Oriental libraries.”24 The earliest Roman libraries were composed largely of Greek volumes because the Romans had so thoroughly ransacked Greece. The Royal Macedonian Library, the library of Mithridates of Pontus, the library of Apellicon of Teos (later used by Cicero), were all raided by the Romans and transferred to Roman soil. The early Christian centuries were not spared: the Coptic monk Pachomius, who had set up a library in his monastery at Tabennisi in Egypt in the first few decades of the third century, carried out an inventory check every evening to assure that the books had been returned.25 In their raids on Anglo-Saxon England, the Vikings stole the illuminated manuscripts of the monks, probably for the sake of the gold in the bindings. One of these rich volumes, the Codex Aureus, was stolen sometime in the eleventh century but had to be ransomed back to its original owners, because the thieves were unable to find a market for it elsewhere. Book thieves plagued the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; in 1752 Pope Benedict XIV proclaimed a bull in which book thieves were punished wit
h excommunication.
Other threats were more worldly, as this admonition inscribed in a valuable Renaissance tome proves:
My Master’s name above you see,
Take heede therefore you steale not mee;
For if you doe, without delay
Your necke … for me shall pay.
Looke doune below and you shall see
The picture of the gallowstree;
Take heede therefore of thys in time,
Lest on this tree you highly clime!26
Or this one, inscribed in the library of the monastery of San Pedro, in Barcelona:
For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.27
And yet no curses seem to deter those readers who, like crazed lovers, are determined to make a certain book theirs. The urge to possess a book, to be its sole owner, is a species of covetousness unlike any other. “A book reads the better,” confessed Charles Lamb, Libri’s contemporary, “which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.”28
A History of Reading Page 25