That evening in Paris, Pontiggia and I had come face to face with another member of our clandestine confraternity, of necessity a limited one, given the conditions one has to fulfill, and we were able to tackle a number of serious questions of which ordinary mortals remain in complete ignorance. Why, for instance, does it so often happen that the out-of-print book you ordered the moment you received the bookseller’s catalog turns out—already—to be unavailable after all? Or, how should you classify your books? By alphabetical order, by genre, by language, chronologically, or—why not?—according to an invisible web of affinities of the Warburg kind (more of this in Chapter 3), mysterious to everyone except the owner? Gilbert Lely, the poet and specialist on Sade, apparently always kept one hundred books on his shelves, not a single one more, and whenever he bought one book he jettisoned another. Georges Perec tells the story of one of his friends who decided, for some reason as surreal as it is incomprehensible, on the ideal number as 361, but could never decide how to count books that came in several volumes, or compendia like the Pléiade editions, which contain several books in one.
We spent some happy moments, Pontiggia and I, comparing the reactions of occasional visitors to a sight they found astonishing. After the “oohs and ahs” there inevitably came the same questions: “How many have you got?” “Have you read them all?” “How do you find your way around them?”—and so on. For us, by contrast, it would be more of a surprise to go into someone’s house and find no books at all, or find no more than a skeleton library belonging to a so-called colleague; or, alternatively, a beautifully arranged set of volumes, protected by glass-fronted bookcases, which you sense at once are entirely for show.
By the end of the evening, with the help of the vodka, we had dreamed up an association of owners of private libraries containing over twenty thousand books—exactly the number of Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini’s books in Giorgio Bassani’s novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The association would have the function of defending the interests of this little-known minority. Our association never saw the light of day, but from that evening on, we maintained a friendly complicity, which ended only with the premature death of my friend Giuseppe “Peppo” Pontiggia in June 2003.
But how does one get to be the owner of so many books? Individual answers would probably be of many kinds: family tradition (“May I be allowed to repeat that my father’s library was the capital event in my life. The truth is that I have never left it”—Borges); prize-winning schooldays; a budding academic career; or a mixture of all those elements. In my case, none of these apply. Instead it was a heartfelt desire to fulfill Borges’s definition of a book collection, “Paradise is a library,” or Bachelard’s, “Doesn’t paradise consist of a huge library?”—although I prefer, with agnostic prudence, to turn these definitions inside out: the library is what brings us closest to paradise on earth.
Before that, came the discovery of reading—which penetrated, like a shaft of sunlight, through the gloomy atmosphere of a provincial childhood of the 1960s. One day, someone will write a book about the boredom of those years, when our fathers were rebuilding the French economy (and helping themselves, on the way) while their wives and children were still living in the nineteenth century. The so-called “thirty glorious years” (1945–75) weren’t glorious for everyone. Yes, French women had the vote at last, but their legal status was still very largely defined by marriage; married women couldn’t own a checkbook, for example. In the provincial petite bourgeoisie where I was brought up, women still looked after home and children, and depended on the head of the family for their housekeeping money. As for the children, they were, to put it briefly, daily confronted with the authority principle. To take just one example: in 1967 it was still forbidden to bring a daily newspaper—even serious ones like Le Figaro, Combat or Le Monde—into a French state lycée. Family discussions were rare, and one’s parents’ decisions were not over-burdened by rational considerations. The tedium of childhood could be fought only by two things: sport or reading. And reading was something like the river flowing through the Garden of Eden, its four watercourses heading off toward the four horizons. Reading scorns distance, and could transport me instantly into the most faraway countries with the strangest customs. And it did the same for centuries of the past: I had only to open a book to be able to walk through seventeenth-century Paris, at the risk of having a chamber-pot emptied over my head, to defend the walls of Byzantium as they tottered before falling to the Ottomans, or to stroll through Pompeii the night before it was buried under a tidal wave of ash and lava. I noticed after a while that books were not only a salutary method of escape, they also contained tools that made it possible to decode the reality around me. The ambitious petit-bourgeois milieu of my youth wanted to consolidate its upward mobility, and in order to do so was prepared to support its children throughout their education. It was time to move out of trade and into the law, medicine, or finance. These were the real roots of May ’68: the younger generation had become more intelligent, or at any rate better educated than its parents (not difficult) and was starting to ask unprecedented questions which, although by no means absurd, did not receive even the beginnings of an answer until the first cobblestones began to fly. Escape and knowledge: it all came from books. I have retained from that time an eternal gratitude, a sort of moral debt toward them, one I have still not finished paying. It was also a way of sliding off the family rails. Hence my ambition—as good as any other, after all—to turn my life to advantage by reading all the books in the world.
But why keep tens of thousands of books in one’s private library? Why could paradise not consist simply of a few shelves? For some people, a single book is enough! For others, the libraries that already exist would suffice. But as Robert Musil explained, that doesn’t suit everyone. (“I can’t work in public libraries, because smoking is forbidden. That makes sense, doesn’t it? But when I read at home, I don’t smoke.”—Diaries)
Then there was the sequence of chance moves which led me to take various jobs in the book trade. Hence my taste for complete sets (by author, subject, collection, period, country, and so on) and an extreme difficulty in parting with a book once read (who knows whether, in the future, I might need a book I found boring first time round?). At any rate, the choice between what to keep and what to throw out takes a kind of energy I have always been unwilling to expend (barring a few exceptions, admittedly). Finally, there was the urge to have ready to hand all the books, paintings, music and films I possibly could, as elements of internal freedom. This was of course long before the internet made it all readily available. It is infinitely easier now than in the past to find an out-of-print volume via the AbeBooks website, which puts you in touch with the catalogs of 13,500 second-hand bookshops from all over the world—but you will only find there what you are already looking for: it’s not the same at all as thumbing through a bookseller’s booth on the banks of the Seine and turning up a book you have never heard of before.
Like Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales (“I can’t remember learning to read and I am bold enough to think I must always have been able to”), I have no memory of the moment I learned to read, unlike some people, who can recall what it was like “before,” such as a Brazilian friend, who claims to remember—unless he has been told this by his family—a time when he pretended to read aloud texts he could not possibly have understood. At any rate, starting from this long-forgotten moment, I read avidly everything that passed in front of my eyes, using any free time left over from playing football. From this vague magma of random readings, only a few memories now swim up: the adventures of Bob Morane (forerunner of the rather more spicy secret agent O.S.S. 117, whom I encountered in adolescence); or romantic novels by Delly (about girls who were poor and beautiful and fell in love with young men who inevitably turned out to be the sons of princes kidnapped in childhood—or else about young men, who were poor and handsome and fell for girls who turned out to be … you get the picture). Th
en there was Captain Corcoran and Louison, his tame tiger, the gentleman robber Arsène Lupin, always immaculately turned out—I can still see the disturbing cover of L’Ile aux trente cercueils (Coffin Island), a book issued in installments and found in our attic—or Louis Garneray, a painter of marine life and chronicler of Surcouf the corsair and his shipmates. I systematically refused—for reasons that remain a mystery to me today—to read any of my set books at school, which meant I had to wait an extra ten years before discovering Montaigne, Racine, Diderot or Balzac.
Among the few exceptions to survive from this period are the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, whose fate of organized solitude already fascinated me, and the books of the only authors in my grandfather’s small library, whom he read and reread all his life: Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens. I also read voraciously the three magazines to which my grandparents subscribed: Le Chasseur français (The French hunter): stories about guns and dogs did not greatly appeal to me, but there was a section called “Jokes and epigrams” which I loved; Historia, where I found plenty of encouragement to dream about the enigma of the man in the iron mask, or the destiny of the lost dauphin, Louis XVII, to mourn the tragic lot of Marie-Antoinette or the duc d’Enghien, or to wonder at the strange fate of Fouquet, ending his life in the Pinerolo fortress, after the splendor of Vaux-le-Vicomte; and lastly, Reader’s Digest, in which I discovered the great events of the century, the horrors of the Great War, and what were then called concentration camps, telling myself there would never be any more anti-Semitism or genocide in the world—on which count I was of course wrong.
So you see, I devoured quite indiscriminately anything that was printed, and not very much of it stuck, except a habit of reading which had somehow to be channeled. It was only when, like many French teenagers of my generation, I read Boris Vian’s L’Ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) at the age of about fifteen that I discovered that novels could be more than an adventure story to dream about, and that the word “literature” started to mean something. Vian did have the signal advantage of being a writer whose name was spread by word of mouth; he was never on the school syllabus.
2
BIBLIOMANIA
Of what interest to me are those countless books and libraries, whose owners have scarcely read the labels in their whole lifetime?
SENECA
There are plenty of libraries to be found in novels. Sometimes they are even a central element—the library of the Benedictine abbey in The Name of the Rose, Des Esseintes’s library in A Rebours (Against Nature), by J. K. Huysmans, or the one belonging to the Sinologist Peter Kien in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé, not to mention the “definitive” 12,000 volumes owned by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. But I know of only one novel in which virtually every character is a bibliomaniac: Carlos Maria Dominguez’s La Casa de papel (The Paper House). The narrator is himself haunted by the proliferation of his books (“They are advancing silently, innocently, through my house. There is no way I can stop them”), and finally succeeds in his quest to find another bibliomaniac, Carlos Bauer, only to discover that the latter has already given up the struggle: “Classifying twenty thousand volumes is no easy matter […] You have to have a strict respect for order, an almost superhuman respect, I would say.” Bauer’s fragile mental equilibrium cannot survive the loss of the card index without which his library has become impenetrable. So he uses his books to build a house (la casa de papel) on a beach far away from everything, and then destroys it, trying to find a book by Joseph Conrad (The Shadow Line), which someone has asked him to return.
But how does anyone manage to acquire so many thousands of books, which end up posing as many problems for their owner? There are various explanations, none of them exclusive—depending on the kind of bibliomaniac we are talking about. The term “bibliomaniac” can be applied to a wide range of personalities. They can be divided into two principal categories: collectors and manic readers.
Collectors can further be sub-divided into specialists and the all-purpose variety. The former will devote themselves to one author: in 1924, Tristan Bernard put up for sale the 173 editions of Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia) by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre which he had patiently collected; or perhaps a period or genre (Pierre-Jean Rémy collected eighteenth-century libertine novels); or a topic, a particular kind of binding, and so on. Christian Galantaris in his Manuel de bibliophilie (Handbook of bibliophilia) quotes two examples: Henry C. Folger (1857–1930), an associate of John D. Rockefeller, who bought up all the past editions of Shakespeare he could find (owning as many as eighteen copies of the same edition), and putting together a collection as large as that in the library of the British Museum (now the British Library). The second was James Douglas (1657–1742), an English doctor whose admiration for the works of Horace led him to possess 450 editions of his works, from the Milan edition of 1493 to one produced in 1739, the date of publication of his Catalogue. And there are even more eccentric cases, such as the collector who amassed only books by writers starting with B, or whose first name was Jules, like his own.
The rarity value of a book can also be a factor in its choice. So in his Mélanges tirés d’une petite bibliothèque (Gleanings from a small library), published in Paris by Crapelet in 1829, one senses the pride Charles Nodier felt in owning one of only seven or eight copies of the Oeuvres diverses d’un auteur de sept ans (Various works by a seven-year-old author), published “without any indication of place and date,” but probably in Paris, by the Imprimerie Royale in 1678. Nodier explains, “This book, which contains a few schoolbook exercises and letters written by the little duc de Maine, was printed by his governess, Mme de Maintenon, and his tutor, M. de Ragois.”
Even I, although I do not count myself a real bibliophile, am quite moved to think I own copy number 696 of the four-volume catalog of the works of Edgar Degas edited by P. A. Lemoine, Degas et son oeuvre (Degas and his works), published by Paul Brame/C. M. de Hauke, Arts et Métiers graphiques, in Paris in 1946–9. This was not quite as exclusively produced as Charles Nodier’s rarity, being in an edition of 950 copies (plus fifty “not for sale”) printed on watermarked Arches paper. But it was really the interest of Degas’s works that was the decisive factor, outweighing even the price. And I do have one precious and mysterious possession, whose riddle I hope to solve one day. This is a copy of a book called Sagesse et chimères (Wisdom and fantasies) by René Bertrand, with a preface by Jean Cocteau. The book was published by Grasset in 1953, but with a white Gallimard cover which has nothing to do with it, since it carries the title Kleist ou la fascination de la mort (Kleist or fascination with death) by one Jean-Martin Pradès. One might imagine that there was some mix-up at the printers between two books published respectively by Gallimard and Grasset, and that somehow the wrong cover had been attached—which would be mystery enough. But there are two details which complicate matters even further: the endpaper inside the book indicates one printer: “This edition (1st impression) was completed on November 2 1953 for Bernard Grasset, Publishers, Paris, by Floch Printers, Mayenne, etc,” while the cover carries a note that it was printed at another, by “Didot et Cie, Paris XIe, Roq-08-60.” What is more, there is no mention of a work on Kleist by Jean-Martin Pradès in the Gallimard catalog, nor indeed anywhere else, not in any bibliography of Kleist, not even in the catalog of the French National Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Nor can I find any trace anywhere of the said Jean-Martin Pradès. How did this Grasset title come to have a Gallimard cover for a non-existent book by an entirely unknown author? Where could this odd volume have come from?
There is a lithograph by Daumier called “The book-lover in heaven” (from Le Charivari, November 5, 1844) which perfectly illustrates the fascination rarity holds for the bibliophile. It shows a man thumbing through a little book and explaining to another book-lover, “I can’t tell you how happy I am … I’ve just found the 1780 Amsterdam edition of Horace for fifty écus—it’s very
valuable, because every page is covered with misprints!”
The mania for collecting can easily turn simply into accumulating. All one has to do is develop one collecting interest after another, and so on. But collectors of a particular category of articles almost always lose interest once they have reached their goal. When the collection is complete, what else is there to do? With nothing else to look for, the fascination of the thing completely evaporates. The collector contemplates the collection for a while (and through the collection, the image of him or herself, persevering and eventually reaching the desired goal) then neglects it, puts it aside, or gets rid of it, and starts another. The important thing is the chase. One can’t help thinking of the beaming face of Mr Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) at the end of the film The Maltese Falcon, when he realizes that the object on which he has finally laid his hands is a fake (“It’s a phony!”) and that he is going to have to return to Istanbul in search of the original. (“Well, sir, what do you suggest, we stand here and shed tears and call each other names, or shall we go to Istanbul?”) The chase is on again. If the falcon found by Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) had been authentic—the solid golden bird which the Knights of Malta presented to Charles V in 1539—the fat man’s life would have lost all meaning and he would have had to look for something else. Failure makes it possible to avoid the effort: he simply carries on as before.
Phantoms on the Bookshelves Page 2