And in any case, that is to ignore exotic scripts like Mandarin, where the rules for transcription have been modified over time. If we choose instead continent or country, the first is too vast a category, while the second, as we have just noted, poses its own problems. Shelving by color was the system adopted by Valery Larbaud, a method he devised at the end of his life, so as to be able to spot the original languages of the books in his library. The problem there was that it would mean having everything rebound or covered, and there are more languages than there are easily-distinguishable colors. Shelving “by date of acquisition” would mean a meticulous set of records, and you would have had to establish the system from the very start, in other words at a time when it was impossible to anticipate the catastrophe to come. (At 39 the age of eighteen, one does not take a conscious decision to be burdened with 40,000 books one day in the future.) After that, it is too late to be able to follow the rule reliably. “Classification by size” means that by definition there are only exceptions. “By date of publication” means choosing between the date of the first edition—not always easy to establish—and that of the copy you happen to own. And what about translations? “By genre” is a category very difficult to stick to: if you interpret it too widely it becomes useless, and if you employ it too narrowly, it leads to Byzantine discussions. Sorting books “by literary period” will not work internationally: literary periods are often quite independent of one another, depending on country or language, and the definition is never clear-cut. “By frequency of consultation” will apply only to a select number of books and will change over time too. Classifying “by binding” is an option open only to bibliophiles. “By series” leaves out the countless books that come in no series at all.
So the solution I propose—and it’s stupid even to do so, since all owners of huge libraries have already chosen how to classify them, and the others won’t bother—is to combine several of these orders, allowing some latitude to one’s own rules. A principle you could extend, of course, to life in general.
Human reality sometimes intrudes strangely into the principles of classification. Christian Galantaris quotes the following extract from the rules of an English library of 1863: “The perfect mistress of a household will see to it that the works of male and female authors are decently separated and placed on different shelves. Unless the parties are married to one another, their proximity is not to be tolerated.” This confirms the view that the principle of ordering one’s books may be a warning sign of the owner’s mental disorder—in the case above, that of Victorian society as a whole. In the case of the hero of The Paper House, the principle applied is that of “affective relationships.” Carlos Bauer does indeed try to avoid two authors who dislike each other finding themselves neighbors on his bookshelves:
… for example, it was unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by García Lorca, whom the Argentine writer once described as “a professional Andalusian.” And given the dreadful accusations of plagiarism between the two of them, he could not put something by Shakespeare next to a work by Marlowe, even though this meant not respecting the volume numbers of the series in his collection [Elizabethan drama]. Nor of course could he place a book by Martin Amis next to one by Julian Barnes, after the two friends had fallen out, or Vargas Llosa alongside García Márquez.
On the other hand, he also puts together some curious bedfellows, a course which he likes to justify (“Dostoevsky ended up closer to Roberto Arlt than he did to Tolstoy. And again: Hegel, Victor Hugo and Sarmiento deserve to be closer together than Paco Espinola, Benedetti and Felisberto Hernández”). In the same way, a certain Henri Quentin-Bauhart (mentioned by Galantaris) thought of “marrying” various books to each other: by that he meant he would bring together in his library two books equally cherished. For example, he brought together a 1532 edition of Clément Marot with a Louise Labbé of 1555 and so on. We do not know what effect on this arrangement would have been produced by the recent revelation that Louise Lab[b]é may never have existed—that perhaps “her” works were written by a group of poets from Lyon (Maurice Scève, Olivier de Magny, Jacques Pelletier du Mans and others) who all frequented the printing house of Jean de Tournes, as postulated by Mireille Huchon in Louise Labé, une créature de papier (Louise Labé, a paper creation). Perhaps Labbé would no longer have been judged worthy to be placed next to Marot. As for Alberto Ruy Sanchez, author of Mogador: the Names of the Air, he crossed a further threshold regarding the potential intimacy between two books on a shelf: “It is said that if at night, in certain very pleasant sections of the Mogador library, two books which have affinities with one another are placed together, next morning one will find three of them …”
While on the subject of ultra-subjective ways of classifying books, one should not omit to mention the great art historian Aby Warburg, who also had some serious psychological problems. The son of a wealthy Hamburg banker, he had, the story goes, sold to his brother Max his birthright as eldest son to run the family bank, in return for unlimited credit with which to buy books for the whole of his lifetime. That led to the 100,000 volumes of the Warburg Institute, now housed in London, which has occupied such an important place in the history of art in the twentieth century. Originally private, Aby Warburg’s library evolved continually, according to its owner’s mental itinerary and his principle of the “law of good neighborliness.” His chief concern was the “survival of the ancient” and Fritz Saxl, who was the first librarian of the collection, himself testified that, “The arrangement of books on the shelves was disconcerting: anyone walking in would have found it odd, to say the least, that Warburg wore himself out moving them around all the time.” Ernst Cassirer, who had worked there, said at Warburg’s funeral in 1929: “From the sequence of books there emerged, in ever clearer fashion, a series of images, themes and original ideas. And behind their complexity, I eventually came to see taking shape the clear and dominating figure of the man who had built up this library, and his personality as a researcher destined to have a far-reaching influence.”
More modestly, I can now offer a precise example of classification, the one I know best: my own. My library is arranged by genre and sub-genre, with books being placed alphabetically within sections. There are three main categories: literature; non-fiction (a terrible Anglicism, which unfortunately does not have a French equivalent); and the arts.
Literature is subdivided into languages, but the Catalans are in the Spanish section, Frédéric Mistral (who wrote in Provençal) is in the French section, and if the Scandinavian section contains books translated from Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and even Norse, it also contains Finnish literature which, strictly speaking, ought to be shelved with Hungarian, or—why not?—with Estonian. But this would have been to infringe a kind of literary taboo, comparable, I must admit, to the very outdated theory of climate, and which would in any case have faced me with another problem: Finnish authors who write in Swedish. So the language of expression would have trumped the cultural community, something I refused to allow to happen. (The owner of a large library quickly becomes a kind of autocrat, going so far as to interfere even with other people’s books. Visiting a colleague, I own up to having surreptitiously rearranged different volumes of a work which have got out of order, or turned a book round if it is lying on its side so that its title is upside down!) And I confess I have not yet found an acceptable solution for Frisian—for example, I have a copy of Tjerne le Frisian by Gysbert Japicx, translated into French by Henk Zwier. The translator tells us that Frisian is a language belonging to the Germanic group, very close to Old English, and that it is mostly spoken in the northern Netherlands. The book was oddly enough in the Scandinavian section when I finally traced it, but I am not sure I will put it back there! And I should perhaps say that I have an entire subsection bringing together, without any distinction of language of origin, all my crime novels and thrillers.
My non-fiction section has two main divisions, which are far from r
igorous: abstract (consisting of philosophy, theology, history of religions, science, psychoanalysis, psychology, literary criticism, linguistics, literary history) and concrete (history, politics, anthropology, autobiography, biography, and documents). I know, I know, this raises subtle questions of definition. Above all, there is the dilemma posed by authors both of theoretical works and of other books which take us closer to the material world. Should I put Norbert Elias’s What is Sociology? next to his more historical works? Should Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire (Writing history) be next to his studies of sexuality and euertegism (gift-giving) in ancient Rome?
The arts section is perforce much subdivided: music, cinema, photography, painting and drawing, architecture, exhibition catalogs and—for reasons of size—art history, criticism and aesthetics. These subdivisions are further divided: painting is by school (French, Italian, Flemish, German, etc.), the catalogs are split between museum catalogs by country, one-man shows, and thematic exhibitions (Art in Medieval France; Pictures within Pictures; Melancholy—and these are shelved chronologically). There is a whole bookcase containing art books that do not fall into any category. I will stop at this point, to spare the reader, but I could go on forever, pointing out exceptions or tricky cases—does Picasso count as French or Spanish? Modigliani as Italian or French? Giacometti as Swiss? Do I treat Bernini as a painter or a sculptor (oh yes, sculpture is another sub-section)—or, indeed, as an architect? And what am I to do with Michelangelo?
Finally, there is a large wall behind my worktable where I have shelved all my reference works—dictionaries of all kinds, lexicons (philosophical, psychoanalytic, gastronomy, etc.). But the 1970 edition of the Encyclopedia Universalis has recently had to be moved to a nearby room, for reasons of space (I had to make some room for works on French painting because there has been such a rapid expansion recently in the activities of museums and art publishers).
This apparently impeccable ordering is in fact unsettled by many individual cases that present knotty problems—these have been resolved in a particular way but might equally well have been decided otherwise—as well as by a number of perhaps more logical exceptions. It was very tempting to put all my Pléiade editions [a uniform series, leather-bound and on bible paper, published by Gallimard] in a special bookcase suited to their size, but some of them are in fact shelved with the other works by a given author. Some complete collections have interrupted the purely alphabetical order of their section. Periodicals are shelved in a special bookcase, but these too are sometimes placed by genre. Volumes in a collection called Les Cahiers de l’Herne, which has a particular shape, are in theory placed together, but since I have run out of space, some of them are with the other books by the author in question.
I can only find my way around because I have personally placed each book in its position, one by one, down the years, and any changes were thought about long enough at the time to enable me to remember them. But all this doesn’t prevent me from sometimes searching high and low when trying to find, say, a book translated from Romanian or Dutch (including Flemish), while the Walloons are in the French section. (The hypothetical partition of Belgium, so often talked about, has become fact in my library.) These sections are too specific to be easily included with others, but small enough to be moved from time to time, and too limited in number to be picked out at a glance. Sometimes I spend time looking for a book for which the logical place has been overtaken by events. Or failing to find a book that I know I have somewhere. Have I mis-shelved it or is it lost? I cannot always answer that question, or else it is answered too late, when I have already bought another copy. When that happens, should I keep both of them? And if not, then which one?
4
THE PRACTICE OF READING
To own books without reading them is like having a painting of a bowl of fruit.
DIOGENES
“And have you read all of them?” No, of course not! Or maybe not. Actually, I don’t know. It’s complicated. There are some books I have read and then forgotten (quite a lot of those) and some which I have only flicked through but which I remember. So I may not have read them all, but I have turned their pages, sniffed them, handled them physically. After that, the book might take one of three possible directions (I’m speaking now of books I have chosen or acquired, that is in some way selected, rather than of books received). They may be read immediately, or pretty soon; they may be put off for reading later—and that could mean weeks, months and even years, if circumstances are particularly unfavorable, or the number of incoming books is too great—in what I call my “to read” pile. Or they may go straight on to the shelf. Even those books have been “read” in a sense: they are classified somewhere in my mind, as they are in my library. They will serve their turn one day, I don’t know when or what for just now, but they’re not sitting there by chance. Books that deserve a mention here are those we have read, but did not appreciate, or those we will never get along with because, written by geniuses though they might have been, they don’t say anything to us; books that need a second reading to be absorbed properly; books we might want to re-read purely for pleasure; and ones we will probably never open again but don’t want to lose sight of; finally there are all those authors whose complete works we promise ourselves we will tackle one day, and others we should like to discover. And so on. (“The truth is that a library, whatever its size, does not need to have been read cover to cover to serve a useful purpose”—Alberto Manguel.) Seneca, however, considered that the vast numbers of scrolls in the library at Alexandria amounted to so many “dining room decorations.”
“Then you must have some method for fast reading?” Yes, I do, of course, but only one. For the last fifty years I have spent a great deal of my time reading all kinds of books, in all kinds of circumstances and for all sorts of purposes. And as with any activity which has become familiar, whether manual, artistic or sporting, you do acquire a kind of special relationship with the object in question, in this case the printed word. (“Years of work are required before the cerebral mechanisms for reading, if regularly oiled, finally become unconscious”—Stanislas Dehaene.) The important thing is not so much to read fast, as to read each book at the speed it deserves. It is as regrettable to spend too much time on some books as it is to read others too quickly. There are books you know well, just from flicking through them, others you only grasp at second or third reading, and others again which will last you a lifetime. A detective novel can be read in a few hours, but to prepare a lecture on the few pages of The Waste Land demands several days. The most extreme imbalance between the time one can spend on a text and its actual length might be to write an essay on Apollinaire’s famous one-line poem: “Et l’unique cordeau des trompettes marines” (“And the single string of the tromba marina”). Writing a review of a book which has just been published means—at least in my case—reading it twice: once to discover the book as an innocent reader, and once more to put some order into one’s impressions and ideas. And in the end, you forget a great deal of what you have read. In How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard has written brilliantly about how all of us can find ourselves talking knowledgeably about books we have only heard about. A bit too brilliantly indeed, since the mass of assimilated reading matter that can be glimpsed behind his argument flagrantly contradicts what he says! He also remarks on the oblivion into which most of the books we have read will fall. “In the first place, it is hard to be quite sure if one has read a book or not, since reading is such a transitory thing.” Even when the book really has been read and absorbed well enough to have a specific place in our minds, what we recall is often a memory of the emotion we felt while reading it, rather than anything precise about its contents. (Years later, you give this title as a gift to someone because you remember having loved it long ago, but you are quite unable to discuss it with the recipient because the details have disappeared beyond recall.)
In Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene shows
how singular an event the coming of reading was for human evolution. It is a fairly recent activity for the human brain: the Babylonian invention of writing occurred about 5400 years ago, and the alphabet was created about 3800 years ago—too recently, in other words, for our genome to have time to alter to develop brain circuits adapted to reading. (“How was it that the cerebral architecture of a strange two-legged primate, which became a hunter-gatherer, adjusted so minutely in a few thousand years to the difficulties raised by recognizing writing?”—Stanislas Dehaene.) This faculty, which to the individual feels like magic is, therefore, also an improbable event in the story of human evolution and one of the most surprising aspects of brain function. Reading, which started originally as a way of receiving information (probably no more than tabulated accounts for goods, trade and transactions), made it possible to move on to noting less obviously instrumental thought processes, then to transmitting them over distances—and by leaving them for future generations to find, encouraged the accumulation and constant enrichment of written artifacts. With writing, and therefore reading, humanity did not just make a quantitative cultural leap, it completely changed the scale of human thought. Humans became complex thinking beings. (“Homo sapiens is the only primate capable of pedagogy, in the sense that this species alone can pay attention to the knowledge and mental state of others for teaching purposes. Not only do we actively transmit the cultural objects we deem useful but—and this is particularly noticeable in the case of writing—we deliberately perfect them. So over five thousand years ago, the first scribes discovered a hidden capacity of the human brain, that of learning to transmit language through the eyes”—Stanislas Dehaene.)
Phantoms on the Bookshelves Page 4