Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania

Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.

In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.

Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus. From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.

As with the metempsychosis of souls from body to body, this copy made its way across libraries and collections until it was purchased for the equivalent of seventy cents in 1970 by a 22-year-old Umberto Eco, this copy of Aristotle joining some 50,000 others as the philosopher built one of the largest personal libraries on the continent. “We live for books,” says a character in Eco’s 1980 philosophical Medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, that novel directly inspired by his Aristotle discovery. If you’re reading a site named Literary Hub, I’m going to assume that you understand that sentiment well.

Plenty of vociferous readers can sustain themselves by library card alone, but the coveting of the physical object of the codex is its own thing.

Another credo that probably makes sense to you—“When I have a little money, I buy books,” wrote Erasmus in a letter, “and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” Those are priorities that Eco internalized, comprehending the paradox of owning more books than you could ever read, of existing in a slipstream between possession and loss. This portly, bearded semiotician referred to his “anti-library,” that is the mass of books that Eco would never read but which he owned, their mere presence a humbling reminder of all of that which we’ll never know. “Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then can get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books,” writes Eco in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, but those “who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior.” The sort of figure mocked in the engraving “The Bibliomaniac” from Sebastian Brandt’s 1497 satirical allegory The Ship of Fools, a work that Erasmus knew well, where he may have recognized himself in the woodcut. I certainly do, seeing a reflection of my own bookish pursuits from half-a-millennia ago in Brandt’s ridiculous figure in monastic robes and scholarly cap and eyeglasses, sitting behind a desk and shelf piled with books, the figure fanning them as if he’s their servant rather than they his possessions.

There was a period when first building my collection from used-book stores and yard-sales, Half Priced Books and Barnes & Noble, where (like the bibliomaniac with his fan) I’d take a ruler and carefully inspect that as my treasures sat on the shelf the back edges of each volume were perfectly lined up so that the pages of the paperbacks wouldn’t curl outward around each other. Today I’m less anal retentive—mostly—but I still dedicate time to continually reorganizing my books, which are stored on nightstand and dresser, in my closets and on tabletops, and in a grand wooden shelf that spans the entirety of our living room. Books crammed in every room, in my campus office, and yes, in my trunk. Frayed paperbacks with mid-century modernist covers purchased from used bookstores and advance reader copies from publishers, massive reference works and beloved hardbacks bought at (that ever increasing) full price.

Using my own rudimentary arithmetic to arrive at an estimate of how many volumes I’ve collected over the past thirty years and I’ve arrived at around 3,000 books, which though paltry when compared to the vast hoard of the black-clad vampiric fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s 300,000, is within spitting distance of Ernest Hemingway (9,000), Thomas Jefferson (6,487), and Hannah Arendt (4,000). “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges, and of course.

People ask me if I’ve read them all, to which I waggishly respond that I’ve opened all of them (mostly), but while there is the stereotype of the book collector valuing status more than knowledge, whether the fool in Brandt’s illustration or Jay Gatsby with his uncut volumes, for me these titles represent the knowledge I’m anxious to acquire but which mortality prevents me from ever fulfilling. In this way, I hope that I’m much closer (if nothing else) to an Erasmus or an Eco. There is, within my larger library, a contingent of books that I’m trying to read at any given time, a mercurial syllabus that I’m always adding and subtracting from, moving the pile of volumes from room to room over the course of a day. Much of my day, it seems to me, is parsing what I’m including or not, figuring out what I’ll be reading next while I’m in the midst of my current book, like a hungry man at lunch deciding on dinner.

Right now that ever-shifting list includes Rita Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, Manvir Singh’s Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom, Morgan Falconer’s How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art, John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy, and Edward Hirsh’s The Heart of American Poetry. Though I don’t spend time making sure that they’re all perfectly lined up anymore, there is an inordinate focus on carefully sorting them into various piles, of counting them, and if I’m being honest, in luxuriating in their sheer, glorious, beautiful materiality, from the moody, purple cover of Critchley’s book to the satisfying heft of Hirsch’s.

Personal libraries are assembled for reasons that are different from other collections. For sure there is overlap; when the Ptolemaic pharaohs confiscated every book in-port at Alexandria to add to their celebrated library, this was equal parts about knowledge and power. But in general, the private book hoarder is motivated by different impulses than to serve the public (as with the New York Public Library guarded by Fifth Avenue’s stone lions), create a center for scholarly research (as with the glass-cube that house’s Yale’s Beinecke), or collate everything that has ever been published (the Library of Congress, at least for now).

These libraries are keepers of knowledge, which a private citizen can also be, but the latter’s reasoning is often of its own sort. “By the books we call ours we will be judged,” writes bibliophile Alberto Manguel in The Library at Night. Banker J.P. Morgan’s private holdings, including a thirteenth-century illuminated Bible, Catherine of Cleves’ fourteenth-century Book of Hours, and a complete copy of John Audobon’s exceedingly rare The Birds of America, was a testament to his wealth more than to his learning. Furthermore, there is little it would seem that Bill Gates can learn from his ownership of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, the most expensive book in the world at $65.3 million dollars, but there is, however, much we can learn about Gates when we consider that manuscript squirreled away in some dark, temperature-controlled vault.

A Morgan or Gates exhibit the impulse which causes the wealthy to bid over a half-million dollars on a 1945 bottle of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti or to spend $33 million on Tsar Alexander III’s Third Imperial Faberge Egg. Yet as the true bibliomaniac understands, fruit juice and easter eggs are one thing, but books are entirely different. Margaret Cavendish, the Restoration-era writer, called books “paper bodies,” and it speaks to how they can never be mere commodities. Even a mass-produced book acquires its own individuality, the nicks and notes, wounds and dog-ears that transform this inert mass of paper, glue, cardboard, and thread into a strangely human thing. Those who agree with Manguel that “Unpacking books is a revelatory activity” are lonely without this crowd of paper bodies; they understand how the cover is a flesh, the binding a nervous system, the chapters as organs, sentences veins, and the words the very blood that circulates meaning.

Book collecting is a vocation assisted by money (they all are), but it’s also rewarded with patience. There are some 20,000 books in Morgan’s collection, but Anke Gowda, a former worker in a Karnataka, India sugar plant, amassed nearly two-million books, mostly titles decommissioned by public libraries and given away for free (there is presumably no Medieval Book of Hours amongst the collection). Photos of his cramped house, where trenches have been made out of piles of books, make me simultaneously anxious and envious. I suspect that ours is a difference of degree rather than of kind, for like myself, Gawda is very much a reader, but being a reader alone doesn’t make a bibliomaniac (nor is the opposite the case). Plenty of vociferous readers can sustain themselves by library card alone, but the coveting of the physical object of the codex is its own thing.

My books don’t rely on the good will of algorithms or tech billionaires; they’ll still be readable long after the lights have gone out.

Books are possessed and possessing, they exist to fortify, to preserve, to radiate their own charged auras. Owning them isn’t the same as possessing the knowledge within, but it’s the second-best thing. There is a sense that I’m keeping these books for when I need them, what Eco compares to having a stocked medicine cabinet for when a certain ailment might strike. Sometimes, like a monk eyeing the encroaching vandals, I feel like I’m fortifying myself as I pile them up on windowsills, leaving the ever more-prevalent censors on the other side. Their very physicality is central to this, because unlike an e-book or text entombed in the cloud, my books don’t rely on the good will of algorithms or tech billionaires; they’ll still be readable long after the lights have gone out (at least by daylight).

Materiality, I suspect, is central to many readers’ love of libraries. Emma Smith in Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers writes that “if you think about the books that have been important to you, it may well be… the feel of it in our hands, the rustle of its pages, the smell of its binding.”

There is a reason why the apocalyptic bromides about the state of print haven’t come to fruition, other than for disposable periodicals and newspapers. As any author looking at the generous royalties stipulated for e-books in many publishing contracts can attest, the digital hasn’t supplanted print. No Spotify or Netflix exists for literature, where (other than with some exceptions, such as for vinyl collectors) the medium and the message are more easily disentangled, but the codex has endured for two millennia whereas the CD and the DVD lasted barely two decades. Manuscripts are things of goat vellum and iron-gall ink, but even print bares the marks of embodiment, that Renaissance device constructed by goldsmiths, who worked with the metal of type, and vintners who understood how to use a press. Smith calls this “bookhood” and Keith Houston in The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of our Time refers to it as “bookness,” the love of this object that has “mass and odor, that fall in your hands when you ease them out a bookcase and that make a thump when you put them down.”

Enjoy your e-reader all you want, but a soul without a body is just a ghost, apt to suddenly flicker out of existence. My budget is closer to Gawda’s than Morgan’s, so other than a (brief and foolish) mania for purchasing seventeenth-century print on eBay a decade ago, my library is less a collection than a biography. No copy of Audubon, but rather The Norton Shakespeare given to me by Professor Barbara Traister upon her retirement and containing her learned marginalia (some of it frustratingly in Latin), the college rhetoric textbook from 1959 that my since-passed father gave me, and the century-old compendium of poetry—with advertisements in it!—which my great-aunt taught in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, once mine and now my son’s, that uninterrupted chain of stewardship between those fortunate to possess a book for a bit until it’s passed on in a process that some call collection, but which is better called love.