Phantoms on the Bookshelves (3 page)

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). Then 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.

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.

People who merely accumulate books give the impression that they have lost sight of any numerical limits and have completely abandoned any idea of reading those they have. Galantaris quotes the case of Sir Richard Heber (1774–1833), who owned 300,000 books divided between five different libraries in England and on the continent, each of which had spread itself over five different lodgings: “The books were omnipresent, forming veritable forests, with paths, avenues, groves and tracks, in which one kept bumping into piles and columns of books spilling out from the shelves and heaped up on tables, chairs and the floor.” As for Antoine-Marie-Henri Boulard (1754–1825), a former notary and mayor of the VIIIth arrondissement of Paris under Napoleon, he had started out by trying to save the books which confiscations and revolutionary appropriations had released on to the market, and ended up filling the nine or ten buildings which he had to acquire in order to house his 600,000 volumes. When his sons arranged for the sale of these books between 1828 and 1832, it apparently resulted in the flooding of the second-hand market in bookshops and
bouquinistes'
booths, so that prices collapsed, and remained low for several years. A certain French haut-couturier of German origin (he wears dark glasses, has a pony tail, and is aged 75, though he does not like to have that mentioned) owns up to having 300,000 books, divided among his five houses.

The other major kind of bibliomania is that of the compulsive reader. Not that people in the first category don't read, but their
chief interest lies elsewhere. And not that people in the second category don't accumulate books, but this is a consequence of their mania rather than their original intention. In their case, it starts with the itch to read and a wide-ranging curiosity, which does not necessarily imply book collecting, since they could always consult works in libraries, or borrow them, or sell them again after buying them. But the reading bibliomaniac wants to hold on to the physical object, to keep it ready to hand. Carlos Maria Dominguez's narrator gives a good idea of this phenomenon, of the reader who is attached not only to reading but to the object that allowed him to do it: