A Passion for Books Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction: - A Passion for Books

  In a Second-Hand Bookshop

  Unpacking My Library - A Talk About Book Collecting

  The Ritual

  How to Get Started in the Book Business - BY STUART BRENT

  Ten Best-Selling Books Rejected by Publishers Twenty or More Times

  Lending Books

  On the Return of a Book Lent to a Friend

  Welcome Home Borrowed Book - ANONYMOUS

  How to Justify a Private Library - BY UMBERTO ECO

  How to Organize a Public Library - BY UMBERTO ECO

  Samuel Pepys’s Library

  Pillow Books

  The New Lifetime Reading Plan - BY CLIFTON FADIMAN AND JOHN S. MAJOR

  Comfort Found in Good Old Books - BY GEORGE HAMLIN FITCH

  The Collector

  Bibliomania

  Bibliomania

  The Book Action - BY SOLLY GANOR

  From Areopagitica - BY JOHN MILTON

  Books Unread - BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

  Ten Books That Shaped the American Character - BY JONATHAN YARDLEY

  Books That Changed America - BY ROBERT B. DOWNS

  The Commerce of Reading

  Book Collecting

  Bibliomaniacs

  They Don’t Call It a Mania for Nothing - BY HAROLD RABINOWITZ

  Bibliolexicon

  What Is the Matter with the Bookshop? - BY A. EDWARD NEWTON

  Ten Memorable Books That Never Existed (and Where They Were Mentioned)

  The Last of His Race - BY A. EDWARD NEWTON

  The Perfect Book

  Books Are the Windows of the Soul - BY HENRY WARD BEECHER

  How Reading Changed My Life - BY ANNA QUINDLEN

  Three by Quindlen - Three Interesting Lists of Books

  Talking of Old Books - BY A. S. W. ROSENBACH

  Potch

  A Good Time to Start - BY AL SILVERMAN

  Invasion of the Book Envelopes - BY JOHN UPDIKE

  My Friends - BY PETRARCH

  Norman Mailer’s Ten Favorite American Novels

  W. Somerset Maugham’s Ten Greatest Novels

  The Bible Through the Ages - BY BEN D. ZEVIN

  Aldus Manutius

  Benjamin Franklin’s Epitaph

  The Collector

  The Newark Public Library

  Why Does Nobody Collect Me?

  How Not to Care for Books

  On Reading and Collecting - BY HERBERT FAULKNER WEST

  How to Care for Books - ESTELLE ELLIS AND CAROLINE SEEBOHM

  Fifteen Books We Would Memorize If We Were the “Living Books” Characters in Ray Bradbury’s Novel Fahrenheit 451 - BY THE EDITORS

  The “100” Game

  100 Greatest Novels in the English Language - BY A. EDWARD NEWTON

  Top 100 English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century - BY THE EDITORS OF THE MODERN LIBRARY

  91 Chambers Street - BY EDWARD ROBB ELLIS (MAP OF FOURTH AVENUE BROADWAY BOOKSELLERS BY MAHLON BLAINE)

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliobibliography— Books About Books: A Selection

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  TO THE MEMORY OF CHAIM GRADE,

  Great Soul, Great Poet, Great Jew, and Great Friend

  HR

  TO JOSHUA,

  who is just beginning to appreciate

  the joys of reading and books

  RAK

  Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.

  THOMAS V. BARTHOLIN

  Disparage no book, for it is also a part of the world.

  RABBI NACHMAN OF BRATZLAV

  Foreword

  BY RAY BRADBURY

  Back in 1953 when I had finished a longer version of my novel Fahrenheit 451, I sought a metaphor for my artist friend Joe Mugnaini that would be appropriate to the text. Glancing through his sketches, I fused a combined metaphor: a neo–Don Quixote armored in newspaper print standing on a pyre of burning books. That chap isn’t really a faux Don Quixote, it’s me. My history is all books, and rarely anything else, which is why I am up front here, as preface.

  The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn’t speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk’s the best.

  I found my wife, Marguerite (Maggie), in Fowler Bros. marvelous bookshop across from San Francisco’s Pershing Square in the happy spring of 1946. She took a vow of poverty to marry me in 1947. Church-mice-poor, we lived in Venice before it was a funny-farm, surviving on hot dogs, pizza, and bad wine while I constructed literary rockets that missed the Moon but somehow reached Mars.

  Along the way I increased my library with ten-cent and quarter purchases of much needed books at the Goodwill. Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Shaw marked down seemed to me as one of life’s unbelievable bargains.

  I believed in books so much that when I graduated from L.A. High with no hope for college, I carried with me the memory of my short-story teacher, Jannet Johnson, and my Yeats/Keats/Shelley/Lady Snow Longley Housh volume. My second novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, is dedicated to them.

  The library as raving influence is best summed in my first novel, Fahrenheit 451. Trying to write in my carless garage was impossible. My daughters knocked on the back window, yelling for Dad to come play. I did so, with a diminution of stories and funds.

  Wandering around the UCLA campus, I heard the clatter of typewriters under the library, went down, and discovered a typing room where I could hammer out my breathless prose for ten cents a half hour. There was a device under each typewriter, a slot machine in which to shove dimes against the clock. You typed madly until the machine froze, then ran to fetch more cash. In nine days I wrote Fahrenheit 451. It cost me nine dollars and eighty cents to write what I later described as my dime novel.

  But the important aspect here was the wonderfully crushing weight of the library above. Between stints at my rented Royal I dashed upstairs to grope, blindly, along various shelves to seize strange books and make friends. When I found apt sentences I ran back downstairs to pop them in the mouths of Montag, my flame-throwing book burner and his equally inflammatory chief. Hyperventilation, then, was my lifestyle, plunging down to hammer my novel into shape. The library turned out to be the best damn maternity hospital in my entire life. My child, born in semipoverty (I was still writing short stories that sold for one or two cents a word), has survived McCarthy, Stalin, and Mao and their fear of information. It now lodges in schools, thank God, around the country.

  Along the way I have written more stories, poems, essays, and novels about other writers than any others in our time. I have claimed in one poem that Emily Dickinson was my mother and Poe my father, with H. G. Wells and Verne crazed uncles up-attic. The title of one poem was “Emily Dickinson Where Are You, Herman Melville Called You Last Night in His Sleep.” My story, “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine,” told how, age twelve, I helped Charles Dickens finish A Tale of Two Cities upstairs in my grandparents’ boarding house in 1932.

  Finally, not so long ago with “Last Rites,” I invented a time machine so I could travel back to save my favorite authors on their deathbeds, offering them hope for their literary futures. Arriving in Melville’s last hour, I laid out new editions of his books published in 1930, 1954, and 1999 so that this old man, long abandoned, could see his immortality guaranteed. Herman, I whispered, open
your eyes. Read the first line of your book, republished in 1939. Herman did so and murmured: “Call me Ishmael.” And died.

  I then visited Poe and left copies of his Tales of Mystery and Imagination.Finally to Paris to bid farewell to Wilde.

  So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and rememberingthe books.

  The Egyptians often, in death, had their favorite cats embalmed, to cozen their feet. If things go well, my special pets will pace me into eternity, Shakespeare as pillow, Pope at one elbow, Yeats at the other, and Shaw to warm my toes. Good company for far-traveling.

  Meanwhile, I stand here with my hopeless prejudices, to preface these loves.

  Please, to begin.

  Introduction:

  A Passion for Books

  In February 1998 Sotheby’s in New York held a series of auctions of a rather unique collection of books. The collection, some three thousand volumes, had belonged to the late duke of Windsor—the former King Edward VIII of England—who had collected them since childhood and had taken the collection with him when he abdicated the throne in 1936. After the duke died in 1972, the books, along with the rest of his possessions, had remained in the hands of his duchess—the former Wallis Warfield Simpson—the woman for whom he had forsaken his family, his country, and his crown.

  On the duchess’s death in 1986, their mansion near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and its contents, were purchased by Mohamed al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman perhaps best known as the father of the man who died in an automobile accident with Diana, the princess of Wales, the estranged wife of the duke’s grandnephew Prince Charles. Some ten years later, Mr. al-Fayed decided to sell the duke and duchess’s possessions, and thus they found their way to Sotheby’s.

  There were three things that made these auctions of particular interest to bibliophiles. First, many of the books were inscribed by famous and/or wealthy individuals. They included, for example, a copy of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, inscribed “To the Duke and Duchess of Windsor with the highest respects,” as well as a Book of Common Prayer inscribed “For My Darling little David [Edward] on his 7th birthday, when he went to Church for the first time, from his loving old Granny,” by Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII.

  Second, these auctions represented the first time in history that books from a British royal library had ever been offered for sale. Although the royal family, as would be expected, made no comment about the auctions, one doubts that they were happy about these books being placed on the market, the sale of such items being, at the very least, unseemly.

  But the third—and perhaps most remarkable—aspect of the auctions was that they were proof that although the duke of Windsor had been willing to give up his throne “for the woman I love,” he had not been willing to give up his books. Such is the mark of a bibliophile.

  We count ourselves among those who share the duke’s passion— at least his passion for books. We are among those for whom there is no such thing as too many books and, as a consequence, have become inured, of necessity, to that ridiculous question we all face from time to time from those who do not share our passion: “Have you read all these books?”

  We are the people who can spend hours browsing through the shelves of a bookstore, completely oblivious not only to the passage of time, but to everything else around us. One of the editors of this book, in fact, was once so engrossed in browsing through the shelves of the old Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue in New York that it took him some moments to recognize that the man standing in front of him was his father.

  We are the people for whom buying books is not a luxury but a necessity, those who can understand what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, “I cannot live without books,” and how Desiderius Erasmus could write, “When I have a little money I buy books. And if any is left, I buy food and clothing.”

  While making the decision to buy a book may be an easy one, deciding which pieces to include in a collection such as this is not. In fact, we read and discussed—sometimes at great length—more than five times as many selections as we ultimately decided to use. It wasn’t that those we put aside were necessarily less valuable than those we chose, but, rather, that were we to include everything we would originally have liked to, this book would have been several times its present size.

  At the outset, we established two rather simple criteria. The first was that the pieces should be well written, entertaining, and informative. The second was that each should exemplify the extraordinary ardor those who love books have for those curious bundles of paper bound together between hard or soft covers. After reading all the material we had gathered and began discussing it, we reluctantly added a third criterion that we would use no more than one piece by any single author.

  To be honest, we have cheated a little here. There are two short, although related, pieces by Umberto Eco (“How to Justify a Private Library” and “How to Organize a Public Library”), two pieces by Christopher Morley (“In a Second-Hand Bookshop” and “On the Return of a Book Lent to a Friend”), and two pieces by A. Edward Newton (“What Is the Matter with the Bookshop?” and “The Last of His Race”), the last such a loving and lovely portrait of a book collector of the old school that we simply couldn’t resist including it.

  In making the selections, however, we also endeavored to include pieces that represented several aspects of bibliophilia. One of these, for example, concerns the eternal question of whether or not to borrow and/or lend books. We have accordingly included Anatole Broyard’s “Lending Books,” the anonymous poem “Welcome Home Borrowed Book,” and a selection from Roger Rosenblatt’s appropriately named one-man show, Bibliomania.

  Bibliomania itself—the ultimate form of bibliophilia—was another of the aspects we wished to explore, to which end we’ve included Gustave Flaubert’s classic short story “Bibliomania” (the title of which was an early coinage of the word), a selection from Nicholas Basbanes’s A Gentle Madness on Samuel Pepys’s unique disposition of his library, and a selection from Susan Sontag’s novel The Volcano Lover, as trenchant a portrait of a collector as we have ever seen.

  Nor have we otherwise slighted the collector. Although the passion for collecting is an undercurrent running through the entire book, it is particularly exemplified by such selections as Robertson Davies’s “Book Collecting,” Petrarch’s “My Friends,” William Targ’s “The Collector,” and the above-mentioned A. Edward Newton’s

  “The Last of His Race,” among others. Because we thought the history of the book was important as well, you’ll also find here William Dana Orcutt’s “Aldus Manutius,” on the founder of the Aldine Press, and Ben Zevin’s “The Bible Through the Ages,” a history of the Bible as a printed book rather than as Holy Scripture.

  Just to show, though, that while we take our book collecting seriously we don’t necessarily take ourselves that seriously, we’ve also included several humorous pieces, including those mentioned above by Umberto Eco and Roger Rosenblatt, John Updike’s “The Invasion of the Book Envelopes,” and Robert Benchley’s “Why Does Nobody Collect Me?” in which he questions why first editions of books by his friend Ernest Hemingway are valuable while his are not, when “I am older than Hemingway, and have written more books than he has.”

  There are several other aspects of bibliophilia represented here as well. Among these are the particular pleasures to be found in old books (A. S. W. Rosenbach’s “Talking of Old Books”), the founding of Book-of-the-Month Club (Al Silverman’s “A Good Time to Start a Book Club”), the joys of reading in bed (Clifton Fadiman’s “Pillow Books”), and the future of books (Anna Quindlen’s “How Reading Changed My Life”).

  Finally, to reflect the eclectic nature of book collectors and book collecting, we have also scattered among the longer pieces a number of book lists (by such people as Norman Mailer, Jonathan Yardley, Anna Quindlen, and Clifton Fadiman), entertaining anecdotes, cartoons, poems, and quot
ations from such literary luminaries as John Milton, Michel de Montaigne, and many others.

  We do have to admit, though, that we have our personal favorites among the selections. One of these is Leo Rosten’s “Potch,” the first reading of which, some years ago, marked the entry of one of the editors into the world of words, ideas, and books. The other is George Hamlin Fitch’s “Comfort Found in Good Old Books,” an extraordinarily touching piece in which the author writes of the comfort he found in reading after the death of his son.

  In all we have included nearly sixty selections for all those who, like us, have a “A Passion for Books.” We regret the necessary omission of many other excellent pieces and hope someday to compile another collection to remedy that situation. For now, though, our only hope is that you find as much pleasure in reading this collection as we found in compiling it.

  —The Editors

  Riverdale, N.Y., January 1999

  Cortlandt Manor, N.Y., January 1999

  In a Second-Hand Bookshop

  BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

  What waits me on the shelves? I cannot guess,

  But feel the sure foreboding; there will cry

  A voice of human laughter and distress,

  A word that no one needs as much as I.

  For always where old books are sold and bought

  There comes that twinge of dreadful subtlety—

  These words were actual, and they were thought

  By someone who was once alive, like me.

  Unpacking My Library

  A Talk About Book Collecting

  BY WALTER BENJAMIN

  With almost every passing year, it seems, more serious students of literature discover the work and sensitive writing of Walter Benjamin, a critic who approached the loftiest ideas and pursuits with his feet planted firmly on the ground. His suicide in 1940 was brought on by his fear of capture by the Nazis, from whom he was fleeing. In this essay from his 1955 collection, Illuminations, Benjamin applies his critical approach to the simple pleasure of unpacking books.