A Passion for Books Read online

The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner (1893)

  The Commerce of Reading

  BY MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  Michel de Montaigne is considered the originator of the essay form, the first two volumes of his Essays having appeared in 1580 and the third in 1588. While in general the author deals with life from an urbanely skeptical point of view, that attitude is not evident in his essay on reading,in which he refers to the pastime as “the best viaticum I have yet found out for this human journey, and I very much pity those men of understandingwho are unprovided with it.” This translation, by Charles Cotton and revised by William Hazlitt, was first published by Temple-manin London in 1842.

  The [commerce of books] goes side by side with me in my whole course, and everywhere is assisting to me; it comforts me in my age and solitude; it eases me of a troublesome weight of idleness, and it delivers me at all hours from company that I dislike; and it blunts the point of griefs if they are not extreme, and have got an entire possession of my soul. To divert myself from a troublesome fancy ’tis but to run to my books; they presently fix me to them, and drive the other out of my thoughts; and do not mutiny at seeing I have only recourse to them for want of other more real, natural, and lively conveniences; they always receive me with the same kindness. “He may well go a-foot,” say they, “who leads his horse in his hand”; and our James, King of Naples and Sicily, who, handsome, young, and healthy, caused himself to be carried up and down on a hand-barrow, reclining on a pitiful feather pillow, and clad in a robe of coarse gray cloth, with a cap of the same, but attended nevertheless by a royal train of litters, led horses of all sorts, gentlemen and officers, therein showed but a weak and unsteady austerity; the sick man is not to be pitied who has his cure in his sleeve. In the experience and practice of this sentence, which is a very true one, all the benefit I reap from books consists; and yet I make as little use of it almost as those who know it not; I enjoy it as a miser does his money, in knowing that I may enjoy it when I please; my mind is satisfied with this right of possession. I never travel without books, either in peace or war; and yet I sometimes pass over several days, and sometimes months, without looking at them; I will read by and by, say I to myself, of tomorrow, or when I please, and time meanwhile steals away without any inconvenience; for it is not to be imagined to what degree I please myself, and rest content in this consideration, that I have them by me, to divert myself with them when I am so disposed, and call to mind what an ease and assistance they are to my life. ’Tis the best viaticum I have yet found out for this human journey, and I very much pity those men of understanding who are unprovided with it. I rather accept of any sort of diversion, how light soever, in the feeling that this can never fail me.

  When at home, I a little more frequent my library from whence I at once survey all the whole concerns of my family. As I enter it, I thence see under my garden, court, and base-court, and into all the parts of the building. There I turn over now one book, and then another, of various subjects, without method or design. One while I meditate; another I record, and dictate as I walk to and fro, such whimsies as these with which I here present you. ’Tis in the third story of a tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second story an apartment with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie to be more retired; above it is this great wardrobe, which formerly was the most useless part of the house. In that room I pass away most of the days of my life, and most of the hours of the day; in the night I am never there. There is within it a cabinet handsome and neat enough, with a very convenient fireplace for the winter, and windows that afford a great deal of light, and very pleasant prospects; and were I not afraid, less of the expense than of the trouble, that frights me from all business, I could very easily adjoin on either side, and on the same floor, a gallery of an hundred paces long, and twelve broad, having sound walls already raised for some other design, to the requisite height. Every place of retirement requires a walk; my thoughts sleep if I sit still; my fancy does not go by itself, my legs must move it; and all those that study without a book, are in the same condition. The figure of my study is round, and has no more bare wall than what is taken up by my table and chair; so that the remaining parts of the circle present me a view of all my books at once, set upon five rows of shelves round about me. It has three noble and wide prospects, and is sixteen paces in diameter. I am not so continually there in winter; for my house is built upon an eminence, and no part of it is so much exposed to the wind and weather as that, which pleases me the better for being of troublesome access and a little remote, as well upon the account of exercise, as being also there more retired from the crowd. ’Tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavor to make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from all society, whether conjugal, filial, or social; elsewhere I have but verbal authority only, and of a confused essence. That man, in my opinion, is very miserable, who has not a home where to be by himself, where to entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others. Ambition sufficiently plagues her votaries by keeping them always in show, like the statue in a market place: “A great fortune is a great slavery.” They have not so much as a retreat for the necessities of nature. I have thought nothing so severe in the austerity of life that our religions affect, as what I have observed in some of their orders; namely, to have a perpetual society of place by rule, and numerous assistants among them, in every action whatever; and think it much more supportable to be always alone, than never to be so.

  If any one shall tell me that it is to degrade the muses to make use of them only for sport, and to pass away the time, I shall tell him that he does not know the value of that sport and pastime so well as I do; I can hardly forebear to add further, that all other end is ridiculous. I live from hand to mouth, and, with reverence be it spoken, only live for myself; to that all my designs tend, and in that terminate. I studied when young for ostentation; since, to make myself wise; and now for my diversion, never for gain. A vain and prodigal humor that I had after this sort of furniture, not only for supplying my own need, but moreover for ornament and outward show, I have long ago quite abandoned.

  Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose them; but every good has its ill; ’tis a pleasure that is not pure and unmixed any more than others; it has its inconveniences, and great ones too; the mind, indeed, is exercised by it, but the body, the care of which I have not forgotten, remains in the meantime without action, grows heavy and melancholy. I know no excess more prejudicial to me, nor more to be avoided in my declining age.

  Book Collecting

  BY ROBERTSON DAVIES

  Robertson Davies was the author of numerous novels, plays, criticism, and essays. In this essay—which first appeared in Holiday magazine in 1962 and later in the 1970 collection The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies—the author discourses on the difference between the individual who collects rare books because they’re valuable and the one who collects them because he loves books, ultimately making it clear which is, as he puts it, “the collector who really matters.”

  Some months ago I was visiting friends in Ireland who took me to call on a neighbour, a titled lady who, they told me, was in financial straits. I was surprised to be shown into a library which I knew at once would bring several thousand pounds if she chose to sell it. I therefore assumed that she must prize her books highly and tried to lead the conversation toward literature and collecting, but with no success. She would talk only about farming, gardening, and the difficulties of maintaining a large house with no staff.

  At last I asked her point-blank about the library. Her eyes misted. For an instant I felt I had intruded upon a secret sorrow or shown some sort of North American grossness. But her reply reassured me.

  “I suppose it is quite nice,” said she. “My husband’s father knew quite a lot about it, but we’ve never troubled ourselves. There’s a Shakespeare Fourth Folio somewhere, but I haven’t seen it for a long time,
and a first edition of Pride and Prejudice, though I think it’s been lost. Oh, and we have the first printed edition of the Venerable Bede’s book”—she waved toward a copy of the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which I had already spotted, and the cover of which was hanging loose—“and some other things.”

  Indeed there were some other things. I had made a quick tour of the shelves while the others chatted. The library was suffering painfully from neglect but was still a splendid accumulation, and there was nothing wrong with it that a good book repairer and a lot of love and saddle soap could not put right. As my hostess talked on about how short of money she was, I asked her why she did not sell her library, since she did not appear to attach much importance to it.

  “I’d have no idea what to ask,” said she. “Several years ago I met a little man at dinner who wanted to know if we had any books. An American—a medical man, I think. I said yes, and asked him to come to see them sometime. Do you know, he turned up the very next day! just at teatime, and we had some people in, so my husband went to the door and said it wouldn’t be convenient, and I think they can’t have got on, because the little man never came again.”

  “I don’t suppose the American’s name could have been Rosenbach, could it?” I asked.

  “Yes, that was it,” said she. “I thought he was rather pushing.”

  This encounter must have been one of Doctor Rosenbach’s few defeats during his famous tour of Ireland, when he scooped up so many fine things for his clients. Edwin Wolf and John F. Fleming’s recent biography of him makes no mention of the incident, which was not important to Rosenbach, but it might have proved a profitable experience for the lady who had mislaid her Shakespeare Folio to have received the most astute and highest-paying book dealer of our time.

  I have found this story useful as a means of discovering what interest people have in books. Those who think of them principally as objects of value exclaim at the lost opportunity to do business with Rosenbach. Those who love books for themselves grieve at the neglect of a fine, perhaps a brilliant, library. And of course there are a few who glory in the aristocratic spirit which sets a tea party ahead of a sorely needed business deal.

  This last point of view is of immense psychological interest but has no place in a discussion of book collecting. Members of the first group, who think of books as valuable objects to be bought and sold, are interesting only when they achieve something approaching the proportions of a Rosenbach. If they buy and sell on a lesser scale, they might as well be dealing in rare stamps; like so many collectors of all sorts, they are mere hagglers and swappers, occasionally goaded by an obsession to complete an assemblage of objects to which they have themselves set arbitrary limits. If a man determines, for instance, that he will get together examples of all the books Horace Walpole produced on his private printing press at Strawberry Hill, he has set himself a difficult and expensive task, for this realm is confused by clever forgeries. Such a man may be—or become—a real Walpole enthusiast, but the chances are that it is the difficulty the collection presents and the particular sort of status attached to its assemblage that enchant him.

  Is there anything wrong with such an attitude? No; it ranks with collecting pictures by a famous painter, or school of painters, not because you like them but because they are valuable. It is a way of gaining face, and I suppose it is sometimes an evidence of the creative spirit; if you cannot make a work of art yourself, you can at least make a distinguished collection of such works. The galleries and museums, and through them the public, owe an incalculable debt to this spirit. But my real admiration is reserved for people who collect books because they love them.

  If you love books, why is any good edition not as dear to you as a first edition, or one which presents some special features? Edmund Wilson attacked Rosenbach and his imitators in 1926, saying, “All this trade is as deeply boring to people who are interested in literature as it seems to be fascinating to those others who, incapable of literary culture, try to buy the distinction of letters by paying unusual prices for bibliographical rarities.” That is partly true, but if we visit those great libraries in ancient universities where the collections of book lovers of the past are preserved as unities, we soon know better. In those splendid rooms we feel the presence of something noble, which has played a great part in shaping a man’s mind to a noble form. We sense books as things with more character than the commercial productions of a trade. It is splendidly austere to say that Shakespeare is just as much Shakespeare in a paperback edition as he is in the beautiful Nonesuch Press edition of 1929 or the First Folio of 1623, but not all of us are such literary Calvinists. We value beauty and we value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like our heroes to be appropriately dressed.

  It is the snobbery of book collecting that disgusts. Suppose our friend the collector shows us his first edition of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson; we handle the chunky, red-brown book with pleasure, reflecting that it was in this form, and in this pleasant type, that Max first saw his child presented to the world; for a moment we are close to the London of 1911. We think of the author with affection and seem almost to see him across the void of fifty years. But then our friend the collector begins to boast a little: his copy, he points out, is a Gallatin 8 (b); and furthermore, it has the ornamental frame on the spine stamped in green, instead of in gold. He urges us not to mistake it for a mere Gallatin 8b, which is a much inferior article, printed in 1912 and (from the dizzy eminence attained by the owner of a Gallatin 8 (b)) hardly worth having. Perhaps we begin to sicken of our friend the collector and tell him that we have only a Modern Library edition, which we read every year, with growing appreciation. This may well be a lie, but we have to put the ass in his place somehow. We are driven into bibliographical Puritanism by his antiliterary nonsense.

  This is what can happen, but worse may befall. We may begin to yearn for his treasure. We do not covet his house, nor his wife (who gives dismal evidence of his lack of taste), his ox nor his ass, but with a searing flame we lust intolerably for his book. We know what it cost him, because he has not been able to refrain from telling us; he ordered it from a bookseller in England (whom he calls “my bookseller,” as though he owned the fellow bodily) and so he got it for less than twenty dollars, which is considerably less than he would have had to pay for the same copy in New York.

  We have twenty dollars in our pocket this minute. But it is not money that matters, nor our ability, at last, to get a Gallatin 8 (b) of Zuleika for our own. It is his book we want, and we want it now.

  In this fevered state men have stolen. Book collectors are often tempted to steal, and if they are not of iron character, they do so. Rosenbach, in his Books and Bidders, admits to the temptation: when in doubt as to whether he could buy the very copy of Johnson’s Prologue used by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane in 1747, he wished that he might be weak enough to steal it. If he ever stole, he will answer for his deed in distinguished company. Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the great Bodleian Library at Oxford, had to be watched by his friends; Pope Innocent X, before he gained the triple tiara, was involved in a scandal over a rare book he stole from the famous collection of Montier; Don Vicente, a monk of the Convent of Pobla in Aragon, murdered several collectors in order to get their best books; and of course men in great political positions, like Cardinal Mazarin and Cardinal Richelieu, stole whole libraries under the guise of dispersing the property of enemies of the state. Frederick Locker-Lampson, the poet, confessed that he very nearly married Lady Tadcaster to get his hands on her Shakespeare Folios and Quartos. This is a lust which cannot be described and is so terrible that I could not wish anyone to feel it.

  Between stealing and what may be called Borrowing with Mental Reservation I do not see any great difference. Conscious of this viciousness in my own bosom (oh, what struggles with the monster, in the dead of night and in the dusky recesses of libraries!), I used for many years a book-plate which bore Doctor Johnson
’s admonition “To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed object is the meanest sort of petty theft.” I wonder if the scoundrels who stole from me have troubled to steam that label out of my books.

  Setting aside all the unworthy creatures who value rare books for the wrong reasons, let us look at the true collectors, splendid fellows like you and me. Why do we collect books? There is no single, honest answer. It is not solely the love of beauty, which may be the mainspring of the man who collects pictures, or furniture, or china. The book lover will have some beautiful books on his shelves, but there will be some ugly little articles as well. One of my special favourites is a hideous, ill-printed jest-book of 1686; it is stained and thumbed, managing somehow to suggest that it was carried in the pockets of several generations of veterinarians as they went about their business; but it is a rarity. Yet I can honestly say that it is not its rarity that comes first with me; when I read it, I am transported back nearly three centuries to the reign of James II, and its jokes (fearful jokes they are, blunt and dirty) are more congenial than if I had the same book in a neat modern reprint. To the book collector the historical sense is at least as potent as the love of beauty.

  Unique qualities are prized, of course, but only a rich man can hope to possess many books which have no mates anywhere in the world. I have a modest example of this kind, a copy of George Cruikshank’s Punch and Judy which contains all the proofs which were pulled for the publisher, Prowett, taken from his scrapbook. Great collections, like that of Pierpont Morgan, contain hundreds of unique volumes. The ultimate in this line is, of course, the manuscript of a book. Morgan acquired the exquisite, touching original script of Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring with the author’s own water-colour illustrations; a facsimile has been made, which is in itself enough of a rarity to be a pleasant possession. These things run high; Rosenbach paid £15,400 for the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland, at a time when the pound was worth close to five dollars.