A Passion for Books Read online

  An interesting type of unique book is that which dealers describe as “extra-illustrated.” In the early nineteenth century people used to make such books for their own pleasure. A man who acquired a biography of his particular hero might also own a considerable number of portraits, significant landscapes, and even letters written by the hero; he sent these away to the binder with his book, and in time it came back to him, handsomely recased, with all the pictures and letters neatly mounted on extra sheets and bound into the text. Such books can be of great interest and value, or they can be junk; it depends on the taste of the original owner. I have one or two books of this kind relating to the theatre, and the additional matter they contain makes them valuable to me; I am not so foolish as to suppose that they would interest anyone who was not bewitched by the theatre of the early nineteenth century.

  Collectors, if they are realists, must make up their minds early in life whether they are getting together a group of books which they hope will grow in value or simply a collection which gives them pleasure. The man who expects to gain a day’s posthumous fame when his library disappears into the maw of a university must never lose sight of his primary aim. The professional bibliophiles will paw over his books and be quick to despise him if he has bought any fakes or anything unworthy—and how quick legatees are to spot anything which is not up to their demanding standards. But the man who collects only for his own pleasure may buy anything he pleases, not caring that when he dies he will be called a magpie and that books he has loved will be bought for ten cents apiece by the dealers. He will have some fine things, of course, but as individual items they are not likely to fetch the prices they would bring if he had controlled his desires and bought only the ingredients of a coherent collection. The fellow who can leave his alma mater every book and every scrap of manuscript relating to or owned by Button Gwinnett is a greater man, in this realm, than the fellow who troubles the university librarian with attractive odds and ends.

  The former will put the Gwinnettologists forever in his debt, and tiny pinches of incense, in the form of footnotes, will be cast into his funerary flame. “The late Enoch Pobjoy, to whom Gwinnett scholars are obliged for the new light his collection has thrown on Gwinnett’s sanitary arrangements”—that is what he will be. But the collector who has lived only for pleasure, what of him?

  Well, so far as I am concerned, he is the only collector who really matters. He is a man who loves books and reads them. He loves books not only for what they have to say to him—though that is his principal reason—but for their look, their feel, yes, and even their smell. He is a man who may give books away, but who never thinks of buying a musty immortality with his library. His affair with books is a cheerful, life-enhancing passion.

  Considering what a nuisance books are, it is astonishing what a number of collectors of this stamp one meets. For books are a desperate nuisance; a library of even a few thousand volumes anchors a man to one house, because it is such a task to shift them.

  There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends, and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

  —PETE HAMILL, “D’ARTAGNAN ON NINTH STREET: A BROOKLYN BOY AT THE LIBRARY”

  I face the ordeal of a move myself, and regardless of how much I try to concentrate on the realities of the matter, I catch my mind wandering toward fearful calculations as to the amount of shelf room I can possibly hope for in the new house.

  Will it be necessary to sink to the horror of a stack room, a book hell, in the basement? Or (for cheerfulness will keep breaking in) will it be possible to devise some splendid new arrangement so that in a twinkling of an eye, any book may be found?

  The one thing that never occurs to me is to get rid of some books or to forswear buying any more. And that, I suppose, is what being a collector really means.

  HOLIDAY, MAY 1962

  “Holy cow! What kind of crazy people used to live here anyway?” © 1967 by The New Yorker magazine, reprinted by permission of Sam Gross.

  Bibliomaniacs

  BY JOHN MICHELL

  John Michell’s classic 1984 book, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, from which this essay is excerpted, might well have included a biographyof Michell himself. His interests ranged from Atlantis to flying saucers, and he wrote several best-selling books on ancient wisdom. Tales of bibliomania taken to extremes have appeared elsewhere, but never with the bizarre touch Michell provides.

  Bibliomania, the passionate desire to handle, possess, and accumulate books, has been the subject of warnings by many writers, mostly those who have been touched by it themselves. Others, however, have defended it on the grounds that, since as one grows older one’s level of insanity inevitably increases, it is best to adopt one of the more liberal forms of madness such as obsession with books.

  Some truly horrid examples are recorded of fanatical book collecting, and of those who have been ruined by it, alienated wives and families, and even been driven from their own homes by their libraries. Thomas Rawlinson, a collector of the early eighteenth century, stuffed his rooms at Gray’s Inn so full of books that he had to sleep in the passage. He then moved into a large mansion which he shared with his brother and did the same thing there. By the time Thomas died, aged forty-four, there was scarcely a place where the brothers could sit among the books, papers, and dust of their collection.

  A bibliomaniac of Paris, M. Boulard, bought books indiscriminately until he owned more than 600,000 of them. Shelf space in his house had long given out, so he filled trunks and cupboards with books, and then the attics, cellars, storerooms, and the floors of every other room. The weight was so onerous that the house began to collapse, so Boulard bought more houses, six in all, which he filled entirely with books, gradually driving out the tenants before the rising flood of his collection.

  Bibliomania is the title of a book published in 1809 by the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, whose principal subject was the outstanding bibliomaniac of his time, Richard Heber. Dibdin came from a show-business family; his uncle was the writer of such long-popular songs as “Tom Bowling” and “’Twas in the good ship Rover,” later to be parodied by rugger players. With Heber and other bibliomaniacs of the time Dibdin founded the Roxburghe Club, where the first toast was to “the cause of Bibliomania all over the world,” followed by more toasts to famous printers and book collectors of ages past. It was a time when book prices were low, and Dibdin and his fellows could pick up for a few shillings manuscripts now worth many thousands of pounds. He had a sharp nose for a bargain and, though a clergyman, did not spare even his reverend colleagues when it came to book business. On a visit to Lincoln Cathedral he noticed in the library some rare old volumes, the worth of which was quite unrecognized by the unworldly clerics. Dibdin offered to help improve the library by providing it with up-to-date books by the best authors in exchange for the old ones. The Lincoln clergy accepted and were delighted with the £300 worth of modern books which the Rev. Dibdin chose for them. Their mood changed, however, when they heard that their benefactor had sold just one of the old books from their library for £1,800. When Dibdin called again, eager to make a further exchange, they shut the door of the library in his face.

  Richard Heber was a prodigy of bibliomania. Born in 1774, the son of a rich clergyman at Hodnet in Cheshire, he compiled at the age of eight a catalogue of the library he had already built up, with detailed instructions on how the books were to be bound. Throughout his school days he bought far beyond the limit of his means, becoming a familiar figure at book auctions. His father saw his rectory being overrun by books, followed by accounts from dealers and book-binders, and did his best to curb Richard’s frenzy. It was in vain. Richard’s magpie career went on unchecked and he became a discriminating buyer of old rarities. He was also that rare type among bibliomaniacs, a scholar, actually reading some por
tion of the writings he accumulated. When he went up to Oxford he further annoyed his father by editing for publication a classical work which the good clergyman found improper.

  When old Mr. Heber died, leaving a fine estate and fortune, Richard was freed of his only previous restraint, lack of money. His book-buying exploits became fantastic. It seemed as if he wanted to own every book that ever was, and not just one copy of each. He used to say that every gentleman needed at least three copies of a book, one for his country house library, one for reading, and one to lend to friends. But three copies was by no means his limit. Several of his collections of different copies or editions of the same work would have formed a considerable library on their own. He would buy the entire contents of a bookseller’s catalogue or collections of many thousands of books in one lot, and he would also make difficult journeys of hundreds of miles in pursuit of a single coveted volume. Only once was he diverted from his career, and only for a short time, when he contemplated marriage. Not that it really was a deviation, for the wife he almost chose was Miss Richardson Currer of Yorkshire, the most renowned of English women book collectors. The proposal, in fact, was for a marriage of libraries, but either the couple or their books did not suit each other, for nothing came of the match.

  Heber’s appetite for books, said Dibdin, displayed “a rapacious-ness of hunger and thirst, such as the world never saw before, and is unlikely to see again.” Holbrook Jackson summed him up as “a bibliomaniac if ever there was one . . . a bibliomaniac in the most unpleasant sense of the word; no confirmed drunkard, no incurable opium-eater, had less self-control; to see a book was to desire it, to desire it was to possess it, the great and strong passion of his life was to amass such a library as no individual before him had ever amassed . . . His collection was omnigenous, and he never ceased to accumulate books of all kinds, buying them by all methods, in all places, at all times.”

  Toward the end of his life Heber became a recluse, gloating over his treasures behind the shutters of his London house in Pimlico. In one of its rooms he had been born, and in 1833 he died in it, despairing and alone, shortly after he had sent a substantial order to a bookseller. It was his inner citadel, fabulous among bibliophiles because no one else had ever been allowed to enter it. The inquisitive Dibdin hurried at once to Pimlico to be the first to break in. “I looked around me in amazement,” he wrote. “I had never seen rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors, so choked, so suffocated, with books. Treble rows were here, double rows were there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos, reaching from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the very ceiling the piles of volumes extended; while the floor was strewn with them, in loose and numerous heaps. When I looked on all this, and thought what might be at Hodnet, and upon the Continent, it were difficult to describe my emotions.”

  From the piles of paper Dibdin was at last able to unearth Richard Heber’s will. Like Shakspere’s, it made no mention of any books. Indeed, it was some time before the executors could locate the manifold branches of his gigantic library. Two houses in London were found to be stuffed with books, and so was the large mansion he had inherited in Cheshire. Other houses, similarly filled, were located in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, and another in Germany. No one has ever been certain whether these eight repositories housed the entire library of Richard Heber or whether he had other store-places about Europe where unknown literary treasures may still be lurking.

  A Monstrous Paper Collector

  At the sale of Richard Heber’s manuscripts in 1836 the largest buyer was a Worcestershire landowner, Sir Thomas Phillipps, who went on to become the largest collector ever known of old papers and documents. Born in 1792, he inherited at the age of twenty-six his father’s estate at Middle Hill near Broadway, married the daughter of an Irish general, and used the influence of his father-in-law to have himself made a baronet. Sir Thomas had a considerable income, all of which, together with all the money he could raise through mortgaging his property, he spent on buying manuscripts.

  No individual’s life has ever been better documented than that of Sir Thomas Phillipps, partly because he never threw away a scrap of paper, hoarding household bills and drafts and copies of all his correspondence, and partly because of A. N. L. Munby’s five published volumes of Phillipps’s Studies (later boiled down to one volume entitled Portrait of an Obsession). Described in this work is the amazing series of transactions by which Phillipps built up a collection of ancient and medieval manuscripts, far more extensive than that of the British Museum or any university library. It is the most detailed history of the most extreme of bibliomaniacs. “Tim” Munby was himself afflicted by bibliomania, but he controlled the disease through its only known antidote by becoming a bibliophile. He collected not only books but curious anecdotes about book dealers and their customers, many of which he published in later years when he was librarian at King’s College, Cambridge. Some of the best were about himself. As a young man, while working for the famous dealer Bernard Quaritch, he had acquired two medieval manuscripts which he then sold to finance a half share in a 1925 type 40 Bugatti. It was a fine vehicle, but it was always breaking down, one of its gaskets giving repeated trouble. Munby repaired it with a piece of thick vellum cut from an old book. When people asked him the age of the Bugatti he was thus able to reply, “Parts of it date back to the fifteenth century.”

  There is no record of any such tomfoolery in the life of Sir Thomas Phillipps. He was serious, dry, cross, and utterly obsessed. Apart from a few minor hobbies, such as abusing the Pope and issuing violently anti-Catholic tracts, his whole time was spent acquiring books and manuscripts. He would buy whole valuable libraries, booksellers’ entire stocks, old records thrown out by government departments, and cartloads of waste paper on the way to be pulped. Among the rubbish were many items of worth and rarity, which were thus saved from destruction. Phillipps offered higher prices for collections of old documents than the waste-paper dealers could pay and thus broke their monopoly of the market. Other collectors followed his example, and preservation of thousands of unique records and historical documents is credited to Sir Thomas’s obsession with paper.

  It was impossible for any one man to catalogue this continually waxing library, but Phillipps did his best. He pressed his wife, three daughters, and their governess into the task of listing manuscripts and copying out those which he thought worth publishing. A succession of resident printers issued catalogues and small editions of texts for the benefit of scholars. These activities were constantly interrupted by the intrusion of creditors. On many occasions Phillipps was so deeply in debt that he seemed on the verge of ruin. Yet he always pulled through, never selling from his library, ever adding to it. His estate buildings collapsed because he refused to spend money repairing them, and his family were forced to live, like him, as misers. He was ruthless with booksellers, demanding lengthy credit and books on approval and then refusing payment or the return of goods until compelled by law. His treatment drove several into bankruptcy, but he could always find others to accept his huge orders.

  At the age of thirty he had to flee abroad to avoid creditors. The move only made matters worse because at that time, in the turmoil after the Napoleonic Wars, many great European libraries were being dispersed. Ignoring his debts, Phillipps bought manuscripts wherever he could, enriching his collection with items which would now be almost priceless. Meanwhile he had hired a printer, Adolphus Brightley, who arrived at Middle Hill to find that he was expected to lodge and work in Broadway Tower, a monument on a lonely hilltop. This was impossible since the Tower was dilapidated, its windows had no glass in them, and the only water available was that which poured through the roof and down the walls. In any case its rooms were all occupied by some local indigents. Phillipps’s agent, who had become adept at running the estate without spending money, took charge of the young printer, found him temporary lodgings, and joined him in a plea
for help to their absent employer. But not even a small sum could be spared for the printer’s expenses. Like all Phillipps’s dependants, he had to learn to fend for himself. He and the agent somehow evicted the people from the Tower and patched it up sufficiently for the printing press to be installed. There Brightley worked for over three years, unable to leave because all his capital was invested in the materials of his trade. In that time he gave loyal service, learning Latin and Anglo-Saxon to assist his work of printing transcriptions of old manuscripts. Finally his employer’s meanness and bad temper became too much for even his tolerance, his wages fell hopelessly into arrears, and he gave notice. The string of printers who succeeded him suffered as badly, or worse, and left more promptly. Each in turn was set to work on Phillipps’s catalogue of his manuscripts, and each used a different size, colour, and type of paper for the work. The finished catalogue, which Phillipps distributed to certain libraries and the few scholars he respected, has a unique reputation as the book which was produced by the greatest number of printers.

  Lady Phillipps’s father, General Molyneux, saved the day by taking over management of the Middle Hill estate and arranging a settlement of its proprietor’s debts. Phillipps was thus able to return home. Immediately he began a spate of book-buying which belittled even his earlier efforts. As crates and cartloads of paper poured into it, the interior of the mansion at Middle Hill rapidly shrank. Most of the rooms were unusable for normal purposes, being filled with books, as were all the corridors in which there was barely enough room for two people to pass. When the dining room became clogged with manuscripts Phillipps locked it up, and the family had to make do with one sitting room on the ground floor and three bedrooms upstairs, poorly furnished, with peeling wallpaper and broken panes. In order that the books might easily be removed in case of fire, they were stored in long, coffin-like boxes, piled one on top of another, the fronts of which opened downward on horizontal hinges. The walls of the Phillippses’ bedroom were so thickly lined with these boxes that only a few square feet of floor remained for Lady Phillipps’s dressing-table.