A Passion for Books Read online

  The problem is that when someone says, “Eco? You’re the one who always answers,” you can reply with a little laugh and, at most, if you want to be polite, with, “That’s a good one!” But the question about your books has to be answered, while your jaw stiffens and rivulets of cold sweat trickle down your spine. In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. “I haven’t read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?” But this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up: “And where do you put them after you’ve read them?” The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: “And more, dear sir, many more,” which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office,” a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy and on the other leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure.

  The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

  —ANATOLE BROYARD

  How to Organize a Public Library

  BY UMBERTO ECO

  The various catalogues must be housed as far apart as possible from one another. All care must be taken to separate the catalogue of books from that of periodicals, and these two from the catalogue by subject; similarly, the recent acquisitions must be kept well away from older collections. If possible, the spelling in the two catalogues (recent acquisitions and older collections) must be different. In the recent acquisitions, for example, pajamashould be spelled with an a, in the older, pyjama with a y. Chaikovskii in recent acquisitions will follow the Library of Congress system; in the older catalogue the name will be spelled in the old-fashioned way, with Tch.

  The subjects must be determined by the librarian. On their copyright pages the books must bear no indication of the subjects under which they are to be listed.

  Call numbers should be impossible to decipher and, if possible, very complex, so that anyone filling out a call slip will never have room to include the last line of numbers and will assume they are irrelevant. Then the desk attendant will hand the slip back to him with the admonition to fill it out properly.

  The time between request and delivery must be as long as possible.

  Only one book should be released at a time.

  The books distributed by the attendant after the request form has been properly submitted cannot be taken into the reference room, so the scholars must divide their working life into two fundamental aspects: reading on the one hand and reference consultation on the other. The library must discourage, as conducive to strabismus, any crossover tendencies or attempts at the simultaneous reading of several books.

  Insofar as possible, no photocopier should be available; if such a machine does exist, access to it must be made very time-consuming and toilsome, fees should be higher than those in any neighborhood copy shop, and the maximum number of copied pages permitted should not exceed two or three.

  The librarian must consider the reader an enemy, a waster of time (otherwise he or she would be at work), and a potential thief.

  The reference librarian’s office must be impregnable.

  Loans must be discouraged.

  Interlibrary loans must be impossible or, at best, must require months. The ideal course, in any event, is to ensure the impossibility of discovering the contents of other libraries.

  Given this policy, theft must be very easy.

  Opening hours must coincide precisely with local office hours, determined by foresighted discussions with trade union officials and the Chamber of Commerce; total closing on Saturday, Sunday, evenings, and mealtimes goes without saying. The library’s worst enemy is the employed student; its best friend is Thomas Jefferson, someone who has a large personal library and therefore no need to visit the public library (to which he may nevertheless bequeath his books at his death).

  It must be impossible to find any refreshment inside the library, under any circumstances; and it must also be impossible to leave the library to seek sustenance elsewhere without first returning all books in use, so that, after having a cup of coffee, the student must fill out requests for them again.

  It must be impossible on a given day to find the book one had been using the day before.

  It must be impossible to learn who has a book that is currently out on loan.

  If possible, no rest rooms.

  Ideally, the reader should be unable to enter the library. If he does actually enter, exploiting with tedious insistence a right, granted on the basis of the principles of 1789, that has nevertheless not been assimilated by the collective sensibility, he must never, ever—with the exception of rapid visits to the reference shelves—be allowed access to the sanctum of the stacks.

  CONFIDENTIAL NOTE: All staff must be affected by physical defects, as it is the duty of a public institution to offer job opportunities to handicapped citizens (the fire department is considering an extension of this rule to its ranks). In particular, the ideal librarian should limp, in order to lengthen the time devoted to receiving the call slip, descending into the basement, and returning. For personnel expected to use ladders to reach the shelves more than eight meters above the ground, it is required that missing arms be replaced by prosthetic hooks, for security reasons. Personnel lacking both upper limbs will deliver the requested volume by gripping it in their teeth (library regulations tend to prevent the delivery of volumes in a format larger than octavo).

  Samuel Pepys’s Library

  BY NICHOLAS BASBANES

  Nicholas Basbanes’s 1995 book, A Gentle Madness, is a richly anecdotalstudy of bibliomania through the ages. In this excerpt he discusses the innovative arrangements Samuel Pepys made to guarantee that his library would survive—intact—after his demise.

  When the incomparable journal maintained for nine and a half years by Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) during the reign of King Charles II was “discovered” in the nineteenth century, the prevailing assumption was that the diarist wrote his entries out in code because he did not want anybody to read his private thoughts. Eventually it was shown that Pepys used a form of forgotten shorthand called tachygraphy, yet the vexing question remained: Why? Did this indomitable perfectionist take steps to ensure that his candid insights into Restoration life would be read by future generations, or did he wish them to remain concealed?

  Because diaries were not published in the seventeenth century, it is unlikely that Pepys envisioned a printed book emerging from the million and a quarter words he wrote between January 1, 1660, and May 31, 1669. But Pepys did insist that his journal be part of the great private library he took ingenious steps to preserve intact, leaving little doubt that the six volumes were pieces of the bequest he emphatically stated was “for the benefit of posterity.”

  Three centuries after it was formed, the library endures as a time capsule from another era. With seven exceptions, every book that the former secretary of the admiralty chose to include is present, and every one is shelved not only in the precise order he indicated, but in the same glazed book “presses” that had been built to his specifications by British navy shipwrights. Since 1724 the library has been housed behind a graceful courtyard at Magdalene College in Cambridge on the northeastern bank of the River Cam. There is nothing else quite like it—and presumably this was part of the collector’s plan as well.

  Barely a fortnight before his death on May 31, 1703, Pepys specified the future of his library in two codicils to his will. A widower for thirty-four years with no children of his own, Pepys directed that his sister’s son John Jackson be given “full and sole possession of all my collection of books and papers” and that the young man enjoy full use of the library for the “terme of his natural Life.” He further stipulated that “all possible provision should be made” to assure “unalterable preservation and perpetual security” of his wishes and that upon his nephew’s death, the libr
ary should “be placed and for ever settled in one of our universities and rather in that of Cambridge than Oxford.”

  Pepys was inclined to see the library placed in the “new building” he had helped finance at his alma mater, Magdalene College, in the 1660s, but he also mentioned Trinity College as an alternative. He insisted that the library remain “in its present form” with no “other books mixt therewith.” To ensure that this would be the case, he proposed a further security arrangement that would require the two colleges to conduct “a reciprocal check upon one another.” Whichever institution accepted the books would have to allow annual visitations from its counterpart, and if “any breach” in “said covenants” were discovered, the library would go over to the other school immediately. Trinity has not exercised its right of inspection within the last century, but there has been no need; the terms have been observed for more than 265 years.

  I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Pillow Books

  BY CLIFTON FADIMAN

  Clifton Fadiman (1904–1999) was one of America’s most respected writers and editors. A member of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and an active member of the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club until shortly before his death, he was also the author or editor of numerous other books. “Pillow Books,” his essay on the art of reading in bed, first appeared in Holiday magazine and was later included in the 1955 selection of his writings, Party of One.

  Reading in bed, like other gentle customs of the pre–Tension Age, may be on the way out. Yet it is a minor art we should not willingly let die.

  There are three schools. At one extreme are those who say, with Sir J. C. Squire, “The bedside book for me is the book that will longest keep me awake.” I suspect such literary night owls of being less avid of reading than fearful of sleeping, like the student Lia Hsun, who, according to Giles’s Chinese Biographical Dictionary, had “a lighted twist of hemp arranged in such a way as to bum his hair if he began to nod from drowsiness.” They would do as well to stuff the pillow with a pair of spurs.

  At a far remove from those who misuse books to keep themselves awake are those who misuse books to put themselves to sleep. When laudanum failed, the poet Coleridge was forced to administer something stronger—the blank-verse odes of his friend Southey. We have no Southeys today, but a dose of current historical romance might do as well, or a bitter ounce of novel by any of our young men who have reached the land of despair without bothering to pass through the intervening country of reflection.

  I hold with neither the Benzedrine nor the Seconal school. As for the first, to read the whole night through is to trespass upon nature. The dark hours belong to the unconscious, which has its own rights and privileges. To use the literary lockout against the unconscious is unfair to the dreamers’ union. Hence the wise bed-reader, rendering unto Morpheus the things that are Morpheus’, will shun any book that appears too interesting.

  Nor, in my view, should a book be used merely as an opiate. Indeed, I do not understand how it can be. Dull books soothe only dull brains—a moderately healthy mind will be irritated rather than rested by a dull book. (This irritation is of a special kind; it is known as boredom, and no one need blush for it. He who boasts that he is never bored confesses himself half-dead, irritability being one of the marks of all living tissue.) But is this capacity to irritate through ennui really what we seek in a pillow book? I doubt it. Books that bore you into a kind of dull paralysis are committing mayhem on your mind. I avoid them as I do the man with total recall of his morning paper, the woman with total recall of her shopping day.

  As a middle-of-the-roader I have found (nothing surprising about it) that the ideal book to read before sleep should neither bore nor excite.

  Take newspapers, which tend to do both. Charles Lamb said, “Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.” I do not urge upon anyone my own reactionary notion, which is that the proper time to read a newspaper is when passing the newsstand. For me much daily journalism might as well be condensed to skywriting.

  But even if this extreme position be disallowed, there is something to be urged against the habit of reading newspapers before sleep—apart from the legacy of smudge they leave upon sheets, pillows, and fingers. Preslumber reading should be a kind of small private devotion during which we beat a quiet retreat from the practical. Now the newspaper is but the daily reiteration of the practical. It is the enemy of the settled mind, which is the province of those truly important concerns that are not practical at all, but speculative. The newspaper, with its unkillable obsession with the actual, is the systematic generator of worry. All newspaper readers furrow their brows. This may be a good thing during the active day, but to read the paper in bed is to open Pandora’s box at the very moment when we are least able to deal with its contents. It is to fall asleep with a gadfly inside your skull.

  There is a famous essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” In this essay Virginia Woolf attacked novelists like Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy on the grounds that reading their books left one feeling incomplete, even frustrated. Such novels, she said, seemed to call for action on your part: reform the economic system, improve education, divorce your wife. I think Virginia Woolf thought up this pretty theory to camouflage the fact that she just didn’t like novels so different from her own. However, applied more narrowly to bedside books, it makes fair sense.

  The man of Wall Street should not take to bed the stock market quotations; the quiet counterpane is no proper field for raging bulls and bears. Problem novels (usually produced by problem children) should never companion your pillow; midnight is no hour to worry about the time being out of joint. Avoid political arguments that step upon your toes, whether the toes be Republican or Democratic. Await a more fitting hour than bedtime to scare yourself stiff with the latest volume on the atom bomb. Above all, put from you all reading matter that aims (like this essay) to persuade you of something or change you into a finer and more alert citizen. The state of a man comfortably tucked in bed is already kingly; it will not brook improvement. All books too close to our worn and fretted daily lives make dubious bedtime reading. Avoid the call to action.

  In my own case I can think of two seeming exceptions to this rule. The first is travel books. The normal human being is made restless by such reading, and quite properly so. But I am of such rooted and stationary nature that I can enjoy the most seductive tales of gypsying without feeling any impulse to kick away the blanket and phone for reservations on the next plane to Rio. However, if I owned an itching foot, I would confine such unsettling reading to the non-horizontal hours.

  The second exception concerns my favorite bedtime pabulum, books about food and drink. For me there are few nobler experiences than to read myself almost to sleep over a classic like P. Morton Shand’s A Book of Food or André Simon’s Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy or M. F. K. Fisher’s Here Let Us Feast. I say almost to sleep, for of course such reading can have but one outcome—a 2 A.M. invasion of refrigerator and cellar. This would appear a flat contradiction of my rule: No calls to action. Yet the contradiction is apparent, not real. Such reading, it is true, maketh a full man, but a full man is a better sleeper, and so books on food and wine lead roundabout to sweet slumber.

  In sum, for me the best bed books are those that deny the existence of tomorrow. To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as children and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key. Not that the book need be “good.” Indeed, like another bedtime favorite of mine, science fiction (some of it), it can be pleasant trash. But, “good” or “bad,” it should act as a bridge, a middle term between the sharp fact of daily existence and the cloudy fact of the dream life. It must commit me to nothing,
least of all to assent or contradiction. All the better if it be removed in some degree from my current time, my current place—life is too short for us to spend more than a few hours a day being up-to-date. Finally, it should not be in any way excessive, whether in humor or depth or even originality.

  Nevertheless, if for you the World Almanac satisfies these conditions, then by all means bed yourself with the World Almanac. The books that do the job for me may quite well bore you to a catalepsy or infuriate you to a raging insomnia. The following paragraphs may therefore be of no use to you. On the other hand, they may.

  Most intelligent bed-readers will get a not too stimulating pleasure from any well-conceived general anthology, such as Huntington Cairns’s The Limits of Art or Somerset Maugham’s more conventional Traveller’s Library. Maugham’s own tales, published complete in two stout volumes, The World Over and East and West, are perfect for the alcove. I like detective stories, if good, but must confess that most of the current crop read as if they had been punched out on an IBM machine. Sound collections, like those by Dorothy Sayers, of short whodunits are most satisfactory. E. C. Bentley’s two detective novels and his handful of short stories have recently been put into a single volume, Trent’s Case Book: a superior affair; and there is also available a Josephine Tey omnibus. Otherworldly tales (but they must stop just short of the gruesome) do nicely. The contrast between their shudders and one’s own snug safety supplies a childish pleasure whose roots lie too deep for us to scorn them. Of anthologies of the weird there are dozens—Alexander Laing’s The Haunted Omnibus and the Modern Library’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural are among the better ones.