Phantoms on the Bookshelves (12 page)

You might think that the internet has changed all that. Yes, of course, it has. And that is one of the reasons that drove me to write this little book. Would I ever have put together the same library if I had been born into the internet generation? Almost certainly not. If we are to believe the statistical surveys of the time spent on average in front of a computer or television screen, when does anyone find time to read? The internet and the many television channels have driven out the boredom which was always the prime motive for reading, but should we regret it? What is more, we now have the convenience of being able to order books online (new or second-hand); and the availability of basic texts, along with the digitizing of others, has made it far easier to locate a particular passage. These novelties have unavoidably transformed the status of the library: it is only one among many ways of acquiring knowledge. And they have changed the status of the book, which is just one method among others, and not the most accessible, of finding ‘entertainment.' But the art book, for example, will not be much affected by the phenomenon. Even if there are more and more images on the internet, they aren't always the ones you want, and the screen is not really adapted to consulting text and image at the same time. As for reading
War and Peace
or leafing through numbers of
L'Os à Moelle
(The marrow bone) edited by Pierre Dac (Omnibus edition 2007), the hard copy version, as they say, probably still has a future.

The problem in years to come will not be how to accumulate books in order to have them within reach, but to find one's
way through the exponentially growing mass of publications. In France alone there were 60,000 new titles published in 2006, compared with 30,000 twenty years ago; and, worldwide, a million titles in 2000, compared with 250,000 in 1950. This is bound to change the way booksellers work. They are unable to carry everything in store, so will increasingly have to select and filter. Large booksellers with online ordering, which are less willing to vet their titles carefully, or to make more cultural investment in their commercial practice, will remain efficient multipliers of the success initiated by others. But even their commercial margins may suffer if they are obliged—as part of France's law on the single retail book price insists—to make their customers pay the price of postage and packing, as one of these booksellers recently told me, and as certain recent decisions in the courts seem to suggest. (This precedent has recently been challenged in the appeal court.)

In fact, for my generation, the internet is a valuable extra, but it is only an extra. For example, a few months ago, I had to identify about a thousand French film titles relating to “noir” films, mostly American in origin, referred to in an Italian book. Without the existence of several Italian film-buff websites, I would never have managed it. And I found up-to-date information there which none of the books on my shelves could manage—obviously, since they could only cover the period up to three or four years ago. What is more, I have benefited from a classic book-based education, which means I have a particular view of the internet. What will be the approach of the generations who are growing up with it? Who
knows whether it will be better or worse, but it will certainly be different. I am not very good at using search engines, but they fit into a specific, pre-established scheme in my head. It's the same for figures: I learned mathematics in the days of multiplication tables and mental arithmetic, so I don't need a calculator, but on the other hand, my mental calculations are certainly slower than a machine. As Robert Musil put it, “All progress forward is at the same time a step backward.” History shows that you never escape unscathed from a beneficial form of progress.

Oddly enough, the infinite source of information which the internet provides does not have for me the same magical status as my library. Here I am in front of my computer, I can look up anything I want, jumping even further in time and space than through my books, but there's something missing: that touch of the divine. Perhaps it's something physical: I'm only using my fingertips: the whole process is outside me, going through a screen and a machine. Nothing like these walls lined with books which I know—almost—by heart. On one hand, I feel as if have a fabulous artificial arm, able to move about in that interstellar space outside, while on the other, I am inside a womb whose walls are my book-lined shelves—the archetype in literature would be the inside of the
Nautilus
, 20,000 leagues under the sea. As you see, it is not always a rational matter.

fantôme
: [phantom] A sheet or card inserted to mark the place of a book removed from a library shelf, or a document which has been borrowed.

PETIT LAROUSSE

Yes, libraries too can die. Great, official public libraries are sometimes spectacularly assassinated—burned down or bombed, like the libraries of Alexandria, the Louvre library after the Paris Commune of 1871 (not to mention the libraries of the Conseil d'Etat and the Hôtel de Ville), the library of Holland House in London in 1940—the scene of the famous photograph—the library in Dresden in 1945, the library in Sarajevo in 1992, and so many others. Bombed, burned out, and often witnessing their contents finished off by the efforts of firemen to save them. There is a martyrology of libraries by Lucien X. Polastron,
Livres en feu, histoire de la destruction sans fin des bibliothèques
(
Books on Fire: the destruction of libraries
): this is one of the books I have found most painful to read in all my days as a reader, tragically justifying its sub-title. Public libraries may also be dispersed, going by some of the books I have bought second-hand which still retain traces of their origins. Just on a bookcase within reach, I find the French edition
of Anthony Blunt's
Artistic Theory in Italy
(Julliard, 1962), which still has its shelf mark (701.17/B659T) and a label from the library of the Saint-Augustin Cap Rouge Seminary in Quebec. No doubt its presence on my shelves indicates a falling-off in the number of vocations. As for Millard Meiss's
The Painter's Choice
, this comes from the South Regional Library of Miami-Dade county. Has the library disappeared, was the book stolen, or was it a victim of what is sometimes known as “weeding” or “pruning”—in other words, throwing out books that are too seldom borrowed? Laurence Santantonios informs us that in a former underground car park in the eleventh
arrondissement
of Paris there are five kilo-meters of shelves holding some of the books weeded from the city's sixty local municipal libraries: the rest have been pulped or distributed to charities, prisons or hospitals. In this strange location, there are apparently 180,000 books available for potential borrowers. Perhaps American libraries have more radical policies? At any rate, somehow some of these books have found their way to me.

As for the risks faced by private libraries, Nodier quotes his friend Peignot: “The three enemies of the book are rats, worms and dust, to which we must add a fourth: borrowers.” Rats, or rather mice, seem from my own observations to prefer newsprint, and are happy in my case to attack the hundreds of copies of the
New York Review of Books
or
Times Literary Supplement
which I have kept religiously, without ever consulting them (because how would I manage to retrieve something from wobbly piles five feet high?). I seem so far to have been spared by worms, unless it is just that
I have not yet discovered their ravages. Dust, yes, there's plenty of that, but you can always dust off a book when you need to consult it. The idea of keeping my books behind glass I find, for some inexplicable reason, quite impossible. As for the saying “a book lent is a book lost,” the solution is very simple: never lend a book, always give it away. Then things are absolutely clear. It has to be applied within limits of course! And there is the delicate matter of divorce, becoming more frequent in society nowadays, and the risk it poses to the survival of libraries which were once shared between spouses. But the psycho-sociological complexity of this question would take us too far. The reasonable solution, but perhaps difficult to put into practice, would be to have separate libraries. Short of that, common sense or prudence might dictate that when people put their two book collections together, they hang on to duplicate copies and keep a discreet record of who bought what.

Private libraries do sometimes burn down too. I know personally of three examples. In the first case, the owner's flat in the rue Bonaparte in Paris burned down when he was on a sailing trip. When he got back, all he had left was a pair of shorts, his swimming trunks, espadrilles and a few T-shirts. In the second, the owners, two writers and teachers, divorced shortly afterward—was there a connection? The third case was that of my friend Pierre B., just a few weeks ago. It happened while he was asleep, so he might never have woken in time. And in such cases everything goes—photographs, pictures, family mementoes, letters and other possessions. To lose one's books is to lose one's past. In Pierre B.'s
case, all I could offer him by way of consolation for the moment were two quotations I had found while writing this book. One is by Valincour, Racine's successor in the Académie Française, who, after losing his books in a fire, declared: “I would have derived little benefit from my books if I had not learned to do without them.” The other is from Manguel: “During dinner, Anders Björsson confided to me that when a fire completely destroyed his library, he suddenly realized that before he tried to reconstitute it, he would have to know which books
not
to include”—
A Reading Diary
. Apart from accidental fires, one has to reckon with the occasional
auto-da-fé
or ceremonial book-burning. One of the earliest was decreed in 213 B.C.E. by the first ruler of the Middle Kingdom, Qin Shi Huangdi (the builder of the Great Wall), on the advice of his minister Li Si. Orders went out for the immediate destruction of all books which were not on medicine, agriculture or divination. The chronicles tell us that a certain number of learned men preferred to die rather than destroy their libraries. Violent and systematic destruction of books has occurred time out of mind in history, and has almost always accompanied or preceded the persecution of their potential readers. We have only to recall the book-burning ordered by Goebbels on May 10, 1933 on the Opernplatz in Berlin, followed by about thirty other similar events throughout Germany. Or the university library in Algiers, which was blown up by the extreme settler organization, the O.A.S., on June 6, 1962, two months after the referendum approving the Evian Agreements on Algerian independence. (“Burning a book, or writing one, are the
two actions between which culture's contrary pendulum swings are plotted”—Maurice Blanchot.)

The only advantage of a library like mine is that it has never interested the few burglars who have honored me with a visit: the books are too heavy and would have little resale value. As second-hand dealers often say, “I don't take books any more, I've got nowhere to keep them and they don't sell.” But then there is the case of José Mindlin, a Brazilian bibliophile who was held up about ten years ago in his house, which was also his library. The gangsters took his wife hostage, and gave him an afternoon to find the ransom money. Before he set off to do the round of the banks, they said that if he failed to come back with the money, they would not harm his wife but would set fire to his library. He paid up. Mindlin also tells the tale of how he once flew to Paris to buy a book he had been pursuing for seventeen years—
O Guarani
by José de Alencar (The Guarani), 1857, and then left it on the plane taking him back to Brazil. “Luckily,” he adds, “Air France found it for me.”

A bibliomaniac may decide to sell his library. Galantaris quotes the example of two collectors who could not help trying to buy back their own books at the auction they had themselves organized: the Comte de la Bédoyère and Baron Jérôme Pichon. The latter spent the remaining seventeen years of his life buying back those of his books which, despite his best efforts, had been dispersed that day. (“If a man wants to taste in a single moment the bitterest misery here on earth, let him sell his books”—Jules Janin.)

But in any case, private libraries—except for one or two which
have been preserved intact, such as those of Charles Spoelberch de Lovenjoul (a Belgian collector who left his books to the Institut de France), Jacques Doucet in Paris, or Martin Bodmer in Geneva—usually disappear when their “curator” dies. Inheritors don't know what to do with a mass of books that is of no interest to them and which takes up such a lot of room. They may even have some pecuniary interest in their haste to sell, but perhaps too they are taking revenge on the books that posed such a visible problem in their own past. I remember once, on a wintry Saturday morning on the Place des Prêcheurs in Aix-en-Provence, seeing hundreds of books belonging to the late Monsieur G., dean of the faculty, being sold off. A whole scholarly career was laid out there, open to the sky, on casual and, as it were, surreptitious sale to anyone passing by. A few of us looked through books dedicated to him: “To Dean G. with my warmest admiration”; “To Dean G, in gratitude for …” and so on, and leafed through the entire run of the
Revue balzacienne
, the academic journal at the heart of his research (he was a Balzac specialist). Thus ended a life of study and erudition. He had built up the Faculty of Letters in Aix to be the leading center it became in the 1960s and '70s. I bought a few modest volumes, as a posthumous homage to a man whom, as it happens, I had never met. Another example is the way that Georges Dumézil's library was dispersed after his death. There was an element of settling scores about that. The only section that was saved, I believe, thanks to Georges Charachidzé, his long-time collaborator, was his collection of books on the Caucasus. That reminds me
irresistibly of Catherine de Medici, who, the day after the accidental death of her husband Henri II, confiscated the crown jewels he had given to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and obliged her to vacate Chenonceaux and move to the less spectacular chateau of Chaumont-sur-Loire. Lucien Polastron tells the story of Prince Mahmud al-Dawla ibn Fatik who in the Middle Ages had the largest library in Cairo: