Phantoms on the Bookshelves (4 page)

I have often asked myself why I keep books that could only ever be of any use in a distant future, titles remote from my usual concerns, those I have read once and will not open again for many years, if ever! But how could I throw away
The Call of the Wild
, for example, without destroying one of the building bricks of my childhood, or
Zorba the Greek
, which brought my adolescence to a tear-stained end,
The Twenty-Fifth Hour
[by Virgil Gheorghiu] and all those other volumes consigned long since to the topmost shelves, where they lie untouched and silent, preserved by the sacred fidelity we have sworn to them.

Alberto Manguel says much the same thing:

As I build pile after pile of familiar volumes […] I wonder, as I have wondered every other time, why I keep so many books that I know I will not read again? I tell myself that, every time I get rid of a book, I find a few days later that this is precisely the book I'm looking for. I tell myself that there are no books (or very, very few) in which I have found nothing at all to interest me (
A History of Reading
).

Manguel is at one on this with Pliny the Elder: “It is very rarely that a bad book does not contain some merit for the cultivated man.” In these two reasons not to part with a book—the recall of a long-lost sentiment, or some possible interest in the future—there surfaces a strange anxiety. The book is the precious material expression of a past emotion, or the chance of having one in years to come, and to get rid of it would bring the risk of a serious sense of loss. Whereas a collector frets obsessively about the books he does not yet possess, the fanatical reader worries about no longer owning those books—traces of his past or hopes for the future—which he has read once and may read again some day

But what lies behind this disturbing “reading fever”? The primal scene—of which naturally I have no memory—no doubt lies in that magical moment when one learns to read, and the infinite horizon that opens up when you decipher something written down. I spent my childhood reading everything that came to hand—books, yes, but also posters, advertisements, notices, newspaper cuttings, and during meals I would read cereal packets or
bottle labels until I became expert on which companies were “by appointment to Her Majesty” or had received medals from various gastronomic competitions or exhibitions. An inextinguishable curiosity drove me to find out what lay behind the words and phrases, and the unknown reality on to which I had stumbled (“I should like you to be amazed not only by what you are reading, but by the miracle that it should be readable at all”—Vladimir Nabokov,
Pale Fire
). The fanatical reader is not only anxious, he or she is curious. And surely human curiosity—condemned as it was by certain Fathers of the Church as being of no purpose since the coming of Christ, and even prohibited, since we now have the Gospels—is one of the determining factors of all our actions? A capital element in the search for knowledge, in scientific discoveries or technological progress, the essential force behind human endeavor. And curiosity has no end: it is without limits. It feeds on itself, is never satisfied with what it finds, but must always press on, exhausting itself only with our dying breath. I read somewhere that a man sentenced to death during the revolutionary Terror read a book in the tumbril taking him to the scaffold, and turned down the page he had reached before climbing up to the guillotine. In Victor Hugo's play
Marion Delorme
, the king asks: “What is your reason for living?” and L'Angely replies “Curiosity.” And reading expands indefinitely our perforce limited experience of reality, giving us access to distant ages, foreign customs, hearts and minds, human motivations, and everything else. How can you stop, once you have found the doorway offering the chance of
escape from an inevitably constricted environment? Liberty was within arm's reach, so all I had to do was read and read, more and more, hoping to escape my individual destiny. Then I had only to add to this boundless curiosity a certain methodical tendency, which drove me to read all the works of a given writer, then all the books on him or her, then to move on to another writer, or all the books written on a certain subject, or the literature of a certain period, or country, and to wish as I went along to keep the books I had read, adding new ones that might be connected to them, gradually acquiring more topics I was interested in—and there I was—a bibliomaniac reader.

After that, a strange relationship becomes established between the bibliomaniac and his (or her) thousands of books. The same relation as between a gardener and an invasive climbing plant: the plant grows all by itself, in a manner invisible to the naked eye, but at a rate of progress that is measurable after a few weeks. The gardener, unless he is willing to chop it down, can only indicate the direction he wants it to take. In just the same way, prolific libraries take on an independent existence, and become living things. (“To build up a library is to create a life. It is never merely a random collection of books”—
The Paper House
.) We may have chosen its themes, and the general pathways along which it will develop, but we can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the room, climbs to the ceiling, annexes the other rooms one by one, expelling anything that gets in the way. It eliminates pictures hanging on the walls, or ornaments that obstruct its
advance; it moves on with its necessary but cumbersome acolytes—stools and ladders—and forces its owner into constant reorganization, since its progress is not linear and calls forever new kinds of division. At the same time, it is undeniably the reflection, the twin image of its master. To anyone with the insight to decode it, the fundamental character of the librarian will emerge as one's eye travels along the bookshelves. Indeed no library of any size is like another, none has the same personality.

Only those who have done it know how great is the labour of moving and arranging several thousand volumes. At the present moment, I own about five thousand volumes and they are dearer to me even than the horses, which are going, or than the wine in my cellar, which is very apt to go, and upon which I also pride myself.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE,
An Autobiography

Any person who owns several tens of thousands of books is faced with an inescapable problem: their classification. For if the comfortable chaos of a few hundred books does not prevent their owner (and their owner alone!) from finding his or her way around them, the ordering of ten or twenty thousand books requires one to have a retrieval system. In fact, that is usually the drift of the second question invariably put by the “innocent” visitor—the first one being: “And have you read them all?” A “fellow conspirator” on the other hand, the moment I leave the room, will look over the shelves, trying to work out the principle, and when I come back in, will check—with not a little pride—whether his or her hypothesis is correct. But even before that, comes the problem of
their physical accommodation. For books, unlike foodstuffs or other articles, can't just sit in cardboard boxes or live in piles. These are no more than temporary solutions, which make it impossible to use them. If they are going to be read, they have to be arranged on shelves in a way that makes them retrievable. And bookshelves take up space, even if whole rooms—not just their walls—can be devoted to them, as in university libraries. The ideal, of course, would be to have a purpose-built library, adapted to the books one owns, and reflecting the image one has of it. Alberto Manguel, for instance, had the barn of a former priest's house in Poitou specially organized. The photograph in the French edition of
The Library at Night
bears a disturbing resemblance to the library of the Colegio Nacional of Buenos Aires, which is pictured below it. You sense here a long-cherished dream being realized. To emulate Boulard, whom I mentioned earlier, one might buy several buildings in Paris—but that would require a great deal of money. A certain poet in Montmartre, finding that his original flat had become crammed with books, turned it into his office-cum-library, and moved his home across the street. We can be sure of one thing: the vast personal libraries one might have found in Paris in past days have become unattainable for the scholar or professor who does not have, in a now-outdated expression, “private means.” Georges Dumézil would not today be able to luxuriate in his chaotic collection of printed works in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The same is true of all major capitals. I have a cutting from the “Culture” supplement of
The New York Times
dated September 5, 1985 and entitled “The Problem of Living with Too Many Books”—note that
“too many
books,” rather than “a lot of books.” The article mentions several real-life examples: the writer M. L. Aronson, who stored 7500 volumes in an apartment on the Upper West Side; Richard Kostelanetz, an author and artist who had 10,000 books in a loft in Soho; the journalist James Dantziger, who kept 1000 books in a small studio flat on Fifth Avenue. The article was accompanied by two “practical” inserts, in the usual spirit of the American press, informing readers about solutions for arranging their interiors, complete with materials and systems for shelving books, and providing prices, addresses and telephone numbers of stores where they could buy them.

But bibliomaniacs, like certain social classes, are doomed to abandon the inner cities, and move out to suburbs better adapted to their income and the kind of space they need. Another solution is to live in town and keep one's library in a second home, more or less devoted to it. But living hundreds of kilometers from one's books requires a whole material—and mental—reorganization of one's life.

Before long, in any case, this kind of problem will probably be of interest only to a few people. Downloading from the internet, looking up books on websites—and the possibility, at any hour of the day or night, and from any corner of the globe, of finding an out-of-print book through an online network of second-hand dealers—is surely on the way to making this dilemma redundant. And with ever greater specialization of fields of research, we are
surely going to see the disappearance, or at any rate the diminution, of large-scale personal libraries of a general character. Bibliophiles will still keep their collections, and libraries devoted to precise topics will survive, but we may be pretty sure that vast and unwieldy personal collections of a few tens of thousands of books are likely to disappear, taking their phantoms with them. This little book is being written from a continent which is about to be lost forever.

Once you have decided how to house the books, there is the vast and inexhaustible subject of how to classify them.

Georges Perec long ago made a brave attempt at listing the possible methods of classifying one's books:

alphabetically

by continent or country

by color

by date of acquisition

by date of publication

by size

by genre

by literary period

by language

by frequency of consultation

by binding

by series

But Perec was well aware that “none of these choices is satisfactory on its own,” and that “in practice, every library is arranged using a combination of these methods.” Any rule can apply only if it allows for exceptions, determined by choice or necessity from the subjective options of the owner. Not a few writers seem to take malicious pleasure in thwarting any principle of classification. And there are countless “unclassifiable” items. The problem is not how to observe a self-imposed rule in order to justify its validity, but how to retrieve a book when you need it. Years afterward. So the exceptions have to obey a sufficiently solid logical process to be reconstituted later, defying the passage of time.

Take classification by language for example. Would you put Nabokov's books written in three different languages—Russian, French and English—under those headings, or should you put them all together? And if so, which language would you choose? Russian was his mother tongue, but his most significant books were probably the ones he wrote in English. Should you shelve Spanish authors alongside those of Latin America? The language may be the same, or almost, but the literatures are very different. The same problem arises for Portugal and Brazil, and one could add writers from former Portuguese colonies (Angola and Mozambique) who write in Portuguese. What about minority languages, for instance those of the Baltic States? There are not enough translations available for each to have a separate section. But if not, then does one opt for a geographical criterion, putting them together, or by linguistic coherence (Lithuanian and Latvian
are Indo-European languages, but Estonian is Finno-Ugrian). Or for convenience do they have to stay where they were, assimilated to the ex-Soviet Union?

Then again, if you choose countries, what do you do with autonomous regions? Since Barcelona is now the center of linguistic nationalism, should I keep my Catalan books on the Spanish shelves? Not to speak (since it is an even more explosive subject) of books by Basque authors. And it is only for the sake of completeness that I even mention the former Soviet Union, which I have given up trying to rationalize. Whether it is by languages or countries, the fate of books translated out of Uzbek or Tajik, which Gallimard used to publish in its “Soviet Literature” collection, whose general editor was the eclectic (within Party lines!) Louis Aragon, is not now easy to resolve. So in my cowardly way, I have left this section under its Soviet arrangement, although it contains at least two Kazakh authors (Mukhtar Auezov and Abdejamil Nurpessov) to whom, if I had been more conscientious, I ought to have added the Tajik Sadriddin Ayni, or the Ukrainian Yuri Ianovski. From the point of view of classification, the ex-Soviet empire had some advantages! Another thorny problem was the former Yugoslavia. While the works of Ivo Andric
č
, Nobel prize winner in 1961, were traditionally described as being translated from the “Serbo-Croat,” the last two to appear in French—
Signes au bord du Chemin
(Signs along the road), 1997, and
Contes au fil du temps
(Tales down the years), 2005, are translated “from the Serbian.” The publishers, L'Âge d'homme, had previously indicated that
Autemps
d'Anika
(Anika's time) and
La soif et autres nouvelles
(Thirst and other stories) had been written originally in Serbo-Croat.