Books, Petrarch wrote, heartily delight us, speak to us, counsel us, and are joined to us by a living and active relationship. Instructing his servants to guard his library as they would a shrine, he kept up an active acquaintance with his books, just as if they were friends capable of talking. The Ottoman poet Abdüllatif Çelebi called each of his books a true and loving friend who drives away all cares. Umberto Eco imagined his books talking among themselves, while Alberto Manguel called the writing of endpaper notes the habit of speaking of a book behind its back.
Elias Canetti’s 1935 novel, Auto-da-Fé, meditated on the precise nature of books’ genial proclivities: “What proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?”
Regard for books often goes beyond convivial attachment. Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin are three famous literary men who kissed their books. Henry Crabb Robinson once saw Coleridge kiss the engraved title page of his copy of Spinoza. Thomas à Kempis told his students to take a book “into thine hands as Simeon the Just took the Child Jesus into his arms to carry him and kiss him.” During Benedetto Croce’s youth, he kissed the pages of Pellico’s Le mie prigioni in an ecstasy of joy.
Deidre Shauna Lynch wrote an excellent book on the subject of book-love and its physical manifestations. Titled Loving Literature, Lynch’s monograph chronicles hundreds of instances in which books were kissed, caressed, and even fondled. Seventeenth-century naval administrator, politician, and diarist Samuel Pepys took this game to a whole new level, if we are to believe his account of buying Voragine’s 1521 Golden Legend on April 10, 1668: “So to piper and Duck Lane, and there kissed bookseller’s wife and bought Legend.’
Reading one book while recalling another was, according to the poet Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, one of the most delicate forms of adultery. The Folger librarian Louis Wright wrote of an English wife who parted company with her husband because he insisted upon reciting Shakespeare in the middle of the night. A perhaps less fortunate wife, from Los Angeles, had the same problem except that her husband read Emerson.
Assembling a library is a minefield of etiquette. In the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical and monastic librarians divided sacred from profane books, and were forbidden from placing “unholy” books above holy ones, even in temporary storage. Commenting on a friend’s library in the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris complained that pagan authors were separated from Christian ones, “the pagans near the gentlemen’s seats, the Christians near the ladies.” In a similar spirit, an 1863 book of etiquette and deportment instructed book owners to segregate the works of male and female authors, “unless they happen to be married.”
Though himself married, Isaac Gosset advocated the bachelor state for collectors. “Never think of marriage,” he would say to young book-lovers, “and if the thought should occur, take down a book and begin to read until it vanishes.” Bibliophiles frequently refer to themselves as “wedded” to their books; those unable to resist the charms of human marriage have been known to keep their purchases secret from their human spouses. To avoid that necessity, the author and librarian A. N. L. “Tim” Munby advised new and prospective husbands that the “education” of wives must be started early: “a visit to at least one bookshop a day throughout the honeymoon is to be recommended.” In 1917 Margaret Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, married the surgeon and bookman Geoffrey Keynes. When the honeymooners visited a bookshop, Margaret complained of feeling faint. Geoffrey “took her outside and made her comfortable, then went back to finish the shop.” A long and happy marriage followed.
(Geoffrey’s older brother was the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. A member of the liberated Bloomsbury group, Maynard married a ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Serious and introverted Geoffrey found playful and outgoing Lydia utterly baffling. At Maynard’s funeral in 1946, Geoffrey wore a black coat and striped trousers. “Oh, Geoffrey,” Lydia said, “you look so sexy.” Afterwards, Geoffrey asked several of his friends, “What can she have meant?”)
An excessive attachment to books can be dangerous. Desiderius Erasmus had clear priorities. “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” The French philologist and lawyer Salmasius asked to be locked inside the library at Heidelberg. There he remained for forty-eight hours with neither food nor drink—sustained only by his proximity to treasured books. Leigh Hunt recorded how Elizabeth West, wife of the painter Benjamin West, was so fond of books she became a martyr to them, her physician declaring “she lost the use of her limbs by sitting indoors reading.” The Greek philosopher Carneades “was so deeply plunged in an overweening desire for knowledge, so besotted with it, that he never had leisure to cut his hair, or pare his nails.” The philologist Budaeus showed his commitment in a different way. When a servant rushed into his study to warn him that the house was on fire, Budaeus replied, “Tell my wife that I never interfere with the household,” and he went on reading.
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Books in bed
Books will sleep with you. The seventeenth-century Belgian politician and bibliophile Charles van Hulthem assembled a personal collection of 32,000 volumes, “all excellent copies,” many of them great rarities. In Great Libraries, Anthony Hobson wrote of how the books “filled to overflowing one house in Brussels and another in Ghent. Books were heaped on every table, so that there was never room to spread a tablecloth, and stood in piles in the alcove where he slept.” Van Hulthem allowed no fire in the house—that would be just too dangerous. On cold nights he kept warm in bed by spreading folios on his feet. The best book for this purpose was Barlaeus’s voluminous account of Maurice of Nassau’s expedition to Brazil. Van Hulthem would sometimes be found “contemplating with infantile pleasure an engraving of a fine female torso”—his sole contact with the opposite sex.
The Medici librarian Antonio di Marco Magliabecchi was renowned as a literary glutton who possessed a memory “like wax to receive and marble to retain.” According to Holbrook Jackson, author of Anatomy of Bibliomania, Magliabecchi “lived in a cavern of books, slept on them, wallowed in them”;
they were his bed and board, his only furniture, his chiefest need. For sleep he spread an old rug over a heap of them and so composed himself; or he would cast himself, fully clothed, among the books which covered his couch.
Jackson describes another bibliomaniac, active at the start of the nineteenth century. His collection was “choice, costly, and copious,” and no man loved more to “embed himself” among the books and documents:
his pillow-case, Columbus’s Letter of 1493, stitched to the original Challenge of Crichton; his counterpane, the large paper Hearnes, formerly in Dr Mead’s library, “still glittering in their primitive morocco attire”; his mattress, large paper Dugdales; his bed-curtains, “slips of the original Bayeux Tapestry.”
Jeanette Winterson is another bibliophile who slept on a bed of books. Her parents were strict Pentecostal evangelists. In her childhood the outside toilet was the best venue for clandestine reading. There, Winterson first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence, “and perhaps that was the best place, after all,” she remarked. A rubber torch was the only source of reading light. “I had to divide my money from a Saturday job, between buying books and buying batteries.” Winterson’s mother knew exactly how many Evereadys were needed “to illuminate the gap that separated the toilet paper from its function.”
Once I had tucked the book back down my knickers to get it indoors again, I had to find somewhere to hide it, and anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that seventy-seven can be accommodated per layer under the mattress.
As her collection grew and her bed began visibly to rise, Winterson worried that her mother might notice. When in fact she did, the books fed the fire.
The designers of the British Museum’s famous reading room have achieved the wonderful illusion that the enormous dome is suspended, like Jeanette Winterson’s mattress, on layers of books.
THE LIBRARY A CATALOGUE OF WONDERS
STUART KELLS
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