A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 3
About halfway into my research on this book came the first press reports of a sensational arrest in Iowa involving thousands of stolen books. While my intention had never been to write a diagnostic textbook about what Nicolas Barker of the British Library would teasingly call my interest in “bibliomedicine,” I nevertheless decided that an extraordinary illustration of excess could be instructive. Without question, Blumberg was a thief, but was he “ just a thief,” as Assistant United States Attorney Linda R. Reade would assert repeatedly at his trial? I wanted to find out.
Right after World War II, Lawrence C. Wroth, the librarian of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote, “The instinct to collect, like the process of fermentation, cannot be put out of existence by legislation nor can it be deprived of its vitality by the frowns of those who are insensitive to its urge. As long as people collect and as long as there are books there will be book collectors.”
The question the historian of this and the last century will ask himself when he considers the libraries of the United States will not be “What has the book collector done for these libraries?” but “What would these libraries have been without the book collector?” He would perceive after some scrutiny of their foundations and growth that in their composition was mingled the almost indefinable quality of “distinction,” bringing at least a score of them close to the level of the best of their kind in Europe. In these American libraries this quality could not have been attained with restricted public or institutional funds in so short a period of time. It was given them through the zeal and knowledge and rash expenditure of the private collector.
The title of Wroth’s essay was “The Chief End of Book Madness.”
Part One
1
Touching the Hand
With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character. When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior. “The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave,” the German bibliographer Hanns Bohatta steadfastly maintained, though the dividing line can be too blurry to discern. Whatever the involvement, however, every collector inevitably faces the same harsh reality. After years spent in determined pursuit, a moment arrives when the precious volumes must pass to other shelves. Some accept the parting with calm and foresight; others ignore it entirely. Some erect grand repositories as monuments to their taste; others release their treasures with the whispered hope that they reach safe harbor in the next generation. “A great library cannot be constructed— it is the growth of ages,” John Hill Burton observed more than a century ago, an axiom that would apply to most private collections as well if not for limitations imposed by the certainty of death. The attitudes of three nineteenth-century French bibliophiles suggest the different ways that the dilemma has been dealt with throughout history.
In most matters, Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) was judged a sensible and analytical scholar, a brilliant man who served from 1833 to his death as keeper of Oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But when this sober perfectionist considered the fate of his own library, his composure was tested. “O my darling books,” he cried. “A day will come when you will be laid out on the salesroom table, and others will buy and possess you—persons, perhaps, less worthy of you than your old master. Yet how dear to me are they all! For have I not chosen them one by one, gathered them in with the sweat of my brow? I do love you all! It seems as if, by long and sweet companionship, you had become part of myself. But in this world, nothing is secure.” He died in 1838; five years later, his books were “laid out on the salesroom table” and dispersed in a series of successful auctions.
Half a century later, Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896)—he and his brother Jules achieved widespread fame as collaborative artists and novelists of French manners—made this stipulation in his will: “My wish is that my drawings, my prints, my curiosities, my books—in a word, these things of art which have been the joy of my life—shall not be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum, and subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by; but I require that they shall all be dispersed under the hammer of the Auctioneer, so that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of them has given me shall be given again, in each case, to some inheritor of my own tastes.” When his library, known as the Bibliothèque de Goncourt, was offered for sale in 1897 in Paris, the collector’s bold declaration was displayed in an epigraph to the elegant catalogue. Edmond also provided for the establishment of the Académie Goncourt to promote excellence in fiction. France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, was created as a result.
A different tack was taken by Xavier Marmier (1809–1892), a member of the Académie Française who bequeathed his books to the public library in Pontarlier, his native town, with the understanding that they serve future generations of readers. With the matter of disposition safely resolved, the lifelong bachelor reflected on how much joy the collection had given him, and when his will was read in 1892, an unusually thoughtful gesture was made public. “In memory of the happy moments I have passed among the bookstall-keepers on the quays of the Left Bank—moments which I reckon among the pleasantest of my life—I leave to these worthy stall-keepers a sum of 1,000 francs. I desire that this amount shall be expended by these good and honest dealers, who number fifty or thereabouts, in paying for a jolly dinner in conviviality and in thinking of me. This will be my acknowledgment for the many hours I have lived intellectually in my almost daily walks on the quays between the Pont Royal and the Pont Saint-Michel.”
In the days that followed, Marmier was widely praised as a man of generosity and “perfect politeness.” The author Anatole France, the proud son of a Left Bank bookseller and himself a formidable bibliophile, described Marmier’s library as one “made in his own image,” an “honest, good-humored Babel, in which, in all the languages of the world, there was no talk but of sweet poetry and popular tales and the varied manners and customs of men.” In a charming reflection of French book lore published just a year after Marmier’s death, Octave Uzanne wrote that for the academician book hunting was “such a serious function” that he wore a “special costume for the purpose; he could stow away bundles of books in his pockets, which were numerous and as deep as sacks.” Yet for all his enthusiasm, he “never forgot after a bargain to offer the stall-keeper a cigarette, or, if the stall-keeper were of the feminine gender, to take a sweetmeat-box from his pocket and beg her to accept a chocolate pastille.”
On November 20, 1892, ninety-five bookstall keepers and their escorts gathered in Le Grand Véfour—then, as now, one of the more fashionable restaurants in Paris. A sumptuous nine-course dinner featuring poulets à la chasseur and quartier de chevreuil à la sauce poivrade as entrees was served with vintage wines, followed by champagne frappé and fine cognac. Afterward, the senior stall-keeper present, A. Choppin d’Arnouville, began his formal remarks by comparing Marmier’s writings with his personal life. “I will permit myself to offer no academic opinion; but what I know well is that in the words of M. Marmier, which amount to nearly eighty volumes, you will find no bad book, no unhealthy page, no ill-natured line.” He spoke warmly of the collector’s “ever-ready kindness, the charm of his conversation, and the invariable and poetic gentleness he showed in all things.” As for Marmier’s library, d’Arnouville said it “seemed he wished it never to be dispersed. It was his custom at night to have his bachelor’s bed laid among his beloved books, and over there in the depths of Franche-Comté it is still near his books that he sleeps his last sleep.”
D’Arnouville took note of Marmier’s fondness for world travel, and stressed that in spite of his far-flung journeys, there was one place that he found most stimulating: “Neither the most attractive landscapes, nor the mountains of his native place, nor even the tall pines he loved so much that he called them his cousins, were as much to him as the quays of the Left Bank. Every day he went
along them, past the Louvre and Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle, giving a glance, perhaps, at the popular statue of the good king, but it was not that horizon which drew him out on that daily and uniform promenade; it was with you that he had to do, with your stalls, your boxes. He wanted to look them over once more, seeking spoil for his knowledge, opening all your books, old or new—and so happy at every find! And every day he thus enriched his library to his memory.”
After the senior stall keeper concluded his remarks, a resolution that the memory of Xavier Marmier “always be kept green” was approved by acclamation, and the formal program ended with “a little dance” to celebrate the beloved book hunter’s name. The joyous “festival,” which the press would call “the Banquet of the Bookstall Men,” then “terminated in all correctness,” Octave Uzanne reported, “without a single drunkard being observable” among the guests, “thus doing honor to the absolute temperance, often doubted, of the Paris bookstall men.”
If there is a lesson to be learned from Silvestre de Sacy, Edmond de Goncourt, and Xavier Marmier, it is that each contributed in different but equally essential ways to the cycle of books among collectors, libraries, and dealers. Regardless of the destinations the collectors chose for their books, steps were taken to ensure proper passage.
On May 17, 1904, a four-year-old boy stood quietly at the dedication of a library his late father had decreed should be built and turned over to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “A child bearing the name of his honored father has presented to you the keys of this building,” Robert Hale Ives Goddard declared on the youngster’s behalf. “No words of mine can add to the dignity or to the pathos with which this simple ceremony is invested. Enclosed within these walls is a matchless collection— the harvest of centuries of learning and of historical research. The books which here have their abiding home will be an enduring monument to the patience, the scholarship and the enthusiasm for historical study of John Carter Brown and John Nicholas Brown—father and son. To the venerable University over which you preside, we entrust the treasures garnered around us.”
The John Carter Brown Library was endowed by Rhode Island’s most prominent family, though a lot more than solid Yankee money was required to make it possible, as Frederick Jackson Turner emphasized in his dedication address. “No one but the collector who sends his agents far and wide with eager eye for the spoils of famous libraries brought to the auction-block and for stray wanderers in old shops, and who knows how keen and sharp was the contest for possession of each of thse gems, can appreciate what it meant to bring together into such a noble assembly this elite of the original sources with all the dignity upon them.”
At the same time that the John Carter Brown Library was rising on College Hill in Providence, and barely a block away, a much smaller variation on this theme was being devised by Rush C. Hawkins, a retired Union Army brigadier general and, since 1855, an avid collector of books produced during the incunabula, or “cradle period,” of Western printing, before 1501. At first, Hawkins had wanted a traditional library to house his paintings and his books, but when Annmary Brown Hawkins, his wife of forty-three years and a cousin of John Nicholas Brown’s, died in 1903, he moved the location from New York to Providence as a tribute to her, and modified the design to include a mausoleum. The Annmary Brown Memorial Library opened in 1907.
Thirteen years later, at the age of eighty-nine, the colorful cavalry officer who had led a regiment of volunteers in the Civil War known as “Hawkins’s Zouaves” died after being struck by an automobile on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The general was not buried among other departed heroes in Arlington National Cemetery, however, but in the tomb next to Mrs. Hawkins, where he confidently had predicted that his presence would become an “anchor” for their precious artifacts. “They may some day want to move my books, they may want to move my paintings,” Hawkins explained once to a friend, “but they will think twice before they move me.” That day came in October of 1990 when all of the books and some of the paintings were moved to more secure quarters in the John Hay Library on campus. But in keeping with the general’s wishes, the books are shelved in their own room as a distinct collection. The mausoleum, described in 1942 by its trustees as “A Booklover’s Shrine,” remains open to visitors.
When the famous English physician and author Sir Thomas Browne died on his seventy-fifth birthday in 1682, it was learned that he had made this stipulation in his will: “On my coffin when in the grave I desire may be deposited in its leather case or coffin my Elsevier’s Horace,” a volume so dear, he explained, since it had been “worn out with and by me.” Similarly, Eugene Field, the nineteenth-century American author and collector, declared in a memoir, “I have given my friends to understand that when I am done with this earth certain of my books shall be buried with me. The list of these books will be found in the left-hand upper drawer of the old mahogany secretary in the front spare room.”
Once the millionaire entrepreneur Henry E. Huntington (1850–1927) was satisfied that the library he built on the grounds of an old orange grove in San Marino, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California, was esteemed among the finest in the world, he set about erecting a mausoleum for his wife and himself. He selected the highest vista on his property, a gentle rise set among eucalyptus and oak trees, and retained John Russell Pope, the designer of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as architect. Pope later used the graceful marble structure he created in San Marino—a domed, circular temple supported by two inner colonnades— as the prototype for a memorial built on the banks of the Potomac River that honors another bibliophile of distinction, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.
The ashes of Henry Clay Folger and his wife, Emily, assemblers of the world’s preeminent collection of material devoted to Willaim Shakespeare and his era, rest in a small alcove of the great library they established in Washington, D.C. The stone marker nearby bears this inscription: “To the glory of William Shakespeare, and to the greater glory of God.” A private joke among staff members runs “God gets the greater glory, but Shakespeare gets top billing.”
When Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal Rossetti died in February 1862 at the age of twenty-nine, the young Englishwoman’s grieving husband placed a sheaf of his unpublished poems at her side and committed both his wife and his poems to the grave. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s touching homage to an invalid wife who died from an overdose of laudanum seemed sincere enough at the time, but seven years later the emotional wounds apparently had healed, and the artist-poet furtively authorized a London dandy named Charles Augustus Howell to exhume “Lizzie’s” coffin and retrieve the buried manuscript. “I should have to beg absolute secrecy to everyone, as the matter ought really not to be talked about,” Rossetti cautioned in an August 16, 1869, letter to Howell, but then dangled an incentive for success. “If I recover the book I will give you the swellest drawing conceivable.”
As time passed, Rossetti’s anxiety mounted. “The matter occupies my mind,” he wrote eighteen days later. The grave at Highgate Cemetery, he told Howell hopefully, “can be found at once by enquiry at the lodge.” Another two weeks went by, and he wrote again. “An aunt of mine died two or three years ago and is, I find, buried in Highgate Cemetery, but whether in the same family grave or not I do not know—however I fancy not.” He then raised the matter of literary identification. “The book in question is bound in rough grey calf and has I am almost sure red edges to the leaves. This will distinguish it from the Bible also there as I told you.”
Since only the correspondence to Howell was saved, no firsthand details of the recovery survive, though Rossetti did discuss it in a letter to his brother. “All in the coffin was found quite perfect,” he reported jubilantly on October 13, 1869, even though the book was “soaked through and through and had to be still further saturated with disinfectants. It is now in the hands of the medical man who was associated with Howell in the disinterment and who is carefully drying it leaf by leaf.” Ro
ssetti confided how he “begged Howell to hold his tongue for the future,” though he conceded that “the truth must ooze out in time.” For the present, however, there was art to consider, and no time to waste; a volume of his verses— including several reclaimed from Lizzie’s grave at Highgate—was published in 1870 under the simple title Poems.
Twenty years later, Charles Augustus Howell was found in a ditch outside a public house in Chelsea with his throat slashed and a ten shilling piece wedged between his teeth; an embarrassing inquest was averted when death was certified to have been caused by pneumonic phthisis. Recovered in the dead man’s house were carefully maintained albums of letters from a variety of well-placed people, Dante Gabriel Rossetti among them. As a result, details of the retrieval ultimately did “ooze out.” The original sheaf of poems, meanwhile, has since made its way to the Houghton Library of Harvard University.
What undoubtedly qualifies as one of history’s most dramatic book exhumations involves a manuscript copy of the Gospel of St. John that was buried in the year 687 with the body of St. Cuthbert, the venerated bishop of a Benedictine monastery near Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England. Two hundred years later, Danish invaders sacked the holy compound and the monks fled, carrying with them the remains of their patron saint. After wandering about for several years, they finally established a new monastery in Durham. When a magnificent shrine was dedicated in 1104, the carved wooden casket at last was opened, and beneath the head of St. Cuthbert’s remarkably “uncorrupted” body was found the Gospel of St. John, a manuscript written in uncial (a script used in Greek and Latin manuscripts of the fourth to eighth centuries) and perfectly preserved. For the next four centuries, the gospel lay on the high altar of Durham Cathedral, where it is said to have occasioned numerous miracles. About 1540, when the priory was suppressed by agents of King Henry VIII, the volume once again was removed and passed through a succession of private owners. In 1773, a chaplain of the Earl of Lichfield presented it to the Society of Jesus. Known today as the Stonyhurst Gospel for the Jesuit college in Blackburn that owns it, the volume is now displayed in the British Library on long-term loan, still encased after thirteen centuries in its original binding of red decorated goatskin over thin limewood boards.