A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Read online

  The therapeutic nature of books is a story heard often, sometimes in a few poignant sentences. On May 20, 1994, John F. Kennedy, Jr., informed a massed press corps that his mother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, had died the previous evening one day after returning home to her Fifth Avenue apartment from a New York hospital. Advised that nothing further could be done to stop the spread of cancer through her body, the former First Lady chose for final comfort the one place that had provided her with so much peace and satisfaction during three decades of unremitting public attention. “My mother died surrounded by her friends and her family and her books and the people and the things that she loved,” Kennedy said. “She did it in her own way and in her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that.”

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  With the development of bibliomania, “the friendly, warming flame of a hobby becomes a devastating, raging wildfire, a tempest of loosened and vehement passions,” the writer Max Sander wrote in a 1943 essay for professional criminologists. He characterized bibliomaniacs as people who suffer from a “pathological, irresistible mental compulsion,” an inexplicable urging “which has produced more than one crime interesting enough to be remembered.”

  Foremost among history’s legendary biblio-criminals is Don Vincente, a former Spanish monk whose consuming fascination for books purportedly led him to commit no fewer than eight murders during the 1830s. His fixation was presumed to have developed at a Cistercian monastery near Tarragona, in northeast Spain, where he served as keeper of the library. One night the monastery was robbed by unknown intruders who daringly made off with huge quantities of gold, silver, and irreplaceable books. Don Vincente abruptly left the order and turned up shortly thereafter as owner of a rare-book store in Barcelona, where he gained attention as a man who bought more books than he sold and who refused to part willingly with anything of value. In 1836, a consortium of competing booksellers was formed to secure at auction what was believed to be the only surviving copy of Furs e Ordinations de Valencia, “Edicts and Ordinances for Valencia,” printed in 1482 by Spain’s first printer, Lambert Palmart. With the backing of his colleagues, Augustino Patxot, a rival bookseller, secured the prize. Three days later, Patxot’s shop burned to the ground, and he was found dead inside. Soon, other bodies were discovered around Barcelona, each one of the corpse of a substantial man—a priest, an alderman, a poet, a judge among them—and each identified with books and learning.

  The rage Don Vincente had displayed after being outbid at the auction made him an obvious suspect, and during a search of his home a damning piece of evidence—the only known copy of Furs e Ordinations— was found hidden in a top shelf. Further investigation turned up additional books that once had belonged to the other victims. Protesting his innocence at first, Don Vincente finally confessed when he was assured that his library was safe and that it would be protected regardless of what punishment he might receive.

  In court, the presiding justice asked the killer why he had never taken any money from his victims. “I am not a thief,” Don Vincente answered smugly. But was he sorry, at least, for having murdered so many people? “Every man must die sooner or later, but good books must be conserved,” he replied. The defense attorney argued that his client obviously was insane, and added that in any event the evidence was circumstantial at best. But there is the Lambert Palmart book, the prosecutor countered: it is unique. Not so, the lawyer answered, and thereupon presented dramatic proof of another copy in France. When he heard this startling disclosure, Don Vincente lost control. “My copy is not unique,” he shouted in disbelief, a lament he kept muttering up to the day of his execution.

  Details of this shocking crime traveled quickly, reaching France when fifteen-year-old Gustave Flaubert was writing his first short stories. One of the emerging author’s earliest tales, written in 1836, the very year of Don Vincente’s execution, was titled “Bibliomania.” It tells of a Barcelona bookseller named Giacomo who “scarcely knew how to read” but was happy “seated among all these books, letting his eyes roam over the lettered backs, the worn pages, the yellowed parchment,” a man “entirely absorbed” by his passion. “He scarcely ate, he no longer slept, but he dreamed whole days and nights of his fixed idea: books.”

  Most of the narrative is familiar: Giacomo, a former monk, becomes furious when he fails to acquire a unique book at auction and kills Baptisto, the rival bookseller, in order to get it. Other murders follow, there is a trial, and a second copy of the book is produced, but it is here that Flaubert demonstrates the difference between imitation and a fertile imagination. Alone with his lawyer, Giacomo asks to hold the newly discovered copy, which has been brought to Barcelona for his defense. After hugging it and dropping “some tears on the leaves,” the condemned man rips the volume apart page by page. “You have lied about it…! I told you truly that it was the only copy in Spain.”

  While cases of murder in pursuit of books are rare, book theft is far more common. Lawrence S. Thompson, an FBI special agent during World War II who later taught classics at the University of Kentucky, outlined some of history’s more unusual cases in a 1947 essay, “Notes on Bibliokleptomania.” Early collections in Rome, Thompson explained, were built with material taken from Greece by conquering generals. And the reason books were tethered to shelves in medieval times was to make sure they stayed where they were. The most widely employed deterrent in the Middle Ages, however, was not the chain but the curse. One monastery threatened prospective thieves with damnation alongside Judas, Ananias, Caiaphas, and Pilate, while others invoked anathema, the most solemn ecclesiastical curse, leading to excommunication. A colorful example, from the monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, goes like this:

  For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails … and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

  Historians agree that one of the most egregious episodes of book plunder in recent times occurred in France during the 1840s and involved the methodical removal of valuable materials from various national collections. Remembered today as l’affaire Libri, the thefts were carried out by an Italian count who moved to France as a young man and achieved widespread renown as an academic. By the time Count Guglielmo Libri-Carucci (1803–1869) was thirty, he was teaching mathematics at the Sorbonne and before long was serving as editor of Journal des Savants, a respected scholarly publication. In 1841, Count Libri was named secretary of a newly formed commission charged with cataloguing historical manuscripts deposited in the nation’s public libraries. But instead of conducting a responsible inventory of the documents entrusted to his care, he spent the next six years systematically stealing them.

  The man’s motive, it appears, was pure greed. In 1847 Libri anonymously placed some stolen books in a Paris auction. Later, in a private transaction across the English Channel, he sold 1,923 ancient manuscripts to Lord Bertram Ashburnham for £8,000. When French officials finally became suspicious, the dapper count fled to England in 1848, taking with him another cache of contraband, which he sold in a series of controversial auctions. In 1850, a French court sentenced him to ten years solitary confinement in absentia. Libri opted to spend the rest of his life in Italy, where he died in 1869.

  Throughout history books have been the source of great joy, great passion, and also great pain for their owners. Emil Bessels, a celebrated nineteenth-century naturalist and explorer, lost many books and manuscripts in a shipwreck, followed quickly by a house fire that destroyed what remained of his library. “He could not be consoled for this double blow, and took his own life” in 1888, the French historian Albert Cim wrote in “Les Victimes du Livres,” a lively essay about the “victims of books.” In another case, an American expa
triate, a Mr. Bryan, gave a small but superb collection of 150 books to the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris. One day in 1903, an old and shabby-looking man visited the library. It was Mr. Bryan, who said simply, “I wish to see my books again.” After looking through them one by one, the man quietly left. Two days later, he was found dead, an apparent suicide.

  After his return from a French expedition to Spain in 1824, Count Henri de la Bédoyère devoted his leisure time to assembling a collection of books and prints about the French Revolution. Twenty years later he put the collection up for sale. Within days he was seized with such remorse that he began buying back his entire collection. When he died in 1861, his second library, “more complete than the first,” was sold to the Bibliothèque Impériale (now the Bibliothèque Nationale).

  Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, a famous eighteenth-century orientalist who translated the Zend-Avesta and a pioneer of Asiatic studies in Europe, had no heat in his apartment, no mattress or bedclothes, and lived only on bread and milk. What the scholar did have in abundance was books. On the rare occasions he went outside, he was so miserably dressed that he was often taken for a beggar and offered alms.

  Oblivious to personal needs, the nineteenth-century philosopher Jean Baptiste Bordas-Demoulins preferred to spend the little money he earned on books. One day he left his attic apartment intending to spend his last sous on a modest meal when he noticed an interesting item in a bookseller’s window. The choice was between the pamphlet or food. “He hesitated not one instant,” according to Cim in his 1911 essay, and returned “peacefully to his attic, from which he was not to leave except to go to the hospital and die.”

  The nineteenth-century French pianist and composer Charles Henri Valentin Morhange, known to his contemporaries as Alkan, was regarded as a virtuoso while still in his teens, and for a while moved in the same artistic circles as George Sand and Victor Hugo. As time passed and his reputation receded, the musician retreated into seclusion, contenting himself with the company of his books. Accounts of how he died vary, but one asserts that on March 22, 1888, while the seventy-five-year-old Alkan was reaching for a Hebrew text, an overloaded bookshelf collapsed and the man once known as the “Berlioz of the piano” was crushed to death.

  Professor Theodor Mommsen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902, wrote a thousand learned essays and books, and Römische Geschichte, a five-volume history of Rome produced over several decades, was considered his masterpiece. The German scholar’s devotion to literature was legendary. Once, Mommsen, the father of twelve, was a passenger on a “horse car” bound for Berlin and was deeply immersed in a book. Annoyed at the wailing of a young boy sitting nearby, he demanded that the noisy child identify himself so that he could be reprimanded by name. “Why, Papa, don’t you know me?” the boy cried. “I’m your little Heinrich.” On January 26, 1903, Mommsen was similarly absorbed in another book he had just climbed a ladder to get from the topmost shelf of his library. While peering at the volume, the eighty-five-year-old historian held a candle too close to his head and set his long white locks on fire. He alertly threw the skirts of his study gown over his head and smothered the flames, but his face was scorched and his hair consumed; his death ten months later was attributed in part to the freak accident.

  Antonio Magliabechi, a seventeenth-century Florentine, was a book hunter so insatiable that some people called him the “glutton of books.” In its Latinized form, Antonius Magliabechius, his name can be rearranged as an anagram for Is unus bibliotheca magna—“he is in himself a great library.”

  Magliabechi lived well into his eighty-second year, but is not known ever to have gone outside Florence. Fully half of his life was spent as a virtual recluse among piles upon piles of books. Born in 1633 to parents of “low and mean rank,” he worked at various menial jobs until a neighborhood bookseller took him in as an apprentice. Soon, the lad achieved widespread recognition for his bibliographical skills. In 1673 the grand duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III, put him in charge of the palace library, and it was here that Magliabechi for the next forty-one years “reveled without cessation in the luxury of his book-learning.”

  His memory was prodigious, and his knowledge of other collections formidable. The grand duke is said to have asked once whether a certain scarce title could be acquired. “No, sir,” Magliabechi answered. “The only copy of this work is at Constantinople, in the Sultan’s library, the seventh volume in the second book-case, on the right as you go in.” Even more impressive was that everything he knew about books outside of Florence he knew only through the detailed correspondence he faithfully carried out with every important collector, librarian, and bookseller of the period. Disdaining the private living quarters that were offered to him in the palace, he chose instead to sleep in a wooden cradle that he slung between the library shelves, surrounded by mounds of books. He was a man, some scoffed, who “lived on titles and indexes, and whose very pillow was a folio.”

  By maintaining strict control over access to the books he was responsible for, Magliabechi became something of an intellectual tyrant. The historian Eric Cochrane has pointed out that an “indispensable condition of all scholarly activity” during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was “submission to that incarnate encyclopedia of scholarship,” the librarian to Cosimo III. “Magliabechi did not have to give proof of his learning by writing books: the scores of authors who applied to him for information kept his name prominently displayed in the dedications and acknowledgments of half the books published in his lifetime.”

  Magliabechi was found dead in 1714, seated in a cane chair, a book open in his lap, “dirty, ragged, and as happy as a king.” In his will he directed that the thirty thousand books he had acquired for himself be turned over to the city of Florence, with the condition that they should always be free to the public. For more than a century the collection was known as the Biblioteca Magliabechiana. In 1860 it merged with the Biblioteca Palatina to form the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, where it remains to this day, monitored silently by a jaunty, smiling bust of the man who was “in himself a great library.”

  Harry B. Smith, a writer of popular Broadway musicals in the early decades of this century, gathered an exceptional collection of presentation copies, manuscripts, drawings, and books formerly owned by famous writers. Among his treasures were love letters from John Keats to Fanny Brawne, proof sheets of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, and a letter written by Charles Dickens the day before he died. “If I were the owner of the copy of Keat’s Poems which Shelley had in his pocket when he was drowned, and which Trelawney threw upon the funeral pyre, I confess I should never read it, though I might keep it in a little shrine and burn incense to it,” he wrote in the catalogue of his collection, The Sentimental Library.

  Smith sold his most precious possessions to A. S. W. Rosenbach, who was nurturing his own taste for “association” material—books once owned by someone of literary or other significance. Rosenbach sold many thousands of books during his career, but one item he kept among his most sacred relics was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s personal copy of Moby-Dick, the novel Herman Melville dedicated to Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius.” It is preserved in the permanent collection of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.

  Thomas J. Wise (1859–1937) is best known for the forgeries of nineteenth-century pamphlets he cleverly produced and sold to unsuspecting wealthy collectors, though he retains credit for helping influence fundamental changes in literary taste. “I here refer not to his more nefarious and notorious activities,” the London bookseller Percy Muir said in a series of lectures given in the winter of 1948–49,

  but to his quiet, revolutionary discovery that English literature did not die with Shakespeare or Swift, nor even with Shelley or Keats, but was in process of creation in every age, that authors were still living just around the corner, people with whom you could shake hands or take high tea, who were writing books worthy of the co
llector’s attention.

  Discredited and disgraced, Wise died in 1937 three years after his activities were uncovered by two young bibliographers, John Carter and Graham Pollard. Still, his collection, known as the Ashley Library, remains an essential component in the English literature collection in the British Library. In fact, Muir contended that Thomas J. Wise “almost invented the exciting business of collecting modern first editions.”

  The key word is almost, because many other collectors have had the wisdom to save the works of living writers. The auction in New York early in the twentieth century of the library of John Quinn is especially noteworthy because it offered valuable contemporary material on an equal footing with books and manuscripts from the past. A successful New York lawyer who was committed to fostering the production of painting and literature, Quinn was a patron of the arts in the traditional sense. For instance, he readily gave money to Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, who gave him inscribed books and holograph manuscripts in return.

  Dr. Rosenbach bought heavily at the Quinn sales in 1923 and 1924, spending $72,000 for Conrad’s final drafts of Victory, Chance, Almayer’s Folly, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Nigger of the Narcissus, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord Jim, among others. They remain in Rosenbach’s personal collection to this day, along with the unqualified bargain of the sale, the manuscript of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which the astute Philadelphian acquired at the 1924 session for $1,950. The controversial novel had been issued in Paris just two years earlier and was still ten years away from being published in the United States. How many millions of dollars this document would fetch at auction today is anybody’s guess, but its unquestioned worth validates Edwin Wolf’s observation that John Quinn was “way ahead of his time” as an aggressive collector of living writers.

  Other examples of the collection of materials relating to living writers go back further than Thomas J. Wise and John Quinn. Although the glory of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City lies in its extraordinary wealth of classic material, one item the founder acquired directly from a living writer is considered worthy of display among the treasures of the East Room. It is a letter Mark Twain wrote in 1909 to Pierpont Morgan, who had inquired about the possibility of obtaining the autograph manuscript of Pudd’nhead Wilson. In complying with the request, the author offered this sentiment: “One of my high ambitions is gratified—which was to have something of mine placed elbow to elbow with that august company which you have gathered together to remain indestructible in a perishable world.”