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

  One of the most eloquent statements of all on the collecting of contemporary material is to be found in a largely forgotten memoir written in 1894 by Mrs. James T. Fields, widow of a Boston publisher acclaimed for the consistently high quality of work issued under his imprint, Ticknor & Fields. Mrs. Fields’s A Shelf of Old Books walks readers through the couple’s library of particularly loved possessions, pausing along the way at some of the most valued items. “There is a sacredness about the belongings of good and great men which is quite apart from the value and significance of the things themselves,” she pointed out. “Their books become especially endeared to us; as we turn the pages they have loved, we can see another hand point along the lines, another head bending over the open volume.”

  In a corner were several shelves filled with material James Fields acquired from Leigh Hunt during a visit to England thirty-five years earlier, the same material, perhaps, that had heartened John Keats when the young poet was an overnight guest in Hunt’s home and slept in the library. “Sleep and Poetry” was written as a result:

  It was a poet’s home who keeps the keys

  Of pleasure’s temple—round about were hung

  The glorious features of the bards who sung

  In other ages—cold and sacred gusts

  Smiled at each other.

  “As I quote these lines,” Mrs. Fields wrote,

  fearful of some slip of a treacherous memory, I take a small volume of Keats from the shelf of old books. It is a battered little copy in green cloth, with the comfortable aspect of having been abroad with some loving companion in a summer shower. It is the copy long used by Tennyson, and evidently worn in his pocket on many an excursion. He once handed it to Mr. Fields at parting, and it was always cherished by the latter with reverence and affection. Here, in its quiet corner, the little book now awaits the day when some new singer shall be moved to song in memory of the great poet who loved and treasured it.

  Appropriately, the frontispiece to A Shelf of Old Books is a wood engraving of the library in the Back Bay townhouse where James T. and Annie Adams Fields shared so many precious hours. Pictured on the right are paintings and a piano. On the left are books and a fireplace, and at the far end are two tall windows that look out on the Charles River. It is here, in this space, that Mrs. Fields concluded her meditation.

  There is no Leigh Hunt now to enchant, and no Keats to be enchanted among the old books; but as we stand silent in the corner where the volumes rest together, watching the interchanging lights thrown through green branches from the shining river beyond, we remember that these causes of inspiration still abide with us, and that other book-lovers are yet to pore over these shelves and gather fresh life from the venerable volumes which stand upon them.

  Mrs. Fields was nourished by her books, and while it is evident that she read them with sensitivity as well, some collectors would argue that mere possession of these artifacts is reason enough to justify their acquisition. Winston S. Churchill addressed himself to this matter in Thoughts and Adventures, a collection of essays published in 1932, twenty-four years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In “Hobbies,” one of the essays, he wrote:

  “What shall I do with all my books?” was the question; and the answer, “Read them,” sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

  A century earlier, the most graceful British essayist of all, Charles Lamb, divided the human species into “two distinct races,” neither of them identifiable by skin color, language, geographic roots, or religious conviction. Instead, Lamb (writing as “Elia”) judged people simply as “the men who borrow, and the men who lend.” But it was not borrowing currency that provoked his displeasure. “To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.”

  As Lamb escorted readers through his “little back study” in Bloomsbury, he pointed out the “foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out,” a cavity that once held “the tallest of my folios.” Further on, he indicated evidence of other similar offenses: “Here stood The Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. There loitered The Compleat Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side.” A frequent visitor to his rooms, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was singled out for special umbrage, though Lamb did concede a single compensation:

  Justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under-collection of this nature (my friend’s gatherings in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory at mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction; natives and naturalized.

  • • •

  In the fall of 1991, the Library of Congress mounted an exhibition to observe the one hundredth anniversary of Lessing J. Rosenwald’s birth. From 1943 until his death in 1979, the former chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co. had given to the nation 2,600 exquisite volumes, the greatest benefaction in the library’s history. The one hundred volumes selected for the exhibition included an enormous two-volume illuminated manuscript known as the Great Bible of Mainz. Produced in 1452, the book is thought to have influenced motifs and ornamentation used in the design of Johannes Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible, which was printed in the same city in the same year. Other treasures included Ptolemy’s Cosmographia; William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience; the only known copy of the first edition of the English version of the Lohengrin legend, The Knight of the Swan; and the only illustrated book produced by Aldus Manutius—a Venetian scholar, printer, and publisher—Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Each of these books is a cornerstone of early printing and illustration, which were Rosenwald’s principal interests as a collector.

  In 1977, Frederick R. Goff wrote how Rosenwald had built his collection “like a great mansion, one brick at a time.” In the final analysis, Goff said, “no collector or lover of books ever possesses a great book or manuscript until it possesses him.” Rosenwald was not one to browse through flea markets or garage sales. He bought through dealers, and though he undoubtedly paid handsomely for his acquisitions, he did benefit by obtaining material that was not always in fashion. In his privately printed memoirs, Rosenwald gave prospective collectors six specific pieces of advice, which can be summarized as follows: know your subject; establish a theme; find a good dealer you trust; be ahead of your time; seize unusual opportunities when they develop; and always be willing to refine your taste.

  In one instance, however, Rosenwald knowingly broke a few of his own rules. He not only bought something that was repugnant to him, but also instructed his agent to spare no expense in securing it. Once the loathsome item came into his possession, he sent it off into bibliographic exile, where it remained sealed for fifty years. Yet this acquisition showed Rosenwald’s unshaken commitment to the proper preservation of historic texts, regardless of their content.

  The chronology began one Sunday morning in December 1937 when he noticed an item in a forthcoming sale catalogue that awoke him from a comfortable lethargy:

  Prozess gegen die Juden von Trent, 1476–1478, manuscript written in
gothic letters of 614 pp. with a border on folio 2 verso, in gold and colours, with the coat-of-arms of the Duke of Württemberg, for whom this account was written, old vellum folio circa 1478.

  Lot 553 was the unpublished manuscript account of a notorious fifteenth-century criminal case in which eighteen members of the Jewish community of Trent, a principality in what is now northern Italy, were arrested on fabricated charges of murdering a two-year-old boy and using his blood at Passover services. Imprisoned and tortured horribly, the Jewish inhabitants of Trent finally were induced to “confess.” The men were executed and the women converted to Christianity.

  Convinced that the manuscript would be used to justify anti-Jewish propaganda if obtained by the German government, Rosenwald called his “advisor on all matters pertaining to books,” Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, and “did something that I never did before or since— once in a lifetime is enough.” Rosenwald learned afterward that during the sale, an unidentified woman loudly insisted she had made the highest offer and demanded that the bidding be reopened. The auctioneer politely told the woman she was mistaken, and refused. “Later investigation established the lady underbidder as a German agent who had been sent to the sale for the sole purpose of obtaining Lot 553.”

  When the bulky folio arrived at Rosenwald’s estate, Alverthorpe, in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, it was examined, repacked, and immediately shipped to the American Jewish Historical Society in Waltham, Massachusetts, which accepted the document with the understanding that it would remain sealed for fifty years. Almost to the day, fifty years later the society put the manuscript on the auction block, explaining that the content did not fall within its primary collecting focus, the history of American Jews. Bought at Sotheby’s for $176,000 by Erica and Ludwig Jesselson, well-known New York patrons of Jewish culture, the document was presented to Yeshiva University in 1988 and became part of the permanent collections. Four years later, Yale University Press published Trent 1475, a thorough examination of the document by R. Po-Chia Hsia, a professor of European history at New York University. Rescued from obscurity, a historic document had served scholarship and, in a small but significant way, had confirmed the vision of a collector once again.

  In the last decade of the fifteenth century, a German poet named Sebastian Brant was putting the final touches on a curious vessel of the imagination, Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools), a copy of which was included in the Rosenwald exhibition at the Library of Congress. First published in 1494, the work had taken Europe by storm, appearing in one Latin, three French, one Dutch, one Low German, and an English version within fifteen years.

  “If popularity be taken as the measure of success in literary effort,” the critic T. H. Jamieson wrote in 1873, Das Narrenschiff “must be considered one of the most successful books recorded in the whole history of literature.” One reason often cited to explain Brant’s far-reaching appeal was that he wrote in short chapters, mixed his “fools” skillfully, and maintained a fluid style that engaged his readers. An accessible study of human frailties, Ship of Fools also was the first printed book to incorporate contemporary events and living persons in its narrative.

  Of the English translations, the most enduring by far is the one rendered by Alexander Barclay and printed in 1509 by Richard Pynson. What made this version popular in England was Barclay’s shrewd decision to adapt the material to English life. Though his version was not a literal translation of Das Narrenschiff, the original’s premise was retained: several shiploads of fools set sail for their native country, the “Land of Fools,” and virtually every folly and vice of the age is personified, from misers and adulterers to lawyers and hypocritical churchgoers. There are 113 sections in the work, most of them devoted to a different class of fool. First to address the reader is the Book-Fool:

  I am the firste foole of all the hole nauy,

  To kepe the pompe, the helme and eke the sayle

  For this is my mynde, this one pleasure haue I

  Of bokes to haue grete plenty and aparayle

  I take no wysdome by them....

  Virtually every potshot taken at book collectors over the centuries is included in these lines, foremost among them that bibliophiles covet rarity more than content, and are impressed more by damask, satin, and pure velvet bindings than the wisdom printed on the pages inside. The Book-Fool is described as having traveled the world in search of new acquisitions, because “to haue plentiy it is a pleasaunt thynge,” though “what they mene do I not understonde.” Contributing significantly to the popularity of Das Narrenschiff was the series of clever woodcuts, some of which, including the one of a bespectacled Book-Fool sitting at his lectern with a feather duster held aloft, are believed to have been executed by Albrecht Dürer.

  In a fanciful story titled “A Meeting in Valladolid,” Anthony Burgess allowed readers to listen in on a literary summit he imagined taking place between William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. The year is 1605, and the English playwright is in Spain on a goodwill tour intended to improve relations between England and Spain, still strained from the bitter naval engagement fought in the English Channel seventeen years earlier. While no evidence exists that Shakespeare ever left England, let alone that he ever spoke with Cervantes, there is no doubt that the dramatist knew of the novelist’s work. Cardenio, a comedy presented in 1613 by the troupe of actors called the King’s Men, is believed to have been written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and though the play is now lost, a surviving summary clearly shows that it was inspired by a minor but amusing character in Don Quixote, which had appeared the previous year in a popular English edition.

  On April 23, 1616, Cervantes died in Madrid at the age of sixty-eight, penniless and embittered. On that same date—because of differing calendars, it was not the same day—Shakespeare died in Stratford at fifty-two, the victim, legend has it, of a chill brought on a fortnight earlier during a robust reunion with former colleagues from the London theater. While history does not record whether either of these writers had any obsession with books, it is noteworthy that two of their most significant characters, Don Quixote and Prospero, were touched quite profoundly by the spells books cast.

  It is stirring tales of chivalry, after all, that move the man of La Mancha to go off with Sancho Panza and joust with windmills:

  Be it known, therefore, that this said honest gentleman at his leisure hours, which engrossed the greatest part of the year, addicted himself to the reading of books of chivalry, which he perused with such rapture and application, that he not only forgot the pleasures of the chase, but also utterly neglected the management of his estate: nay to such a pass did his curiosity and madness, in this particular, drive him, that he sold many good acres of Terra Firma to purchase books of knighterrantry, with which he furnished his library to the utmost of his power.

  As the broken knight lies dying in his bed with a burning fever, the village priest orders the offending books incinerated and the hidalgo’s library sealed off with brick and mortar.

  For Shakespeare, creativity was a process of working magic with fleeting images and random thoughts. A typical meditation comes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

  The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

  And as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  The character Shakespeare chose to say farewell to the London stage on his behalf was a magician who draws his power from books. The Tempest is the first play to appear in the First Folio, not because it was the first written, nor because it was the last, but in all likelihood because it was widely acknowledged to be the great bard’s parting production. In a moving epilogue, Prospero is alone on the stage and seeks permission from the audience to withdraw in peace and dignity:

  As you from crimes would pardoned be,

 
Let your indulgence set me free.

  The Tempest is as much about the power of books as about the mysteries of magic. When Prospero tells his daughter Miranda how he was tricked out of his kingdom by his brother, he confesses some responsibility for what happened. He explains that he had been distracted by his reading, which caused him to neglect his official duties. “My library,” the magician admits, “was dukedom large enough.” Forced by the palace coup to seek refuge on a tropical island, he brought with him only Miranda, his wand, some bare necessities, and prized volumes from his library. Later in the play, when Caliban drunkenly plots with Stephano and Trinculo to kill Prospero, the “hag-born whelp” makes clear that before any attempt is made on his master’s life, it is necessary to “seize” his books, to “possess” his books, to “burn” his books, “for without them he’s but a sot as I am.” Finally, after fulfilling all his objectives, Prospero breaks his wand, abjures his “potent art,” and vows to “drown” his books in “certain fathoms in the earth.”

  In the fall of 1989, a New York collector paid $2.1 million for a splendid set of the first four folios of Shakespeare’s dramatic works at the Garden Ltd. sale, at the time the most ever spent for nonillustrated printed books. (For more on the Garden Ltd. sale, see chapter 6.) At the same auction, a magnificent copy of both parts of Don Quixote (the novel was issued in two volumes, one in 1605, the other in 1615) was sold to an unidentified Spanish collector for $1.65 million, more than six times the amount Sotheby’s had estimated in its catalogue. Only seven other sets of the novel are known to exist in the original state, and prior to this auction, there was only one in Spain, the country the book celebrates.