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

  “Our copy isn’t in as fine a condition as the one sold at the Garden sale, but at least we got ours when it was issued,” Julian Roberts, the executive librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, said a few months after the New York auction. “We had an agent then who traveled to Spain on our behalf. There was a great deal of enmity between England and Spain at the time, and he was not treated very well, but he did go there and he bought five Spanish books for us; Don Quixote was one of them.”

  This would have been around the same time, about 1605, that Shakespeare was creating the role of Lear for Richard Burbage to perform at the Globe Theatre. When the playwright drafted his will in 1616, he made no mention of any library or papers, but he did leave small amounts of money to John Heminges and Henry Condell, the actors who seven years later selflessly guided his dramatic works through William and Isaac Jaggard’s press to create the First Folio. None of Shakespeare’s personal books or manuscripts are known to survive, with two possible exceptions: a three-page fragment of an unproduced play about Sir Thomas More believed to be in his hand, and a book in the British Library with his name written boldly on the flyleaf. Yet Heminges and Condell note on the title page of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, the seminal collection of Shakespeare’s complete works that is known today simply as the First Folio, that their edition was “published according to the true original copies.”

  In an introductory note addressed “To the Great Variety of Readers,” Heminges and Condell issued an urgent plea: “Read him, therefore, and again, and again.” They also stressed, in a timeless caveat, how “the fate of all books depends upon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well, it is now public, and you will stand for privileges we know: to read and censure. Do so, but buy it first.”

  Because people did “buy it first,” Shakespeare’s works have survived through the generations. Though a number of plays exist individually in unauthorized quarto editions, fully twenty others—Macbeth, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra among them—are known from no other source except the First Folio. If someone in those days had proposed that Shakespeare’s handwritten drafts be deposited somewhere safe and secure—a place, perhaps, like the university library in Oxford, the town the playwright passed through often during his many journeys between Stratford and London, the institution that had the foresight to purchase in Spain a first issue of Don Quixote—the legacy would be richer still.

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  Book madness has appeared from time to time as a motif in various works of fiction, most notably perhaps as the mischievous catalyst in Don Quixote, but just as powerfully in more recent novels. The German writer Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, used the theme with singular power in his 1936 novel, Die Blendung. (Blendung means “mirage,” “bedazzlement.”) Translated into English after World War II, the book was published under the somewhat snappier title Autoda-fé (“act of faith”), an expression first used during the late Middle Ages for the ceremony accompanying the pronouncement of judgment by the Spanish Inquisition. The phrase came to mean the burning of heretics at the stake. Both titles suggest the theme of fire.

  In the novel, Peter Kien is a fiercely detached European scholar whose existence is centered around his great library of 25,000 volumes. When he marries an illiterate housekeeper with the idea that she will attend to his daily needs, he fails to recognize the woman’s rapacity, and his destruction is assured. “She is the heaven-sent instrument for preserving my library,” he reasons with sad irony. His error is quickly apparent, and the marriage becomes a mortal combat between ignorance and independence. Momentarily alone in his library, Kien apologizes to his lifelong companions for his terrible misjudgment: “Greatly daring, he glided along his shelves and softly felt the backs of his books. He forced his eyes wide and rigidly open, so that they did not close out of habit. Ecstasy seized him, the ecstasy of joy and long-awaited consummation.” At the end, Kien is in his library once again, but now he is a fugitive and police officers are pounding at the bolted door. Realizing he is doomed, Kien pulls volumes from his shelves and builds a pyre in the middle of the room. He climbs to the sixth step of his library ladder and waits. “When the flames reached him at last, he laughed out loud, louder than he had ever laughed in his life.”

  Combustion is also the central metaphor in Fahrenheit 451, an unsettling novel by the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury about an intolerant future society that outlaws books and decrees their destruction; the title is the temperature at which paper bursts into flames. Similarly, fire is the instrument of deliverance from intellectual bigotry in The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s apocalyptic novel of ideas that is set in the fourteenth century in a wealthy Italian abbey noted for its magnificent monastic library. William of Baskerville, a brilliant Franciscan monk, arrives to investigate a series of horrible murders. “Everything turns on the theft and possession of a book,” William soon declares, and the mystery is solved when the medieval detective determines the identity of a lost text of Aristotle. But the discovery is costly, and destruction follows. “It was the greatest library in Christendom,” William says as he watches the abbey burn to the ground. “Now, the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him anymore.”

  The British author A. S. Byatt, a former instructor of American literature at University College, London, uses the intense competition so often apparent among academic institutions as the premise for Possession, a richly textured novel of literary detection and ideas that won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1990. Described by the author as a contemporary “romance,” its climax takes place in a country graveyard with the opposing parties trying desperately to outwit each other and retrieve a cache of important papers from a famous writer’s grave. The title takes on several layers of meaning, ownership and obsession among them.

  With the release of a film based on the 1910 novel Howards End, the writer E. M. Forster (1879–1970) has attracted a new generation of readers. In the climactic scene, the Leonard Bast character is crushed to death by a collapsing bookcase. Forster’s most recent biographer has observed that falling books appear in no fewer than five of his works. What event may have inspired the image is uncertain, but Forster used it often to suggest a number of concepts. In the story “Ansell,” the hero’s box of books—representing his life’s work and thus his identity—falls into a ravine, providing, in an odd way, a release and a freeing. The image also appears in “The Story of the Siren,” “The Purple Envelope,” and in the 1908 novel A Room with a View, when one of the characters, a writer named Miss Lavish, is described as having lost a manuscript at Amalfi after “the Grotto fell roaring onto the beach.”

  Because writers are so involved in the creative process, most of them find book collecting a phenomenon too remote to understand. When A. J. A. Symons was establishing the First Editions Club in London in the 1920s, he also was working on a bibliography of prominent British writers. As part of his research he interviewed George Moore, a writer of Victorian novels who had enjoyed widespread popularity many years earlier. “Moore was much flattered, like most of the other writers my brother approached, by this move towards a lifetime canonization,” Julian Symons wrote in an affectionate biography of his older brother. The aging novelist agreed to inscribe A. J. A.’s copy of a book of poems and in return asked for help with a story he was then writing about a “great collector.” Moore not only wanted to know how such a person would behave, but also wondered what books such a collector might show to visitors. “I think he would choose, for the sake of the ladies, first editions of Shelley and Keats and writers of that period,” Moore speculated. “I wish you could supply me with a dozen names and a few accidental remarks that he might make.”

  Conversely, the late Ian Fleming understood not only what it meant to collect but how it felt to be collected. His hugely successful James Bond novels sold millions of copies during the 1950s and 1960s and to this day first editions of
Agent 007’s adventures routinely command respectable prices in dealers’ catalogues. With the able counsel of the London bookseller Percy Muir, Fleming also assembled one of the finest “subject” book collections of his generation: he devised an imaginative scheme to seek out printed works that had “made things happen” over the previous century and a half. Such a focus allowed him to include Charles Darwin on evolution, James Clerk Maxwell on the electromagnetic nature of light, Marie Curie on radium, Sigmund Freud on the subconscious, Albert Einstein on relativity, Alexander Graham Bell on the telephone, Sir Francis Galton on fingerprint identification, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov on conditional reflexes, Robert Koch on the aetiology of tuberculosis, and even Robert Baden-Powell on the Boy Scouts (Fleming’s collection included Baden-Powell’s influential 1908 guide, Scouting for Boys). About a thousand books in all entered his collection.

  Fleming’s activity as a bibliophile was known in antiquarian circles, particularly because of his visibility as founder and principal owner of The Book Collector, the distinguished quarterly based in London that continues to provide collectors, dealers, and librarians with a forum to exchange information. Yet the scope of his collecting did not become public knowledge until 1963, when organizers of “Printing and the Mind of Man,” one of the most exciting book exhibitions of the twentieth century, borrowed 44 of Fleming’s books for the show mounted in London at the British Library. Sixty-three libraries and individuals from around the world lent 464 books that have shaped Western culture, but only King’s College, Cambridge, with 51, lent more titles than Fleming, the creator of the modern spy novel. When he died the following year, there was concern that his collection would be broken up, but after prolonged negotiations it was acquired by the Lilly Library of Indiana University, where it remains intact today.

  The biographer Joseph Blotner wrote how William Faulkner once refused to sign half a dozen copies of his books that Alfred A. Knopf had brought to a dinner party at the New York apartment of Bennett Cerf, “because special signed editions are part of my stock-in-trade.” This was especially embarrassing for Cerf, who was Faulkner’s publisher, because Knopf had combed so many used bookstores that day looking for the out-of-print titles. “People stop me on the street and in elevators and ask me to sign books, but I can’t afford to do this,” Faulkner explained somewhat ingenuously. “Aside from that, I only sign books for my friends.” He finally relented, though only after Cerf interceded on his colleague’s behalf. “Mrs. Knopf has been very kind to me, so if you want to pick out one of them, I’ll inscribe it for you,” said Faulkner.

  Over the years, John Updike has authorized hundreds of signed limited-edition copies of various works to be issued by small-press printers, probably more than any other writer alive or dead. As a result of this enterprise—along with the fact that first editions of his many trade books are also in great demand—Updike understands the relationships that can develop between those who collect and those who are collected.

  In Bech is Back, Updike tells the story of the author Henry Bech as he approaches his fiftieth birthday. “He had his friends, his fans, even his collectors,” most prominent among the latter being a persistent fellow from Cedar Meadows, Pennsylvania, named Marvin Federbusch. The two have never met, but for more than twenty years Federbusch has been pestering Bech with requests to sign copies of his books and return them in post-paid padded envelopes.

  One day, when Bech is in central Pennsylvania with a free afternoon and a rented car at his disposal, he decides on a whim to call on his most “faithful agitator” unannounced. Once inside the man’s drab house, Bech looks around and remarks, “I don’t see my books.” Reluctantly Federbusch leads him to a back room where he opens a door to reveal “a trove of Bechiana”: Bech in many languages, “Bech anthologized, analyzed, and deluxized, Bech laid to rest. The books were not erect in rows but stacked on their sides like lumber, like dubious ingots, in the lightless closet along with—oh, treachery!—similarly exhaustive, tightly packed, and beautifully unread collections of Roth, Mailer, Barth, Capote.” After signing some paperbacks, Bech leaves with the certain knowledge that he has heard the last of the collector. “How wrong he had been to poke into this burrow, how right Federbusch was to smell hurt! The greedy author, not content with adoration in two dimensions, had offered himself in a fatal third, and maimed his recording angel.”

  Piqued by the high prices he discovered people were asking for first editions of In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway’s second book, the humorist Robert Benchley was moved to write an essay in 1934 in which he asked a delightfully petulant question: “Why does nobody collect me?” Benchley did not mention that Hemingway’s book had been issued in a first printing of 175 copies and was a rarity almost from the beginning of its existence, but that detail seemed irrelevant in light of his other grievances:

  I am older than Hemingway, and have written more books than he has. And yet it is as much as my publishers and I can do to get people to pay even the list-price for my books, to say nothing of a supplementary sum for rare copies. One of my works, Love Conquers All, is even out of print, and yet nobody shows any interest in my extra copy. I have even found autographed copies of my books in secondhand book shops, along with My Life and Times by Buffalo Bill. Doesn’t anybody care?

  Benchley died in 1945, and with the passage of time it has developed that some people do care about his work. In fact, two of his titles were listed in Collected Books: The Guide to Values, an authoritative price guide of modern first editions compiled by Allen and Patricia Ahearn of Rockville, Maryland. His 1924 book, Of All Things, was listed at $400, and his 1928 book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; or David Copperfield, was selling for $300, assuming in each instance that the copies had dust-jackets and were in fine condition. Benchley still has a way to go before his “values” achieve parity with Hemingway’s, however; first editions of In Our Time continue to sell for upward of $15,000.

  Three years before Robert Benchley lamented the dearth of collectors of his published works, an author of travelogues, essays, and maritime adventures who was far less popular than Ernest Hemingway had his work canonized in a bibliography. William McFee, whose oeuvre included such books as Casuals of the Sea (1916), Captain Macedoine’s Daughter (1920), Swallowing the Anchor (1925), and Sailors of Fortune (1929), was so delighted by the effort put forth by his good friend James T. Babb that he wrote the introduction to the bibliography, published in 1931.

  “It is impossible to be a collected author and remain innocent of the irony,” McFee wrote with impish delight.

  The scorn and contempt for a collected author like myself, who makes very little money, cherished by the big fellows who make six-figure incomes from serials and novels but whose work is esteemed as garbage by collectors, is one of the joys of my life. The wistful desire to be reckoned “important” by critics who earn less than their own chauffeurs saves many a successful writer from haughtiness. I confess I share, sometimes, their bewilderment. At other times, when I am reading their works, I fancy I understand. I seem to have read it all somewhere else, long ago, in other best sellers. Perhaps collectors are a cannier lot than we authors give them credit for being. If somebody did not preserve the beginnings of literature, they would be irretrievably lost. Think of the librarian who discovered Chatterton manuscripts being used to wrap up fried fish! Think of the well-to-do novelists of Chatterton’s time who have no value in a collector’s estimation at all, but who have turned to dust! Collectors, in short, in these days of manipulated reputations, money prizes, and book clubs, are the repositories of integrity in our profession. Theirs is a noble madness. It behooves us never to betray their confidence.

  Unlike McFee, James A. Michener is in the enviable position of being widely read and widely collected at the same time. In fact, because his books are issued in printings of several hundred thousand copies, some of his fans take unusual steps to enhance the value of their first editions. “People will drive for three hundred miles and ask me to s
ign their books,” he said one morning in a telephone interview from his home in Austin, Texas. “I’ve been involved in this as an affectionate watcher for many years, and I would never try to discourage it, but it remains a mystery to me. A day doesn’t go by that five or six books do not come into my office, and I groan, because it happens every day of my life. About twenty years after I am dead, somebody is going to find one of my books that isn’t autographed by me, and it will be worth a fortune.”

  The North Carolina author Reynolds Price was doodling on a paper placemat in a Harvard Square café one spring morning in 1992 when he told me about the copy of Paradise Lost he had bought for himself five years earlier after surviving extensive treatment for spinal cancer. Price said that he had always been a book collector and that he taught a course on John Milton at Duke University, but stressed that the thin volume meant considerably more to him than love of the great poet’s work. “Milton was in his early forties and I was in my early fifties when we both underwent a physically devastating illness, and in both our lives that experience led to some kind of mysterious renewal of good work,” he explained. “Milton wrote his best books after he lost his sight. I have written eleven books since I had cancer, and it represents some of the very best work I have ever done. My copy of Paradise Lost once belonged to Deborah Milton Clarke, the daughter who took Milton’s dictation after he went blind. For me, it was like the apostolic succession. I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand.”