Books Do Furnish A Mind, Part I
by Ibn Warraq (March 2015)
Anyone entering my smallish but not tiny apartment in New York is immediately struck by the sight of seventeen overflowing Ikea Billy bookcases of approximately 3450 books.2 All those in happy possession of a private well-stocked library must have encountered the same inevitable question, “Have you read them all?” Occasionally, when the mood takes me, I reply, “Imagine you have a wine cellar. Now what would be the point of having a well-stocked wine cellar where all the bottles are empty?”
To the same question, French novelist, poet, and Nobel Prize winner in 1921, Anatole France [died 1924] always replied “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”5
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“On all sides are we not driven to the conclusion that of all things which men can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call book? For, indeed, is it not verily the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a book? It is the thought of man. The true thaumaturgic virtue by which man marks all things whatever. All that he does and brings to pass is the vesture of a book”
– T. Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History, The Hero as Man of Letters, 1840.
About three thousand four hundred books (including the ones in my bedroom), and another two thousand in a farm house in France, do not amount to a serious library, alas. Professor Richard A. Macksey of Johns Hopkins University, and co-founder of the university’s Humanities Center, is the owner of a library of over 70,000 tomes.6 Christian Galantaris in his Manuel de Bibliophile recounts the tale of Sir Richard Heber [1774-1833] who owned 300,000 books spread over five different houses in England, and some on the continent. Jacques Bonnet gives the example of Antoine-Marie-Henri Bouland [1754-1825], a former mayor of a Paris arrondissement who had to acquire nine buildings to house his 600,000 volumes. Bonnet, a French publisher, author, translator, and art historian, is himself possessed by bibliomania, of which he gives a witty and erudite account in his Des Bibliothèques Pleines de Fantômes, a work in which most bibliophiles will recognize their own experiences. Bonnet’s personal library of some 40,000 books puts mine to shame.
Nonetheless, by the end of his life, Pepys’s collection amounted to 3000 volumes.
Thomas de Quincey [1785-1859] in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar, which first appeared in two parts in the London Magazine, September and October, 1821, wrote,10
Edward Gibbon [1737-1794], in his Memoirs, talks of his library in Lausanne,
My habitation was embellished in my absence, and the last division of books, which followed my steps, increased my chosen library to the number of between six and seven thousand volumes. My seraglio was ample, my choice was free, my appetite was keen. After a full repast on Homer and Aristophanes, I involved myself in the philosophic maze of the writings of Plato, of which the dramatic is, perhaps, more interesting than the argumentative part: but I stepped aside into every path of inquiry which reading or reflection accidentally opened.11
Jean-Baptiste Colbert [1619-1683], French statesman, Minister of Finance for Louis XIV, gathered an impressive number of books (23,000) and manuscripts (5212) during his life. Pierre LeGallois in his treatise on European libraries, wrote in 1680, “The library of Monsieur Colbert contains a large number of rare books and manuscripts. Here one sees all the manuscripts concerning France, among them the negotiations for the treaty of Munster, the twenty eight conferences ofthe Pyrenees, and copies of all the charters of the kingdom.”14 His library passed to his son, the Marquis de Seignelay, then in 1732 the Colbert family sold the library to Louis XV for 300,000 pounds.15
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“I cannot live without books.” Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 1815.
“I will bury myself in my books and the devil may pipe to his own.” Tennyson, Maud, Ist Edn. 1855.
“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts (1931) ‘Myself’
Eric Cochrane in his history of Florence wrote that “an indispensable condition of all scholarly activity [during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was] submission to that incarnate encyclopedia of scholarship [Antonio Magliabecchi who] 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 acknowledgements of half the books published in his lifetime.”19
By now he had acquired ten thousand volumes, and just as he was thinking his quest was over, Bancroft realised that he had neglected Mexico itself for a possible source for further books on his subject. Thousands more books, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts relating to Jesuit missions in Texas, California, and South America, works in Indian languages and dialects, and so on were acquired through agents and dealers. By 1890, Bancroft was in possession of a library of sixty five thousand volumes, a library that luckily survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and was bought by the University of California at Berkeley, where the books are now housed in the university’s Bancroft Library. Thus while it is highly unlikely that Bancroft had read the sixty five thousand volumes let alone the 100,000 manuscripts, his bibliomania had resulted in the creation of an invaluable tool for scientists, a research library on the subject of California, and the Pacific West, unequaled in the United States, perhaps, the world.
Other book collectors whose passions, bibliomania, and eccentricities have led to the establishment of important private research institutes in the United States include Henry E. Huntington [died 1927], Henry and Emily Folger [died 1930 and 1936 respectively], and John Pierpont Morgan [died 1913].
Book collector, Fred J. Board of Connecticut confessed to Basbanes without embarrassment “I don’t buy books to read. I don’t read any of them, really, it’s the chase I enjoy, the challenge. That’s what I was doing in business, I was chasing these companies. Then I got interested in a private press in Portland, Maine, Mosher Press. They did about five hundred books, and I have all but three or four. And then I kind of got interested in epitaph books.”22
Carter Burden, who is said to have spent somewhere between ten and twenty million dollars on first editions of American authors, started collecting toy soldiers and baseball cards at the age of six. He is an obessive collector rather than someone with serious scholarly concerns. For example, Burden once paid $19,250 for a copy of the book Hike and the Aeroplane, Sinclair Lewis’s first book, written under the pseudonym Tom Graham. Nicholas Basbanes remarked to Burden, “With everything you’ve got, I would have figured you to have Sinclair Lewis pretty much covered.” Burden replied, “I already had a copy of the book. It was the dust jacket I needed.”23
Forster finds a kind of comfort in being surrounded by his books, “It is very pleasant to sit with them in the firelight for a couple of minutes, not reading, not even thinking, but aware that they, with their accumulated wisdom and charm, are waiting to be used, and that my library, in its tiny imperfect way, is a successor to the great private libraries of the past.”
As for lending books, yes he does lend them, “and they are not returned, and still I lend books. Do I ever borrow books? I do, and I can see some of them unreturned around me. I favour reciprocal dishonesty.”
To be continued.
[1] Sir William Waller , Meditation V in Divine Meditations upon Several Occasions: with a Daily Directory, London: Benjamin Alsop, 1680, p. 29. Sir William Waller (1597 –1668) was an English Parliamentary general during the English Civil War. I discovered this quote after I had already thought of the title of the essay, which was an ironical allusion to Anthony Powell’s novel Books Do Furnish a Room, tenth volume in the twelve volume series, ambitiously and pretentiously titled, A Dance to the Music of Time.
[2] I counted them, in February 2015, bookshelf by bookshelf by drawing a grid of rectangles representing each bookshelf.
[3] Italian Ethnomusicologist, Roberto Leydi [died 2003] had a private library containing 10,000 volumes (plus thousands of records, tapes and instruments) which he donated, just before his death, to Center for Dialectology and Ethnography in Bellinzona, Switzerland.
[6] http://bookriot.com/2013/09/30/libraries-rich-famous/
[7] James Boswell. Life of Johnson, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008, p..438.
[9] The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. X, p.34. Pepys’s spelling and punctuation have been retained.
[10] The London Magazine, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Pains of Opium” No.XXII, October, 1821, Volume IV, [July-December,1821], p.368.
[11] Edward Gibbon, The Life and Letters of Edward Gibbon with his History of the Crusades. London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1889, p.108
[13] Craik, Henry, ed. English Prose. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916, Vol.V, sv “Southey, R.”
[16] James Boswell. Life of Johnson, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008, p.379.
[17] The British Library: Help for Researchers,. George III Collection: the King’s Library. Available on line at: http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/prbooks/georgeiiicoll/george3kingslibrary.html
[18] Theodore W. Koch, The North American Review (1821-1940) Boston: Aug 1914. Vol. CC., Iss. NO. 705, p. 244.
[19] Eric Cochrane. Florence in the Forgotten Centuries 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973, quoted in Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. New York: An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company, 1999, p.38.
[20] Quoted in Nicholas A. Basbanes. A Gentle Madness, Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. New York: An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company, 1999, pp.169-170.
[21] N.Basbanes, op.cit., p171.
[22] N.Basbanes, op.cit.,p.407.
[23] N.Basbanes, p.285.
[24] More correctly, Charles Forster, Mahometanism unveiled: An inquiry, in which that arch-heresy, its diffusion and continuance, are examined on a new principle, tending to confirm the evidences, and aid the propagation, of the Christian faith. London: J. Duncan and J. Cochran, 1829.
[25] E.M.Forster, “In My Library”, in Two Cheers for Democracy, London, 1951, p.301
[26] Ibid.,p 302.
[27] Ibid.,pp.302-303.
[28] Ibid.,p.304. __________________________________ . To comment on this essay, please click here. To help New English Review continue to publish scholarly and important essays such as this, please click here. If you have enjoyed this article by Ibn Warraq and would like to read more, please click here.