Phantoms of the Bookshelves
by Jacques Bonnet
Translated by James Salter
(The Overlook Press, New York, 2008)
The physical possession of a book may become of little significance. Access to it will be what matters and when the book s closed, so to speak, it will disappear into the cyber.
Introduction, page 1.
Titles and names strike what can only be called chords of desire.
Page 2.
Reading has the power not only to demolish time and span the ages, b ut also the capacity to make one feel more human - human meaning at one with humanity - and possibly less savage.
Page 2.
Books should be read at the speed they deserve … .
Page 3.
A private library of good size is an insolent form of riches, and the desire to have more books is difficult to rationalize, especially in view of the fact that you do not or cannot read them all …
Page 4.
The bibliophile is, after all like a sultan or khan who has countless wives already but another two or three are always irresistible.
Page 5.
Books … are expensive to buy and worth very little if you try to sell them. The fate of a private library after the death of its owner is almost always to be scattered.
Page 5.
The love of books, the possession of them, can be thought of as an extension of one’s self or being, not separate from a love of life but rather as an extra dimension of it, and even of what comes after. “Paradise is a library”, as Borges said.
Page 6.
… competence and appropriateness are not provable by document.
Page 9.
The term “bibliomaniac” can be applied to a wide range of personalities. They can be divided into two principal categories: collectors and manic readers.
Page 22.
… collectors of a particular category of articles almost always lose interest once they have reached their goal. When the collection is complete, what else is there to do? With nothing else to look for, the fascination of the thing completely evaporates.
Page 25.
People who merely accumulate books give the impression that they have lost sight of any numerical limits and have completely abandoned any idea of reading those they have.
Page 26.
… the reading bibliomaniac wants to hold on to the physical object, to keep it ready to hand.
Page 27.
The book is the precious material expression of a past emotion, or the chance of having one in years to come, and to get rid of it would bring the risk of a serious sense of loss. Whereas a collector frets obsessively about the books he does not yet possess, the fanatical reader worries about no longer owning those books - traces of his past or hopes for the future - which he has read once and may read again some day.
Page 28.
The fanatical reader is not only anxious, he or she is curious.
Page 29.
A strange relationship becomes established between the bibliomaniac and his (or her) thousands of books. The same relationship as between a gardener and an invasive climbing plant: the plant grows all by itself, in manner invisible to the naked eye, but at a rate of progress that is measurable after a few weeks. The gardener, unless he is willing to chop it down, can only indicate the direction he wants it to take. In just the same way, prolific libraries take on an independent existence, and become living things.
Page 30.
… books, unlike foodstuffs or other articles, can’t just sit in cardboard boxes or live in piles. These are no more than temporary solutions, which make it impossible to use them. If they are going to be read, they have to be arranged on shelves in a way that makes them retrievable.
Page 33.
Bibliophiles will still keep their collections and libraries devoted to precise topics will survive, but we may be pretty sure that vast and unwieldy personal collections of a few tens of thousands of books are likely to disappear … .
Page 35.
The problem is not how to observe a self-imposed rule in order to justify its validity, but how to retrieve a book when you need it.
Page 36.
… the principle of ordering one’s books may be a warning sing of the owner’s mental disorder … .
Page 41.
“The truth is that a library, whatever its size, does not need to have been read cover to cover to serve a useful purpose” - Alberto Manguel.
Page 49.
The important thing is not so much to read fast, as to read each book at the speed it deserves.
Page 49.
Writing a review of a book which has just been published means - at least in my case - reading it twice: once to discover the book as a n innocent reader, and once more to put some order into one’s impressions and ideas.
Page 50.
Even when the book really has been red and absorbed well enough to have a specific place in our minds, what we recall is often a memory of the emotion we felt while reading it, rather than anything precise about its contents.
Page 50.
The Babylonian invention of writing occurred about 5400 years ago, and the alphabet was created about 3800 years ago - too recently, in other words, for our genome to have time to alter to develop brain circuits adapted to reading. … This faculty, which to the individual feels like magic is, therefore, is an improbably event in the story of human evolution and one of the most surprising aspects of brain function.
Page 51.
With writing, and therefore reading, humanity did not just make a quantitative cultural leap, it completely changed the scale of human thought.
Page 51.
Reading tires me out as little as it tires fish to swim or birds to fly.
Page 56.
I find it impossible to read without something in my hand.
Page 56.
To write on a book helps my reading, but it also helps me to remember the book and to come back to it later.
Page 57.
My memory works best at being able to find quickly the book the information is in, rather than by loading itself with facts, dates and quotations which are sitting on my bookshelves.
Page 57.
Bookstores often become informal meeting places, where at certain times of day you are almost sure to find someone to talk to.
Page 65.
Anyone interested in art and who has collected books about it immediately encounters two problems. The first is financial. Art books cost on average three or four times as much as other books - sometimes far more. And they never come out in cheap paperback form. Then once they are out of print, it is unusual for them to be reprinted. So their price on the second-hand market can shoot up. …
The second problem is their size and shape - generally irregular - and it means you have to shelve them in rather haphazard fashion, which complicates any thematic arrangement.
Pages 73, 74.
Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional.
Page 80.
Authors and their characters do have something in common: they almost always have love lives. It is very rare for a novel to contain no love story at all.
Page 88.
The library protects us from external enemies, filters the noise of the world, tempers the cold winds around us - but also gives us the feeling of being all-powerful. … my library is also a concentrate of space. Every region on earth is represented there somewhere, the continents with all their landscapes, their climates and their ways of life.
Page 98.
Beyond books themselves, there is everything they have to tell us about the human condition. Pointing out that the past allows us to put our own present into salutary perspective is something of a truism, yet surprisingly many people seem not to know it.
Page 99.
The library is governed by a wider economy, to do with one’s relation to the outside world. To play its part properly, the library must be left behind form time to time, so that one can miss it and then gratefully rediscover it. From a distance, it becomes idealized, and helps one to bear the discomfort of travelling.
Page 102.
Since all dictionaries are by definition incomplete or contain errors, one tends to accumulate them in order to compare one with another.
Page 105.
The internet and the many television channels have driven out the boredom which was always the prime motive for reading, but should we r egret it? What is more, we now have the convenience of being able to order books online … These novelties have unavoidably transformed the status of the library: it is only one among many ways of acquiring knowledge. And they have changed the status of the book, which is just one method among others, and not the most accessible, of finding “entertainment.”
Page 107.
The problem in years to come will not be how to accumulate books in order to have them within reach, but to find one’s way through the exponentially growing mass of publications.
Pages 107-108.
I have benefited from a classic book-based education, which means I have a particular view of the internet. What will be the approach of the generations who are growing up with it?
Page 108.
History shows that you never escape unscathed from a beneficial form of progress.
Page 109.
The three enemies of books are rats, worms and dust, to which we must add a fourth: borrowers.
Page 111.
Never lend a book, always give it away. Then things are absolutely clear.
Page 112.
To lose one’s books is to lose one’s past.
Page 112.
Violent and systematic destruction of books has occurred time out of mind in history, and has almost always accompanied or preceded the persecution of their potential readers.
Page 113.