In his affectionate introduction to Jacques Bonnet’s reflections on reading and collecting, novelist James Salter points out that “a private library of good size is an insolent form of riches.” Bonnet owns 40,000 books, which he reads, marks up and uses for his art-history and literary research — his is a working collection, not a museum of precious rarities. In this case, what’s really “insolent” is that Bonnet’s books are all shelved, all organized, all findable.
Anyone with a serious personal library — that means, in Bonnet’s view, 20,000 or more volumes — recognizes that it’s easy to acquire books, but it’s hard to find a place to put them. My collection, for example, probably qualifies as “serious,” although at least two-thirds of what I’ve accumulated over the years currently resides in boxes, either in the basement or in a storage unit. Long ago, Samuel Johnson spoke of turning over half a library to write one book. In my case, I sometimes turn over half my library just to find one book. When that MacArthur grant finally comes my way, I know precisely what I’m going to do with it. There will be miles of mahogany shelving, two long study tables and the best lighting that money can buy.
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
In his breviary-like “Phantoms on the Bookshelves,” Bonnet includes chapters on “organizing the bookshelves” and “the practice of reading,” writes lovingly of his art monographs and catalogues, and offers plenty of anecdotes about his favorite authors and collectors. This is, however, no Gallic version of Nicholas Basbanes’s best-selling “A Gentle Madness” (recently reissued in paperback by Fine Books Press, $15.95), which presents in-depth profiles of bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs. Instead, Bonnet offers a personal ramble through his own library, coupled with chummy and sometimes idiosyncratic pensees about the literary life.
For instance, Bonnet distinguishes between “collectors and manic readers.” Henry Folger, who gathered as many Shakespeare first folios as he could find, was a collector; Bonnet, by contrast, is a manic reader, one who grows attached to physical volumes, wants to hold them in his hand and keep them near. In his case, he also admits to “a certain methodical tendency” that drives him “to read all the works of a given writer, then all the books on him or her, then to move on to another writer, or all the books written on a certain subject, or the literature of a certain period, or country,” all the while discovering still other topics of interest. Serious collectors, in other words, focus their energies and cash, while manic readers tend to go wandering through a garden of constantly forking paths.
In this speed-obsessed Internet age, Bonnet reiterates that “the important thing is not so much to read fast, as to read each book at the speed it deserves.” He notes that “to pick up a book in your hands and discover what it really contains is like conferring flesh and blood, in other words a density and thickness, that it will never lose again, to what was previously just a word.” To be away from his library, he says, is to feel “handicapped, as if I had been amputated of some vital limb.” Nonetheless, “to play its part properly, the library must be left behind from 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. It is waiting for us at home and is already being enriched with the things we are bringing back with us.”
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