The Book Schnook

 

"Real bibliophiles do not put their books on shelves for people to look at or handle. They have no desire to show off their darlings, or to amaze people with their possessions. They keep their prized books hidden away in a secret spot to which they resort stealthily, like a Caliph visiting his harem, or a church elder sneaking into a bar. To be a book collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope-fiend with those of a miser."

Robertson Davies

I was dusting another bookshelf this morning, and the volumes were rather large and heavy and hard to handle. The fugitive thought flitted through my head of whether I really needed or wanted so many books, some of them books which I hardly ever look at these days, some books that are so hard to get to that they almost might as well not exist in my library.

The answering thought came back almost immediately. Yes, I really need and want all my books! In fact, I need even more. I want every book I once owned and lost or had to sell. I want every book I ever read and forgot the title of. A copy of every volume I ever read from a library, every book I ever saw in a bookstore and couldn’t buy, every book I borrowed and had to return to brother or friend.

But then, of course, I’d have to have somewhere to keep them. I am haunted by a character in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno, a book collector who is condemned to a circle in Hell as a ‘hoarder and waster;’ not only does he hoard rare books, but he does not have adequate funds left for a place to store them. As a consequence, they rot and decay unread. There is a fine line between a bibliophile and a bibliomaniac, and I fear I sometimes tread that line. But I do love my books and I give them what care I can. And I do read them. I like to have them at hand if I wish to enjoy them anew.

If I could suddenly have any books I wanted, there are several expensive selections I would like. Highest on the list would probably be Tolkien’s The Old English Exodus (1982; edited by Joan Turville-Petre), which goes for about $2000. It is an obscure work of scholarship, totally unrelated to Middle-earth, but, you know, -- Tolkien. A runner-up would be another scholarly work, Shakespeare’s Boy Actors (1939) by Robertson Davies, $250, and again, Davies. I have three volumes of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comics Strips. There are at least five more; each goes for about $50. And, of course, there are all the other books in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series that I don’t have.

I’ve made a pretty successful effort at getting many of the books I’ve wanted. But there are always new books being published, while older books grow rarer and more expensive. I doubt if I’ll ever be satisfied, and that’s alright. As The Very Big Corporation of America in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life says, “which brings us once again to the urgent realization of just how much there is still left to own.” A dream unfulfillable lasts an entire lifetime.