Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (18 page)

“We took the books back to the store and divided them up by topic—history on the left wall, literature on the right, philosophy in the back alcove—and somehow, all of a sudden, they weren’t John Clive anymore. Dispersing his library was like cremating a body and scattering it to the winds. I felt very sad. And I realized that books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.

“When I was leaving work that day, I noticed that the proprietor had put one of Clive’s books in the fifty-cent cart we kept on the sidewalk. It was an Edwardian compact Shakespeare with an ugly typeface and garishly colored plates. Inside, in a round adolescent hand that must have dated from his teens or early twenties, Clive had written his name and the lines from
The Tempest
‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ “

I asked Adam what he had done with the book.

“I bought it,” he said, “and took it home.”

 
R
E C O M M E N D E D
 R
E A D I N G
 

M
ost good secondhand bookstores have a shelf labeled “Books About Books.” That no such shelves exist in new bookstores is both a dispiriting reflection of readers’ changing interests and an explanation of why so many of the following titles are out of print—some, in fact, for more than a century.

My favorite book about books happens to be called
The Book About Books: The Anatomy of Bibliomania
. It is a monumental compendium by Holbrook Jackson, based in form and style on Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
, whose chapter titles alone (“Bibliopegic Dandyism”; “Symptoms of Bibliophily”; “Bibliobibacity with a Digression of Ecstasy”) are whiffs of opium beckoning the book addict into a den from which he or she is likely to emerge several weeks later, tottering with intoxication. Other useful compilations of book lore and quotations include
Bookman’s Pleasure
, also edited by Holbrook Jackson;
The Book-Lover’s Enchiridion
, edited by Alexander Ireland; and
Books
, edited by Gerald Donaldson.

I recommend the following anthologies of essays on books and reading:
Bookworms
, edited by Laura Furman and Elinore Standard;
Reading in Bed
, edited by Steven Gilbar;
The Romance of the Book
, edited by Marshall Brooks;
The Most Wonderful Books
, edited by Michael Dorris and Ernilie Buchwald;
What Is a Book
?, edited by Dale Warren;
Bouillabaisse for Bibliophiles
and
Carrousel for Bibliophiles
, both edited by William Targ; and
Men and Books
, edited by Malcolm S. MacLean and Elisabeth K. Holmes.
The Literary Gourmet
, by Linda Wolfe, is a succulent anthology of food literature, complete with recipes for Gogol’s stuffed sturgeon and Maupassant’s crayfish bisque.
A History of Reading
, by Alberto Manguel;
The Evolution of the Book
, by Frederick G. Kilgour; and
The Kingdom of Books
, by William Dana Orcutt, contain valuable historical material. Among the many volumes on book collecting, I am particularly fond of
Penny Wise and Book Foolish
, by Vincent Starrett, and
A Gentle Madness
, by Nicholas A. Basbanes.
ABC for Book Collectors
, John Carter’s classic dictionary of book-related terms, is indispensable for the sort of reader who has always wanted to know the difference between a free endpaper and a paste-down endpaper.

Those who seek inspiration for reading aloud will find an abundance in
Charles Dickens as a Reader
, by Charles Kent, and “The Blue Room,” an autobiographical essay by Adam Gopnik published in
The New Yorker
and, for reasons I can’t fathom, never anthologized; “Reading Aloud.” from
The Size of Thoughts
, by Nicholson Baker, focuses on the pitfalls of the art and thus cannot be classed as inspirational, but it should be read anyway because it is so funny. On the subject of arranging one’s library, readers of this book will already know that I cherish
On Books and the Housing of Them
, by W. E. Gladstone.

Anyone interested in the intersection of literature and life should read
The Common Reader
and
The Second Common Reader
, by Virginia Woolf.

Six essays on books and reading have made an indelible impression on me: “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse,” from
Essays
, by Michel de Montaigne; “1808 Lectures on the Principles of Poetry,” lecture 3, from
Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature
, volume 1, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” from
The Last Essays of Elia
, by Charles Lamb; “On Reading Old Books,” from
The Plain Speaker
, by William Hazlitt; “Bookshop Memories,” from
An Age Like This
, volume 1 of
The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell;
and “Unpacking My Library,” from
Illuminations
, by Walter Benjamin.

 
A
C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
 

F
ive years ago I got a call from an editor named Stephen G. Smith asking whether I would like to help found
Civilization
. Over the phone I could hear neither the uppercase
C
nor the italics, and thus believed for a few heady moments that I was to be a latter-day Romulus, called from my desk to get suckled by she-wolves and rout barbarians. The truth, though it dashed my fantasies, was not altogether different. During my happy tenure there, I came to see
Civilization
, the magazine of the Library of Congress, as a kind of Utopian city. The infinitive-splitters and the modifier-danglers were pounding at the gate, but even though we could hear the thump of their battering rams, our walls were thick and our little metropolis was safe.

When I told Steve Smith I wanted to write a column called “The Common Reader,” he rashly said yes. He informed me that I was to forget about reportage and write about myself, a fiat that was initially alarming but ultimately emancipating. The resulting essays—some of which I’ve renamed or lengthened or fiddled with—became this book. Steve edited most of them, with such meticulous expertise that I was sometimes tempted to junk my own words and publish his marginalia.

I would also like to thank the members of
Civilization’s
staff—Leah Edmunds, Gretchen Ernster, Rachel Hartigan, Elizabeth Hightower, Aaron Matz, Katie O’Halleran, Diantha Parker, David Vine, and Charles Wilson—who disinterred and checked odd facts. William Mills of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, provided information about Sir Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic base camp; Carolyn Chadwick of the Center for Book Arts, in New York City, explained how the volume I inherited from my great-grandmother was printed and bound; and P. J. Williams of St. Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden, Wales, sent useful material about W. E. Gladstone’s library.

At Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I was fortunate to be sheltered under the generous editorial wings of Jonathan Galassi and Natasha Wimmer. Susan Mitchell and Jonathan Lippincott made the book look beautiful, outside and in. After Karla Reganold copy-edited it, I realized I wasn’t nearly as good a proofreader as I had previously thought.

Adam Goodheart deftly edited several of the essays, suggested material, and spent innumerable hours talking with me about books. Many other friends also got used to my telephone calls: “Do you dog-ear your books?” “Do you know the meaning of
opopanax
?” “What dirty books did you steal from your parents’ shelves?” Bill Abrams, Ross Baughman, Charles Bell, Laurence Bergreen, John Bethell, Sara Bethell, Lisa Colt, Sandy Colt, Byron Dobell, Lars Engle, Rob Farnsworth, Campbell Geeslin, Eric Gibson, Paula Glatzer, Peter Gradjansky, Maggie Hivnor, Kathy Holub, Rhonda Johnson, Pepe Karmel, Susan McCarthy, Charlie Monheim, Mark O’Donnell, Dan Okrent, Julie Salamon, Kathy Schuler, Carol Whitmore, and Sherri Yingst fielded my questions with good grace. Jon Blackman and Maud Gleason came in for more than their share of interrogation and were kind enough not to complain. Gary Hovland, Robert Lescher, Brian Miller, Barbara Quarmby, Carol Sandvik, Frances Stead Sellers, and, especially, Monica Gregory provided help of various kinds. My dear friends Jane Condon and Lou Ann Walker encouraged me from start to finish, as they have with all my projects for more than twenty years.

The center of this book is my family. I hope that when my children are older, Henry will forgive me for revealing that he ate part of
Goodnight Moon
and Susannah will recover from my disclosure that she thought
Rabbit at Rest
was a story about a sleepy bunny. Of the many satisfactions of parenthood, few have been keener than watching my children’s faces when they open a new book for the first time.

My husband, George Howe Colt, and I courted each other with books and married each other’s libraries as well as each other’s selves. How lucky I was with both! George gave every word of
Ex Libris
his close and wise editorial attention, inspired much of it, and, most important, whether in the Grand Canyon or in our book-filled loft in New York City, lived it with me. What he once wrote to me in an inscription I here write back to him, with still-deepening love: “This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours.”

I began my relationship with books as a member of Fadiman U., the insufferable foursome who never missed a round of
College Bowl
and still proofread menus together. If I were to rank life’s pleasures, talking about books with my brother and my parents would be close to the top. Kim not only figures prominently in many of these essays, but also read every word in draft and made many excellent suggestions. My mother and father, to whom
Ex Libris
is dedicated, read tens of thousands of pages aloud to me when I was a child, transmitting with every syllable their own passion for books. Because they are both writers, it would have been easy for them to squash my literary hopes under the weight of their unmatchable achievements, but somehow they managed to do the opposite. Without them, I would be neither a reader nor a writer, and I thank them for these and many other gifts.