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“NY,” it turned out, was John Fry, a young bookseller from Bristol: N and Y are the terminal letters of his first and last names, a common device of ceremonial anonymity. (Fry’s final book was even less anonymous: it identified its editor as “J–N F–Y.”)
In strictly monetary terms, Pieces was the most valuable thing we owned. But it was more than an asset we could liquidate if we had to. It became for us a talisman. We’d found the nucleus of our future library.
I became a student again, determined to learn everything I needed to become a bookman. Nearby universities offered no degrees in holistic bookmanship. Inspired by Fry and his circle, I improvised my own course, plucking units from literature, psychology, philosophy, art, commerce, curatorship, history, law, logic, mathematics—a mixture that made no sense to anyone but Fiona and me.
When eventually I graduated, I walked away with a book about bookselling, a master’s in book auctions, a doctorate in law, the untidiest transcript in Christendom, and a bespoke qualification in bibliophilia.
sold books to venerated libraries such as the Mitchell, the Houghton, and the Bodleian, whose users must swear not to remove or deface the objects therein, nor to bring or kindle any fire.
very modest ones, like the collection of “found” books amassed by a demolition man in the course of his labors, every volume methodically catalogued and lovingly preserved.
We called on the hoarder who cut an indoor pathway to his bathtub, where his most prized possessions were kept. And we swooned over medieval libraries with books shelved spine-inward and attached to chains to prevent escape.
libraries are not Platonic abstractions or sterile, hyperbaric chambers. They are human places into which humans cry tears, molt hair, slough skin, sneeze snot, and deposit oil from their hands—incidentally the best sustenance for old leather bindings.
Creating a library is a psychically loaded enterprise. In gathering their bounty, book-lovers have displayed anxiety, avarice, envy, fastidiousness, obsession, lust, pride, pretension, narcissism, and agoraphobia—indeed every biblical sin and most of the pathologies from the American Psychiatric Association manual.
John Hill Burton described a book collector whose nervous temperament was so sensitive that he could not tolerate an alien book in proximity to his library;
John Baxter imagined the books in his Graham Greene collection rustling and rubbing against each other every night like a colony of insects.
We’ve also seen whole collections ruined by grazing silverfish, the bibliophile’s nemesis. Those monsters relish pulpy paper and the crunchy starch in book glue and book cloth.
Books behind glass get sick from breathing their own air.
Found piled in a bedroom bookcase on an appraisal visit to a suburban home: two 1625 George Chapman plays, quarto format, in immaculate condition and bound together by one of the world’s finest bookbinders, Riviere & Son. At the bottom of a dusty box in a country bookshop: a pre-revolutionary French royal binding, in wonderful condition and with spectacular provenance and rarity. In a secondhand store: Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s luxurious catalogue of Lord Spencer’s library at Althorp—the catalogue in which Dibdin glamourized the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the “First Folio.”
In 1937, at the age of thirty-eight, Jorge Luis Borges started his first regular full-time job: the “menial and dismal” work of re-cataloguing books at the Miguel Cané municipal library in the Boedo district of Buenos Aires.
The heart of the story is a remarkable vision of a universe consisting of an infinite library composed of interconnected hexagonal rooms, all the same size, all with bookshelves whose dimensions—thirty-five books per shelf, five shelves per side, twenty shelves per floor—mirrored those of the Miguel Cané.
This metaphor of infinite libraries has been expressed in countless other ways: every possible combination of musical notes; infinite cabinets of things; the set of possible protein sequences; the set of possible mystery-novel plots; tabulations of the secret name of God; the world, nature, and Google as universal libraries; the Bible, the Koran, the First Folio and Finnegans Wake as universal texts; monkeys with typewriters; pan-dimensional cryptographs; automatic writing; continuous narratives; nameless cities; formal depictions of mathematical and quantum indeterminacy; the mare incognitum
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In Borges’s story, the Library of Babel is an endless subject of wonder for the civiliations that have grown up in its rooms and on its stairs. They construct legends and cults, they debate their theories, they explore the vast expanses of the labyrinth, and, when driven to despair, they jump to fast-slow deaths in the bottomless air shafts that stand between the hexagons.
If a library can be something as simple as an organized collection of texts, then libraries massively pre-date books in the history of culture.
The Kope of New Guinea, the Mandinka griots of Mali, the Ifugao of the Philippines, the Arabs of Palestine, the nomads of Mongolia, the Nambikwara of Brazil, and the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en of British Columbia—these and other peoples used narrative forms such as Hudhud chants, Hikaye stories, Urtiin duu and Bogino duu (long and short songs) to maintain their immaterial libraries.
Cultures that lacked any form of writing could only ever preserve their texts imperfectly. Those cultures, though, adopted elaborate techniques (such as intricate patterns of repetition) and rules (such as social obligations and taboos) to maintain, as best they could, the integrity of their texts.
Memorizing a single text from the Vedas involved up to eleven forms of recitation, including the jaṭā-pāṭha (“mesh recitation”), in which every two adjacent words in the text are first recited in their original order, then repeated...
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Indigenous Australians sometimes refer to this expansive system as their “Dreaming” and their “Dreaming stories.” The stories reflect the bosom connection between the first Australians, their land, and all its features—tors, plateaux, rivers, billabongs, animals, plants, routes for trade and conquest, and the journeys of totemic beings—giant animals and giant people—from the primordial past.
Travel and geography are so important to the Dreaming that the Dreaming stories are often called “Dreaming tracks,” or, especially among the Arrernte, “tjurunga lines,” a reference to the mysterious tjurunga stones that are vital to Arrernte tradition.
Most tjurungas had a central place in “love magic,” initiation ceremonies and other ancient rituals. (Versions of the stones tied with women’s hair can be swung to make a charmed sound and have been called “bull-roarers” and “wife callers.”)
Every Dreaming track is inherently multifaceted, blending animate and inanimate entities, past and present, fact and belief, ground and sky. It is, as Nicholas Shakespeare writes, “at once a map, a long narrative poem, and the foundation of an Aboriginal’s religious and traditional life . . . It is secret and there are penalties for those who transgress.”
In a career spanning four decades, Ted Strehlow undertook fieldwork that was remarkable for its breadth, depth, and fruits. He collected from Arrernte groups some 1,800 objects, most of them sacred, many of them tjurungas. He also collected a library of songs, publishing his analysis of them in his 1971 magnum opus, Songs of Central Australia.
In Songs, Strehlow built an elaborate descriptive and theoretical architecture that linked Arrernte Dreaming with the Western literary canon. Rich with analogies from Greek and Norse mythology, the book received a distinctly mixed reception among the few people who read it.
Chatwin saw in the Dreaming tracks something vastly grander than anything else mankind had built. “The pyramids are little mud pies in comparison.”
Borges was eighty-four, Chatwin forty-three and still riding the success of the experimental travel book, In Patagonia, that he’d written while truanting from the Sunday Times. He and Borges had more than one thing in common. As Shakespeare noted in his Chatwin biography, “Many of the skills Borges acquired through cataloguing books for the Miguel Cané municipal library, Bruce picked up in Antiquities.
Chatwin would make a second trip to Australia, in 1984. The results of his work there appeared in 1987 as Songlines. The title recalled Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia and was Chatwin’s word for the labyrinthine Arrernte Dreaming tracks.
When the book reached central Australia, though, the reception was quite different. Songlines ignited a blast of criticism from historians, ethnographers, and other observers, several of whom could claim direct cultural links to the traditions Chatwin had sought to picture. The basis for the criticism was clear: Chatwin had misunderstood and misstated the place of tjurunga tracks in the Arrernte’s past and present.
Critics detected a naive imperial sensibility in Songlines. If Chatwin had helped put Aborigines on the international map, it was a map, according to Shakespeare, “superficially exquisite and tasteful like a Mont Blanc pen, and as unrelated to everyday life.”
After calling the book a tremendous misuse of poetic license, Christopher Pearson quoted Stewart Harris: “If there is one person more damaging to the position of the Aboriginal Australian than the racist, it is the person who idealises them and romanticises them.”
The Arrernte for their part were certain they did not need a white man to mediate their texts and render them intelligible. In many respects the book added insult to the injuries caused by Ted Strehlow, whose irreparable, unforgivable betrayal of the Arrernte had three main limbs: taking the sacred tjurungas, and with them a large part of Arrernte culture; passing them on to his second wife, in breach of every Arrernte taboo; and revealing, in the German magazine Stern, secrets he’d promised to keep.
The book was Charles P. Mountford’s 1976 Nomads of the Australian Desert. Mountford was a noted Australian anthropologist; his book, which included photographs of indigenous ceremonies, was withdrawn from sale on the grounds that it revealed secrets of the Pitjantjatjara people. This was the first time a book had been withdrawn in Australia for reasons of indigenous cultural sensitivity—a watershed moment in the growth of respect for the first Australians.
The Strehlow–Chatwin account of the oral library of central Australia was a hub of concentric scandals. And yet, despite the blunders in how it was studied and represented, the library does possess the epic grandeur that attracted Strehlow and Chatwin to write about it.
The Arrernte narrative tradition is vastly richer than Chatwin had imagined. In the twentieth century, Australia was the perfect place to study oral libraries, but Chatwin and Strehlow failed in their duty as curators.
Often Chatwin was right, but sometimes the “it’s a fake” mood would consume him and he would condemn even genuine works. His approach exhausted and alienated his colleagues. Tim Clarke headed the porcelain department. Clarke’s wife spoke for “not a few people” within Sotheby’s when she said of Chatwin, “We thought he was a bit of a fake.”
Holding the object up to the light, Chatwin said it was made from some sort of desert opal. “It’s a wonderful colour,” he said. “Almost the colour of chartreuse.” A few weeks later, James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Australia, arrived at Jonathan Hope’s house to examine Indonesian textiles. Mollison took the knife from the table, looked at it closely, then announced his verdict. It was amazing, he said, what the Aborigines could make from an old bottle shard.
Books, Petrarch wrote, heartily delight us, speak to us, counsel us, and are joined to us by a living and active relationship. Instructing his servants to guard his library as they would a shrine, he kept up an active acquaintance with his books, just as if they were friends capable of talking.
The Ottoman poet Abdüllatif Çelebi called each of his books a true and loving friend who drives away all cares. Umberto Eco imagined his books talking among themselves, while Alberto Manguel called the writing of endpaper notes the habit of speaking of a book behind its back.
Regard for books often goes beyond convivial attachment. Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin are three famous literary men who kissed their books.
Seventeenth-century naval administrator, politician, and diarist Samuel Pepys took this game to a whole new level, if we are to believe his account of buying Voragine’s 1521 Golden Legend on April 10, 1668: “So to piper and Duck Lane, and there kissed bookseller’s wife and bought Legend.’
Reading one book while recalling another was, according to the poet Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, one of the most delicate forms of adultery.
Assembling a library is a minefield of etiquette. In the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical and monastic librarians divided sacred from profane books, and were forbidden from placing “unholy” books above holy ones, even in temporary storage.
In a similar spirit, an 1863 book of etiquette and deportment instructed book owners to segregate the works of male and female authors, “unless they happen to be married.”
Bibliophiles frequently refer to themselves as “wedded” to their books; those unable to resist the charms of human marriage have been known to keep their purchases secret from their human spouses.
In 1917 Margaret Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, married the surgeon and bookman Geoffrey Keynes. When the honeymooners visited a bookshop, Margaret complained of feeling faint. Geoffrey “took her outside and made her comfortable, then went back to finish the shop.”
An excessive attachment to books can be dangerous. Desiderius Erasmus had clear priorities. “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” The French philologist and lawyer Salmasius asked to be locked inside the library at Heidelberg. There he remained for forty-eight hours with neither food nor drink—sustained only by his proximity to treasured books.
