Phantoms on the Bookshelves Read Online Free

it stuck, except a habit of reading which had somehow to be channeled. It was only when, like many French teenagers of my generation, I read Boris Vian’s
L’Ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream
) at the age of about fifteen that I discovered that novels could be more than an adventure story to dream about, and that the word “literature” started tomean something. Vian did have the signal advantage of being a writer whose name was spread by word of mouth; he was never on the school syllabus.

2
BIBLIOMANIA
    Of what interest to me are those countless books and libraries, whose owners have scarcely read the labels in their whole lifetime?
    SENECA
    There are plenty of libraries to be found in novels. Sometimes they are even a central element—the library of the Benedictine abbey in
The Name of the Rose
, Des Esseintes’s library in
A Rebours
(
Against Nature
), by J. K. Huysmans, or the one belonging to the Sinologist Peter Kien in Elias Canetti’s
Auto-da-fé
, not to mention the “definitive” 12,000 volumes owned by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
. But I know of only one novel in which virtually every character is a bibliomaniac: Carlos Maria Dominguez’s
La Casa de papel
(
The Paper House
). The narrator is himself haunted by the proliferation of his books (“They are advancing silently, innocently, through my house. There is no way I can stop them”), and finally succeeds in his quest to find another bibliomaniac, Carlos Bauer, only to discover that the latter has already given up the struggle: “Classifying twenty thousand volumes is no easy matter […] You have to have a strict respect fororder, an almost superhuman respect, I would say.” Bauer’s fragile mental equilibrium cannot survive the loss of the card index without which his library has become impenetrable. So he uses his books to build a house (
la casa de papel
) on a beach far away from everything, and then destroys it, trying to find a book by Joseph Conrad (
The Shadow Line
), which someone has asked him to return.
    But how does anyone manage to acquire so many thousands of books, which end up posing as many problems for their owner? There are various explanations, none of them exclusive—depending on the kind of bibliomaniac we are talking about. The term “bibliomaniac” can be applied to a wide range of personalities. They can be divided into two principal categories: collectors and manic readers.
    Collectors can further be sub-divided into specialists and the all-purpose variety. The former will devote themselves to one author: in 1924, Tristan Bernard put up for sale the 173 editions of
Paul et Virginie
(
Paul and Virginia
) by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre which he had patiently collected; or perhaps a period or genre (Pierre-Jean Rémy collected eighteenth-century libertine novels); or a topic, a particular kind of binding, and so on. Christian Galantaris in his
Manuel de bibliophilie
(Handbook of bibliophilia) quotes two examples: Henry C. Folger (1857–1930), an associate of John D. Rockefeller, who bought up all the past editions of Shakespeare he could find (owning as many as eighteen copies of the same edition), and putting together a collection as large as that in the library of the British Museum (now the British Library). Thesecond was James Douglas (1657–1742), an English doctor whose admiration for the works of Horace led him to possess 450 editions of his works, from the Milan edition of 1493 to one produced in 1739, the date of publication of his
Catalogue
. And there are even more eccentric cases, such as the collector who amassed only books by writers starting with B, or whose first name was Jules, like his own.
    The rarity value of a book can also be a factor in its choice. So in his
Mélanges tirés d’une petite bibliothèque
(Gleanings from a small library), published in Paris by Crapelet in 1829,