Bibliomania

Rebecca Rego Barry: Rare Books Uncovered (2015)

Rebecca Rego Barry. Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places. Foreword by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Voyageur Press. Minneapolis, MN: Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc., 2015.

It's always a bit difficult to explain the appeal of your particular fetish objects to those who don't share that passion. Why, for instance, do I find myself perking up with excitement every time I see a shop-window full of mouldy old books?

Others presumably feel the same when they spot a fine piece of pottery, or an old Meccano set, or a 1930s propaganda poster - and I'm guessing that each of those passions has earned its own name by now. Bibliophilia is the usual term for my own illness. When you've really let yourself go, though, I think it's appropriate to take it up a notch and call it bibliomania.

Recently I bought a copy of the book above from one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops left in Auckland, the Hospice Bookshop in Birkenhead.

Rebecca Rego Barry (1976- )

Its author, Rebecca Rego Barry, has collected together a series of anecdotes from booksellers and collectors about the most remarkable finds they've made in the course of their careers. Catnip to the likes of me, one might have thought.

Actually I'd have to admit that most of the stories are a bit on the underwhelming side: barn-found volumes of botanical prints, or obscure editions of Vitruvius discovered under a heap of old comics at a garage sale. Nevertheless, I dutifully read it from cover to cover: it was like hearing the distant voices of my own kind, fellow sufferers from this most inconvenient of ailments.

Why inconvenient? Well, because books - especially in large numbers - are so bulky, and heavy, and unwieldy; and so subject to damp, heat, insects, and a variety of other ills.

John Fenton

When it comes to the question of thinning out your collection, I thought I might share a few insights from my friend John Fenton's recent article "Lost Libraries — Biblioclasm: a deadly sin" in the Christchurch literary journal takahē. His essay touches on a number of angles to do with books, book-collecting, libraries, storage, and - what interests me most here - dispersal:

All ageing book collectors are forced to confront the mortality of their libraries, and the inevitability that most of these libraries will die with them ... Yet there is nothing that brings on the cold sweats in a bibliophile more than the realisation that their precious library, one that has been amassed over a lifetime, might soon be tipped into a landfill. There are surprisingly few antiquarian booksellers left in my city, and so the rats wait patiently for the day when they can nest in an association copy of a rare first edition ...

A friend once told me that he often lay awake at night, the prospect of his collection being disbursed to philistines too much for him to bear, or at least to allow peaceful slumber. I didn’t tell him, but the prospect is worse than that. Many of those beloved books are more than likely to end up in a skip. He was worried that a sharp-eyed antiquarian bookseller would obtain his best books for a pittance and sell them on at a huge profit. My fear is more aligned with reality. That a buyer or an auction house would be shown the collection, select one or two, and declare the rest unsellable. Books should be read. The idea of a book-dealer making a killing at my expense is of little concern, so long as the books are read and loved.

takahē 115 (2025)

I feel your pain, John - but at least you can contemplate spending your twilight years in the house you now live in. I don't have that luxury. And when Bronwyn and I are forced to move, as we eventually will be, grim reality really will set in. We know not the day nor the hour, but still it will come.

John's account of the various possible ways of dispersing a large private collection is particularly relevant to this dilemma:

Having more books than I could accommodate, I knew the day of reckoning was here; it was time for a serious book purge. I needed a nudge to get started, and the nudge came when family members paid for a nice built-in bookcase. It was not easy sorting the books into ‘keep’ or ‘sell’ piles, but I did so, worried about the burden my children would face if I neglected the task ...

As I thinned, I loaded quite a few into rubbish sacks and paid a junk collector to take them away. He assured me that he would re-home as many as possible to care homes. Others were just binned — the dismembered and the commonplace. I had become a biblioclast.

I had also set aside what I thought were the more saleable discard items. I loaded them into my car and visited a few second-hand and antiquarian booksellers. There are very few remaining in Auckland, and those that remain face the same storage problems I do. One shook his head sadly at the sight of my boxes and rejected most of them. The ‘baby boomers,’ according to him, are the last book-collecting generation. His shop and the containers behind his shop were stacked with boomers’ collections. He had reached his limit. The second buyer I approached was closing down; now, a few months later, both are gone ... All that remains is the drawn-out hassle of selling piecemeal on TradeMe or eBay.

Bronwyn Lloyd: Jack the Book Maniac (December 2019)

I presume that the picture above speaks for itself. It's from a post called "Seven Stages of Book Collecting", one of many I've devoted to the subject in the past. It dates from a time when I was revising the purely geographical aspect of my bibliography blog. I'd already listed all the books I owned. Now it was time to map just where they were: on what shelf of what bookcase in what room.

Having already compiled such exhaustive data on this collection should surely make it easier for me to work out what should stay and what should go. Strangely enough, it doesn't. I don't keep books I don't want. All of them speak to me in one way or another. But there are, at present, almost 20,000 of them! I doubt I can keep more than a quarter of those - even that is stretching it a bit.

Marie Kondo, where are you when we really need you?

Radical Moderate: Tidying Up (2021)

Kondo now claims that that 30 books figure was a "misconception", but it sounds like she did actually say something very like it in her Tidying Up With Marie Kondo show on Netflix:

[In] episode five of season one ... Kondo visits Los Angeles to meet Matt and Frank, two writers who need her help in tackling their stacks and stacks of books.

While helping the couple to decide whether keeping the books will be “beneficial” to their lives going forward, Kondo states that we should “ideally keep fewer than 30 books”, a practice she follows herself.

I used to scoff at the madness of this idea, but now it's beginning to exert a strange fascination over me. Why not own "fewer than 30 books." You could keep them in a backpack! You could become a wandering scholar, like the Vagantes of the Middle Ages.

Helen Waddell: The Wandering Scholars (1927)

It's true that I've written more than 30 books (48 at last count - with one more in the pipeline at present), and wouldn't it be the height of hypocrisy to try to peddle my produce to people when I wasn't even prepared to give it shelfroom myself? It's still a nice fantasy to bask in, though ...

As I browse through my previous posts on the subject, I notice the slightly sheepish tone of "Crazy like a Fox" (2009) modulating into the straightforward denialism of "My New Bookcase" (2022) - by way of my 2020 encomium of bibliophilia-apologist and book-buying enabler extraordinaire, Nicholas A. Basbanes.

It's action stations now, though. I'm finally ready to admit that I need help. John Fenton's solution to his storage dilemmas was to get a new floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Mine would probably have to be something more in the region of Hercules' cleansing of the Augean stables. As you'll recall, the demigod diverted the course of the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the accumulated detritus of ages.

Greek Mythology: Hercules tidies up

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd furniture-van hurrying near
And, breaking our literate fellowship,
The uncouth shadow of the skip.

- after Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Bookcase"

Skip full o' Books

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All suggestions - serious or flippant - are only too welcome ...

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Slightly Foxed (b.o.f.)

John Fenton. Slightly Foxed b.o.f. [= but otherwise fine]. Auckland: John Denny, 1997.

I once belonged to a secret society.

It wasn’t especially secret – just a group of book enthusiasts who met once every month at the Kinder House in Auckland to jaw about their latest finds. It was called “Slightly Foxed.”

I first found out about it during a last-minute Christmas shopping spree. I’d just located a facsimile edition of Shackleton’s Terra Australis journal to give to my father, when I got to chatting to the salesman behind the desk.

He was quite a young guy, but very eager to talk – some relief from the surging crowds in Whitcoull’s basement, I suppose. When I admitted I was a bit sorry to give away such a prize rather than keeping it for myself, he urged to buy another copy. “Go on, you know you want to.”

Then we started skiting about how many books we respectively owned. Then onto this strange little club he apparently belonged to, and the respective tastes of its various members. One, I recall, was an enthusiast for the works of John Cowper Powys, but (as my new friend remarked) his own attitude to that author was “why use one word when ten will do?”

Having been a card-carrying Powysian since my teens, I vigorously demurred, and so it went on. It took me quite some time to extricate myself from there, but I have to say that the whole exchange remains quite vivid in my mind.

I never saw him again.

When I mentioned this “Slightly Foxed” group to a friend of mine, Murray Beasley, back at Auckland University, where we were both teaching at the time, he said that he had once attended a meeting of theirs, had a good time, but never been invited back. “It wasn’t really clear what the set-up was. Did one have to be shoulder-tapped? Were they judging the cut of my jib? Or should I simply have … turned up?”

A few years later, back in Auckland from a sojourn abroad, another friend, Kate Stone, asked me along to a meeting. She, it seemed, was a regular attendee, and knew all the regulars.

It was odd. From my long-ago conversation with the chap in the bookshop, I’d imagined something terribly high-powered: erudite discussions of colophons and signatures; all that bibliographical panoply I’d so eagerly tried to master in my years away at the University of Edinburgh.

Not so. The first time I attended the talk was (I think) entitled “Books on Waiheke,” and featured an old cloth bag containing various random finds obtained from the stalls and bookshops on the island, with desultory discussion of how much (or little) they’d cost. Hobbyist rather than serious collector talk.

The Kinder House (Parnell, Auckland)

But I was lonely, and it was a chance to get out and about, and the Kinder House was quite an atmospheric place to sit on a dark winter evening, with books on the table and mulled wine in one’s glass. So even when Kate stopped attending regularly, I kept on going along. I’d got on the mailing list somehow, so I suppose I had been shoulder-tapped, if such rituals ever actually took place. The whole thing was so informal, really, that it seemed impossible to imagine that there could have been that many obstacles to another person filling a chair.

The members were certainly both various and interesting. The oldest and most eminent was undoubtedly Ron Holloway, famous for printing so many New Zealand classics at his Griffin Press in the 1930s and 40s. He was pretty deaf, and seldom (if ever) took part in the discussions.

Then there was John Denny, a far younger, far more onto-it artisanal printer. He remains a friend. But the heart and soul of the group, so far as I was concerned, was John Fenton. A generous and clubbable man, interested in all aspects of the bookish game, especially Beat poetry and Jazz. It was he who wrote the society's history, pictured above - and, yes, that club logo on the cover was contributed by the great Ronald Searle!

Who else? Let's see - there was David Greeney, who'd had a career working in the publishing trade, and who knew it inside out as a result; there were Jan & Peter Riddick, a canny pair of local environmentalists; then there was the printer Ken Wood, who had a passion for collecting the same number from each numbered, limited edition he encountered. He must have had a magnificent collection even then!

• 1997 - (24 September) “The Thousand and One Nights.”
• 1998 - (18 March) “Kendrick Smithyman.”
• 1998 - (10 June) “Maxim Gorky” [with Bruce Grenville]
• 1999 - (1 September) “Mikhail Lermontov” [with Bruce Grenville]
• 2000 - (19 July) “Henry James.”
• 2001 - (21 March) “Antarctica.”
• 2001 - (19 September) “Edgar Allan Poe.”
• 2002 - (24 April) “Shakespeare.”

Probably the most successful of these - from the point of view of the other members, at any rate - were the ones where fellow-member Bruce Grenville, the (self-styled) Sultan of Occussi-Ambeno, showed a film from his massive collection of old celluloid – much of it inherited from the defunct stores of the Soviet embassy – while I talked about the life and works of the author concerned.

It was Bruce who contributed indirectly to my exit from the society, in fact. At one of the last of these talks – I think probably the one on Edgar Allan Poe – he got into an argument with the club’s president, and the two of them almost came to blows.

“If this continues, I’m out of here.” I proclaimed. There was no pleasure to be found in sitting at a table with these two gentlemen sniping at each other, and I think I came back just once after that, to give one last talk on Shakespeare.

I still run into old “Slightly Foxed” alumni, though, some twenty years on. I met up with John Fenton again recently, and he tells me that the society has, in fact, folded - but then he would say that, wouldn't he? Perhaps it still continues in some clandestine form.

To be honest, more of my energies were directed into writing groups by then: first the (so-called) “Bookshop Poets,” who met at Lee Dowrick’s house in Devonport; and subsequently the “Eye Street Poets,” who gathered at Raewyn Alexander’s place in Western Springs. I rather miss those convivial gatherings, too.

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