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