'But Books Thrill You to the Marrow'

“That you may not think I am immune to all man’s failings,” writes Petrarch to the Florentine monk Giovanni dell’ Incisa in 1346, “learn that one unquenchable passion possesses me, which so far I neither could nor would repress. I flatter myself that a longing for worthy things is not unworthy. You expect the name of some disease? Yes, it is that I cannot sate my lust for books.”

I know the feeling. Odd to “identify” with the book lust of a man who lived more than seven centuries ago. The passage is drawn from Letters from Petrarch (1966), edited and translated by Morris Bishop, author of Petrarch and His World (1963). Until recently, my desire for books was necessarily disciplined by a lack of funds. As a newspaper reporter I never made much money, so I learned to be prudent when entering a bookstore. I always brought a list of the books I wanted, and tried to stick to it, and I still rely on libraries. It’s a good thing Amazon, Alibris and AbeBooks weren’t around back in the Eighties. In lean months I even sold my books. I regret having sold my first editions of Joseph Mitchell’s first four titles, including his first and least-known, My Ears are Bent (1938). I was friends with a book dealer in Schenectady, N.Y., who always treated me generously. Steven Millhauser once expressed concern after finding my first edition of W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson (1977), with my name on the bookplate, in the dealer’s shop. Here is more of Petrarch’s letter:

“Perhaps now I have more books than I need, but it is with books as with other things: the more one gets the more one wants. Yet there is something special about books. Gold, silver, gems, purple robes, a marble palace, broad lands, paintings, a horse with rich trappings, and all such things bring only a mute, a superficial pleasure. But books thrill you to the marrow; they talk to you, counsel you, admit you to their living, speaking friendship. Nor do they insinuate themselves alone into the reader’s spirit; they introduce other books; each one creates a desire for another.”

Petrarch here lays it on a little thick, but I understand. I know acquisitiveness only because of books. I reluctantly concede that I need a car and clothes, but I want books, an impulse easily confused with need. Later in the same letter, Petrarch asks his friend the monk to contact the “few trustworthy scholars” he knows and have them “scour Tuscany” for books: “[T]urn out the cupboards of the monks and other learned men, to see if anything will emerge fit to slake my thirst—or better to whet it.” He even includes a list of “my chief desiderata.” He concludes the letter:

“And to keep you on your toes, learn that I am addressing the same requests to other friends in Britain, France, and Spain. Don’t yield to any of them in faithfulness and diligence. So do your best—and farewell.”

In The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), Gilbert Highet writes: “Dante had a bookshelf, a large one. But Petrarch had the first living and growing personal library, in the modern sense.”