'Books Are Curious and Elusive Things'

On Wednesday, for the first time since St. Patrick’s Day last year, I entered the building on campus where my office is located. I was there to deliver paperwork. The lighting is muted and the halls are silent, as in a funeral parlor. I saw no one. I briefly visited my office to retrieve some notebooks and a library book I had left in a desk drawer since before the lockdown: Occasions (1922), an essay collection by Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948). Just that morning I had received an email from a reader asking if I have read Jackson’s best-known work, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930): 

“Perhaps you could devote a blog post to it, tying it in, of course, to Robert Burton’s famous The Anatomy of Melancholy. It’s too bad Jackson has fallen almost completely down the memory hole. His biographies and other books of literary criticism look interesting as well.”

 

I bought a copy of Jackson’s Anatomy in 1998 from a used bookstore near the University of Chicago. I gave up underlining and annotating it because too many pages hold a memorable aphorism or an allusion to follow. Not that my pleasure was unmixed. Jackson cultivates a cloyingly tweedy persona, a variation on the unworldly English eccentric. He’s fond of archaisms. He writes in a pastiche of seventeenth-century prose, aping Browne and Burton, as he acknowledges. Take the first sentence in the introduction:

 

“Gentle Reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what antic or personate actor it is that so insolently intrudes upon this common theatre to the world’s view, arrogating, as you will soon find, another man’s style and method: whence he is, why he does it, and what he has to say.”

 

He almost lost me at “thou.” This is not the King James Bible. Jackson calls Burton “my master.” Readers who know Edward Dahlberg’s later prose or Alexander Theroux’s novels will feel right at home with Jackson.  It’s a book to live with and consult, if not necessarily read cover to cover. The voice’s theatrical quality becomes tiresome and the reader looks forward to lengthy quotations from other sources – Lamb or Donne as waystations of relief. I doubt most of today’s students could shoulder on past the first few pages. Jackson is for serious, deeply and broadly read readers. It’s the sort of book that sends you back to better and more interesting writers. I transcribed a line from the book onto the title page: “The time to read is now, not hereafter. We must make time or miss our joy.” Amen.

 

I see from a skim of Occasions that Jackson has at least a vestigial sense of humor, though it's a little awkward. In an essay titled “The Uses of Books,” he writes:

 

“Books are curious and elusive things, and, after all, no man can say with any degree of certainty for what purpose they may be used to the best advantage. Some people use them for propping up decrepit furniture, a practice that will commend itself to the practical and the haphazard alike; others use them as missiles. William Morris hurled a fifteenth century quarto, which he would allow no one to touch but himself, at the head of a person who irritated him. Throwing incunabula at tiresome folk has much to be said for it; but the uses of books are by no means exhausted by such passionate acts.”

I’m reminded that in Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night (1999), a character contemplates using a 592-page novel by Theodore Dreiser as a weapon: “Jennie Gerhardt would have laid him out cold. Good heft, hard binding: a brick of a book. Jennie to the rescue. Social value of art.”