The name I remembered but not what he had written, which is hardly unusual when the writer in question was first encountered in childhood and his readability hasn’t survived into adulthood. Very young children pay attention to the work, not its author. In this case, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” by Eugene Field (1850-95), which begins with lines I half-remember:
“Wynken,
Blynken, and Nod one night
sailed off in a wooden shoe —
Sailed on a
river of crystal light,
into a sea of dew.”
A reader asks
if I had read a prose work by Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, published posthumously in 1896. “It sounds
like something you would like,” she writes. It does but isn’t. In his short
life, Field assembled a personal library of some four-thousand books – not bad for
a nineteenth-century Midwesterner who earned his living as a journalist and was
never wealthy. His prose has a folksiness and lazy romanticism about it that is
typical of its time and place, so I skimmed. I suspect Field was more collector
than reader. There’s a staginess about his declarations of bookish love. It
seems intimately meshed with his love of England and his cozy sense of Anglophilia:
“Lamb loved
old books, old friends, old times; ‘he evades the present, he works at the
future, and his affections revert to and settle on the past,’—so says Hazlitt.
His favorite books seem to have been Bunyan’s Holy War, Browne’s Urn-Burial,
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,
Fuller’s Worthies, and Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying. . . . there were
few modern volumes in his library.”
Like me and generations of other readers, Field was smitten early by Robinson Crusoe. He celebrates other great readers, including Dr. Johnson and Thomas De Quincey. “Books, books, books,” he writes, “give me ever more books, for they are the caskets [poor choice of metaphor?] wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity—words, the only things that live forever! . . . For one phrase particularly do all good men, methinks, bless burly, bearish, phrase-making old Tom Carlyle. ‘Of all things,’ quoth he, ‘which men do or make here below by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.’”
Field writes
in one of his poems, “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer”:
“Let my
temptation be a book,
Which I
shall purchase, hold, and keep,
Whereon when
other men shall look,
They’ll wail
to know I got it cheap.”
1 comment:
This piece has caused my head to spin in several directions as I try to distill (or maybe expand? explain?) the notion of a bibliophile or "book lover." Is that a "lover of books" because they are books? A lover of reading books? A lover of reading certain books? What makes one bibliophile more of a bibliophile than another? Size of the library? Nature of the reading? Volume of the reading?
For me, books and reading are separate in that I enjoy reading and words for their own sake, whether they are in a book, Kindle, lyric, billboard or this blog.
I love a good turn of a phrase, especially one that surprises me. I love to read, but I don't have any particular affinity for books qua books. Does that make me not a bibliophile? Or is the person who collects books they never read more of a bibliophile than me?
Somewhat like the question of Christianity and redemption. Who goes to heaven? The man who claims to be a Christian and attends church each week, but cheats on his wife, abuses his kids and steals from his clients? Or the person ignorant of Christianity who actually leads an exemplary life following tenets of Christianity he is completely unaware of?
What defines a "good bibliophile"?
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