'He Doesn't Want to Read'

In a comment on last Friday’s post, my friend John Dieffenbach asks about bibliophile: 

“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?”

 

I replied, in part: “‘Bibliophile’ is a word I would never use with a straight face. To me it feels pretentious.” If a precise word is required, I’m happy to settle for reader. I told John there’s something decadent-seeming about the notion of bibliophilia. One might as well be collecting, like the late Robert Gottlieb, plastic handbags. I told John of an ambitious book collector I know who has to rent a storage unit to hold the volumes he has accumulated. He admits he’s not much of a reader. He’s a hoarder. For example, he has amassed more books by and about Eugenio Montale than I possess but has read none of them.

 

The person who would seriously use bibliophile in writing or speech would likely say that a writer “pens” his books. It must sound classy to some ears. Max Beerbohm in “Whistler’s Writing” (Yet Again, 1909) nicely distinguishes readers from bibliophiles:  

 

“I do not deem alien from myself nothing that is human: I discriminate my fellow-creatures according to their contents. And in that respect I am not more different in my way from the true humanitarian than from the true bibliophile in his. To him the content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because they are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He doesn’t want to read.”