'Friends They May Become To-morrow'

“New books can have few associations. They may reach us on the best deckle-edged Whatman paper, in the newest types of famous presses, with backs of embossed vellum, with tasteful tasselled strings,--and yet be no more to us than the constrained and uneasy acquaintances of yesterday.” 

By “new books” I take Austin Dobson (1840-1921) to mean previously unread volumes, not newly published. The Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki more than a millennium ago, is a new book for me because I still haven’t read it. In his essay “On Some Books and Their Associations” (De Libris: Prose and Verse, 1908). Dobson extends the metaphor of books as friends or at least companions:

 

“Friends they may become to-morrow, the day after, --perhaps ‘hunc in annum et plures’ [this year and more]. But for the time being they have neither part nor lot in our past of retrospect and suggestion. Of what we were, of what we like or liked, they know nothing; and we--if that be possible--know even less of them.”

 

A reader added a passage from Dobson’s commonplace book, A Bookman’s Budget (1917), as a comment on Saturday’s post. Poet, essayist and biographer, Dobson is largely forgotten, as is the niche he once filled: man of letters. There was a gentlemanly allure about this non-academic designation. Reading good books – important books – was assumed to have a civilizing effect on readers. One had read most everything, in several languages, and could recommend favorite titles and be trusted. Of reading previously unread books, old or new, Dobson writes:

 

“Whether familiarity will breed contempt, or whether they will come home to our business and bosom,--these are things that lie on the lap of the Fates. But it is to be observed that the associations of old books, as of new books, are not always exclusively connected with their text or format,--are sometimes, as a matter of fact, independent of both. Often they are memorable to us by length of tenure, by propinquity,--even by their patience under neglect. We may never read them; and yet by reason of some wholly external and accidental characteristic, it would be a wrench to part with them if the moment of separation--the inevitable hour--should arrive at last.”

 

Every serious reader is a fetishist. We like owning multiple copies of our favorites. I can’t say with Dobson that “we may never read them.” I own plenty of volumes I have read once (The Anatomy of Melancholy), or even twice (Proust), but I’m unlikely to read them again. I cherish their companionship but they’re like friends living in Australia, never to be visited.