'Now I Live Predominantly Through Them'

“Books are to most men, now-a-days, not so much a luxury as a necessity. A home that has not its own small, yet highly prized and well used, library, must be inhabited by either poverty, or what is almost as bad, inactive and uncultivated intellect.” 

The source is The Bibliomaniac, a periodical started in Providence, R.I., by the book dealer Sidney Rider in 1867. Rider was a New England idealist, a true believer in the vivifying power of words, though his journal lasted only three issues.  His thinking and his prose have a clarity and charm we can admire somewhat sadly from a distance, as though it belonged to some remote stage of human evolution. Rider goes on:

 

“The great advantage of education is that it trains the mind to think, gives the man something to say, and enables him to say it in the best and most forceful way. Such education is not derived wholly from books. Books are like guide-posts to direct the young mind into the right road. But it depends upon the youth himself, whether he shall find worthy or worthless things in the road which he takes. . . . Knowledge must be digested to be of much value in the work of real education.”

 

Rider is an American exponent of self-reliance but not so fierce an idealist as to equate books and reading with true education. That resides in the sensibility of the individual and takes many forms. It has little or nothing to do with schools attended, degrees conferred, honorifics accompanying names.  Long ago Guy Davenport warned that we inhabit “an age when a college degree is becoming a certificate of illiteracy.” Too many are intimidated or impressed by that parade of initials after a name.

 

In “A Kingdom of Books,” about the British town Hay-on-Wye, Theodore Dalrymple writes: “I am not a bibliophile but a bibliomaniac: I have always lived partly through books, and now I live predominantly through them.”

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I’ll accept “bibliophile” though I’m more comfortable with the humble “reader.” I’ve never been at ease with “bibliomaniac.” There’s nothing romantically attractive about madness in any form. The OED defines bibliomania as “extreme enthusiasm or passion for collecting, owning, or reading books,” and notes that the word first showed up in English in the eighteenth century. Fine distinctions – collecting and owning books are not the same as reading them. After all, books can be arranged on a shelf like bowling trophies. I’ve known book-hoarders who are not readers. Is the mere presence of good books a comfort? I’m honest enough to say yes, but it’s not a sensation I take too seriously. What I like is the company of books I have absorbed, whose contents over time I have incorporated into whatever passes for my sensibility.

My old friend Bill Healy named his bookshop Bibliomania when he opened it in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1981. He has since moved the business online. I bought dozens of books from Bill and sold him even more when money was especially tight. Steven Millhauser once visited the shop, found my former copy of W. Jackson Bate’s biography of Dr. Johnson (thanks to my bookplate) and bought it. I once found a beat-up first edition of Kerouac’s On the Road at a library sale, walked down the block and sold it to Bill so I could pay the rent. A bibliomaniac likely would have kept it. Consider what C.H. Sisson writes in “On Translating Dante,” the introduction to his version of The Divine Comedy:

 

“[A]ll literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance.”