'The Finest Collection of Shabby Books'

Once I dropped a copy of Ian Frazier’s The Fish’s Eye into a bathtub full of water. While reading a paperback of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned, the spine snapped as I was marking a passage, turning it into two volumes. The same thing happened with my copy of Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues. The cover of my Webster’s Third, a gift from friends in 1973, detached, turning the fat dictionary into a paperback. My old copies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are held together with rubber bands. Once I left Edward Dahlberg’s Can These Bones Live on the ground after a picnic. By the time I realized it was missing and turned the car around to retrieve it, rain had swollen the book into a pulpy blob.

I try to soothe my conscience by recalling that Dr. Johnson was a serial book abuser. He routinely tore the covers off books to make them easier to read. Books were tools to be used, not trophies. He never reformed. I have, mostly. I strive to no longer be a clumsy vandal. I don’t even write in books. I keep notes in a notebook. I’m a reader, not a collector, but I’m mildly neurotic when it comes to treating books with finicky delicacy. Not Charles Lamb. Consider Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary entry for Jan. 10, 1824:

“I looked over Lamb’s library in part. He has the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of first-rate works of genius, but filthy copies, which a delicate man would really hesitate touching, is I think nowhere to be found. I borrowed several books.”

 

That final sentence, amusingly understated, articulates a true reader’s credo. In a pinch, a dirty, torn or otherwise unsightly book will be sufficient. In one of his Essays of Elia, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” Lamb confirms Robinson’s observations:

 

“Thomson’s Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day’s needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?”

 

Like Lamb, I enjoy reading copies of previously owned books – the inscription, underlinings, marginalia. A book is incomplete without readers. Their fleeting presence confirms one’s sense of gratitude and solidarity. In another essay, “Two Races of Men,” Lamb writes of the perils of lending books to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his friend since childhood. He condemns “borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes,” but reverses himself and writes of his friend, a compulsive writer of marginalia:

 

 “Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. -- he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury: enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his -- (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) -- in no very clerkly hand -- legible in my Daniel: in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands. ---- I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C.”