Interesting concept. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of books, unowned by any single natural individual and free for anyone to browse and absorb, guided by an idea that books are not primarily the vehicles of accumulation but of communal participation, what is now sometimes called a “knowledge base”. If we were able to envisage the most idyllic, serene, and outrageously personal habitat reproduced as a public space, would we still nonetheless tread willingly to participate in this experiment?
The scales are unbalanced, however, and the gravity of unreason out-weighs commercial considerations; despite being a local library’s “external borrower” (I feel so dirty), I feel some justification in procuring another ragbag assortment of knowledge-things, otherwise known as “books” - such as Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.
What if our reluctance betrays that we bibliophiles aren’t in it for the read? What if we are mere acquisitors, and of the shallow unreflective kind, and hence no better than our fallow human? We biblophiles are perhaps satiated not by the impact and not of the read as much as we anticipate and achieve tri-fold delirium - first upon selection, then procurement, with the closing coital arrival and unwrapping. Reading is near incidental.
This dissociative possibility, one which doubts the heart of reading, troubles us. My friend Nick, in his monthly column for The Believer, belatedly, 12 months into the contract between himself and The Reader, admits:
I bought so many books this month it’s obscene, and I’m not owning up to them all: this is a selection. And to be honest, I’ve been economical with the truth for months now. I keep finding books that I bought, didn’t read, and didn’t list.
So long as Nick keeps this dishonesty to his Readership.
The personal library is a living autobiography no less. It charts spikes, in curiousity for Trintarianism or some obscure tenet therein, periods spent navel-gazing (with or without Lacan), moments of simple bad taste (Is bad taste ever “simple”?). It is also an expensive, extravagent and expansive tool to track our whims and meanderings. That was the week in which I delved into Uzbek literature. That book was a corollary of my reading on Albanian sheep farming. And such like. The minutae of your trajectory is registered in your library. How else would I remember the impact of some Hungrarian theoretician secluded in Tom Bottomore’s Modern Interpretations of Marx? Or how would I have realised that an obscure book by Vincent Geoghegan was never entitled Marxism & Utopianism, but Utopianism and Marxism - I had prioritized the wrong pole, symptomatic of a largely pig-headedness inspired to right wrongs. Or that my battered copy of Styles of radical will came as a gift from Adi LeBlanc? (These meaningful relationships deter mechanisms such as Emeth’s Book Giveaway. To part with my decaying War & Peace, or even - secondarily - my annotated Hegel and Skepticism??).
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Fascinating. And why am I thinking there’s the seed of a novel in this post?
Thank you for the kind words. Perhaps a seed with constant tending, though it started as a lament.
The abstract truth is I hold fast to what someone wrote
The honest truth is - how I would like to cross that threshold, to no longer compare, confirm or deny but present for comparison, confirmation or denial.
Writing brings the best and worst out of us. Here’s to more of both.
hi to you and all bibliophiles the world over