I’ll start the new year off with one of my favorite things (e.g.), writing in praise of books — to wit, Ed Simon’s Literary Hub essay Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania:
Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.
In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.
Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus. From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.
As with the metempsychosis of souls from body to body, this copy made its way across libraries and collections until it was purchased for the equivalent of seventy cents in 1970 by a 22-year-old Umberto Eco, this copy of Aristotle joining some 50,000 others as the philosopher built one of the largest personal libraries on the continent. “We live for books,” says a character in Eco’s 1980 philosophical Medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, that novel directly inspired by his Aristotle discovery. If you’re reading a site named Literary Hub, I’m going to assume that you understand that sentiment well. […]
There was a period when first building my collection from used-book stores and yard-sales, Half Priced Books and Barnes & Noble, where (like the bibliomaniac with his fan) I’d take a ruler and carefully inspect that as my treasures sat on the shelf the back edges of each volume were perfectly lined up so that the pages of the paperbacks wouldn’t curl outward around each other. Today I’m less anal retentive—mostly—but I still dedicate time to continually reorganizing my books, which are stored on nightstand and dresser, in my closets and on tabletops, and in a grand wooden shelf that spans the entirety of our living room. Books crammed in every room, in my campus office, and yes, in my trunk. Frayed paperbacks with mid-century modernist covers purchased from used bookstores and advance reader copies from publishers, massive reference works and beloved hardbacks bought at (that ever increasing) full price.
Using my own rudimentary arithmetic to arrive at an estimate of how many volumes I’ve collected over the past thirty years and I’ve arrived at around 3,000 books, which though paltry when compared to the vast hoard of the black-clad vampiric fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s 300,000, is within spitting distance of Ernest Hemingway (9,000), Thomas Jefferson (6,487), and Hannah Arendt (4,000). “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges, and of course. […]
Book collecting is a vocation assisted by money (they all are), but it’s also rewarded with patience. There are some 20,000 books in Morgan’s collection, but Anke Gowda, a former worker in a Karnataka, India sugar plant, amassed nearly two-million books, mostly titles decommissioned by public libraries and given away for free (there is presumably no Medieval Book of Hours amongst the collection). Photos of his cramped house, where trenches have been made out of piles of books, make me simultaneously anxious and envious. I suspect that ours is a difference of degree rather than of kind, for like myself, Gawda is very much a reader, but being a reader alone doesn’t make a bibliomaniac (nor is the opposite the case). Plenty of vociferous readers can sustain themselves by library card alone, but the coveting of the physical object of the codex is its own thing. […]
There is a reason why the apocalyptic bromides about the state of print haven’t come to fruition, other than for disposable periodicals and newspapers. As any author looking at the generous royalties stipulated for e-books in many publishing contracts can attest, the digital hasn’t supplanted print. No Spotify or Netflix exists for literature, where (other than with some exceptions, such as for vinyl collectors) the medium and the message are more easily disentangled, but the codex has endured for two millennia whereas the CD and the DVD lasted barely two decades. Manuscripts are things of goat vellum and iron-gall ink, but even print bares the marks of embodiment, that Renaissance device constructed by goldsmiths, who worked with the metal of type, and vintners who understood how to use a press. Smith calls this “bookhood” and Keith Houston in The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of our Time refers to it as “bookness,” the love of this object that has “mass and odor, that fall in your hands when you ease them out a bookcase and that make a thump when you put them down.”
Enjoy your e-reader all you want, but a soul without a body is just a ghost, apt to suddenly flicker out of existence. My budget is closer to Gawda’s than Morgan’s, so other than a (brief and foolish) mania for purchasing seventeenth-century print on eBay a decade ago, my library is less a collection than a biography. No copy of Audubon, but rather The Norton Shakespeare given to me by Professor Barbara Traister upon her retirement and containing her learned marginalia (some of it frustratingly in Latin), the college rhetoric textbook from 1959 that my since-passed father gave me, and the century-old compendium of poetry—with advertisements in it!—which my great-aunt taught in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, once mine and now my son’s, that uninterrupted chain of stewardship between those fortunate to possess a book for a bit until it’s passed on in a process that some call collection, but which is better called love.
My equivalent of Goodnight Moon is Marjorie Torrey’s The Three Little Chipmunks, which was read to me seven or so decades ago, which I read to my grandsons a couple of decades ago, and which I hope they will read to whatever offspring they may have. I am pleased to say that they already have an abiding love of books.
‘Manuscripts are things of goat vellum and iron-gall ink, but even print bares the marks of embodiment …’
‘Bears’?
Hi, Umberto Eco was born in 1932 (in 1970 he was full Professor at the University of Bologna and in 1970 he was wealthy and famous in Academic circles).
I gathered Umberto Eco was still alive, but probably not. I had not heard about him dying. After your forties you just don’t notice when people die.
He passed away ten years ago next month. I recall hearing about it at the time, although not as much as one might have expected for a major cultural figure.
His cultural majority seems to have passed. Compare this comment about two other formerly inescapable authors:
I have quite enjoyed various Martin Amis novels, despite their perpetual-adolescent cynicism.
The Name of the Rose is fun, too, though hardly capital-L Literature. Foucault’s Pendulum is – OK, I guess. Definitely superior to Dan Brown. I’ve always supposed that Eco’s status was based not so much on his literary output but on the semiotics stuff, but I am handicapped in this assessment by a complete ignorance of semiotics.
I am never going to read something entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being. One has standards.
Name of the Rose and Lightness are cases where I both read the book and watched the movie – in 1980s Germany that was basically inescapable if you had any intellectual aspirations at all (and back then I still was young and giving more than a fuck for “what intellectual people were reading”). On the other hand, I’ve never read anything by any of the Amises; I guess they are seen as much more important in the Anglosphere than in continental Europe. (Not saying that this makes them not worth reading; I’ve heard good things about “Lucky Jim” and once almost bought it, but then decided on something else.)
Lucky Jim is very funny, but in some ways has aged poorly. You probably wouldn’t regret taking the time to read it, but you’re not missing a lot if you continue to not have done so.
A couple of years ago I read Grantchester Grind. I vaguely remembered it as having been popular when first published and as a sequel to Porterhouse Blue, which I had also not read and which had been adapted in the late 80s into a TV series I had not seen. I found the sequel’s humour had dated but was sufficiently amusing to try the earlier book, which I assumed had been published about 1985. I was repelled and confused by its much more blatant sexism and racism. I checked and discovered it had actually been published in 1974, which I guess was something of a relief. On the other hand, Grantchester Grind turned out to have been published in 1995, not c. 1988 as I would have estimated. (The action continues directly on from the earlier book but each is set in its contemporary present.)
Eco and Kundera were pretty close to each other in age, but were both a quite considerable amount older than Martin Amis – indeed much closer in age to Martin’s dad Sir Kingsley. This is of course not inconsistent with all three appealing to the same cohort of then-college-age readers in the US in the 1980’s even if they were not at the same stages of their own careers. Now I am suddenly recalling a time in New Haven circa 1986 when my then-girlfriend gave me an anthology of short stories by Harold Brodkey, very close in age to both Eco and Kundera and perhaps now even more faded into obscurity.
The movie of The Name of the Rose is a waste of time, unless you’re hot for Christian Slater.* On the other hand, I think the book is very good, and actually quite literary.
* Ron Perlman is perfectly cast, but his role is too minor to make the film worth watching.
Aw, I thought it was a fun popcorn movie, as long as you forget about the book (which is of course on a different level). And Michael Lonsdale was good too.
I’ve read every Kundera I could lay my hands on (and have several on my shelf, in Hebrew translation, and maybe it’s high time to go for the Czech) but have never even heard of any of Amis’ books.
[Our Three Chipmunks is either Fox in Socks or Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree, truly two great masterpieces of the modern era.]
I like the movie (and have seen it several times – in German, on TV); haven’t read the book, but Eco and his books are famous; I knew of Kundera; if it weren’t for cyber-here, I’d never have heard of either Amis or of any of their works.
Kingsley Amis is best and funniest at boiling misanthropy. Lucky Jim has a nice collection of positive characters. But One Fat Englishman is funny because its protagonist is such a nasty person, shown from his own viewpoint. Ending Up is another funny portrait of a group of creeps (at the end of their lives, for extra ha-has).
Eco has had at least a minor resurgence as a political analyst. His essay „Eternal Fascism“ was prominently displayed next to the counter in several Italian bookstores I visited last year.
JB – was that the Brodkey anthology with the infamous 10,000 word story describing performing cunnilingus on a Radcliffe girl? Those sort of postmodern stunts do seem to have fallen out of fashion.
In NYT Roger Rosenblatt Dec. 28 “Before you toss that book” wrote about all books he ever owned and annotated still in his house. Me, I have a younger sister and brother and child to whom books went. And an older brother whose clothes I wore. And I sold books when needed. And giveaways for several reasons. And loans. And in my student era, partly studying Dead Sea Scrolls and archaeology, amassed reams of photocopies, some sorted, some not.
I find lost text stories–yes by Eco too–compelling.
@Vanya: It was the anthology titled _First Love and Other Sorrows_. I don’t recall the plot point you mention, but perhaps I could have easily taken that in stride back then and not thought it memorable. I vaguely associate being gifted with that book book with the store “Book Haven” on York Street, but the girlfriend in question definitely worked there for a while, so that’s probably interfering with the clarity of my recollection. Was she the one who gave me that Baudrillard book or did I get that some other way? The Eighties in New Haven were a long time ago, man.
i quite like Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum*, but find eco’s other novels that i’ve dipped into to be incredibly dull. i’ve found his critical work interesting and useful, but haven’t read a lot of it – i can recommend Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (though the book doesn’t capture the flavor of his Norton Lectures as well as it might – he was an excellent performer) and The Search for the Perfect Language.
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* which to me is both a fascinating novel about the italian trajectory from the partisan years through the years of lead, and one of the three best 20thC novels about conspiracism, alongside The Crying of Lot 49 and the Illuminatus! trilogy.
From the brief bio of Kingsley Amis at the front of e-Lucky Jim:
>After his second, 18-year marriage to the novelist ended, he lived in a London house with his first wife and her third husband.
The line used to scare teens about promiscuity and venereal disease is “you’re sleeping with everyone your partner ever slept with.” I’ve never known anyone who felt that applied to marriage.
Some essays by Eco I consider worthwhile, and after his first two novels, Rose and Pendulum, I eagerly bought The Island of the Day Before, which was for me an utter failure, the only mystery being why he published it.
I put that down after a few chapters. It’s still in the stack of books I’m currently reading, but after more than a decade, I guess it’s time to let it go
Yeah, I’m another one who started it and gave up pretty quickly.
I finished it, but only because I am incapable of starting a book and not finishing it, except if fate intervenes (e.g., I loose it somehow). I haven’t read Pendulum, but maybe I will given the endorsements here. I can only support rozele’s recommendation for The Search for the Perfect Language; it should be right up the alley for most here at the Hattery.
it should be right up the alley for most here at the Hattery.—many will find much they already know, but that ought not to be a deal breaker.
Just to add my endorsement, Pendulum is in my opinion Eco’s best novel. Yes, for long stretches it reads more like an essay than like a novel, but given its subject matter — and given that Eco’s real talent was as an essayist anyway — it is less of a weakness than it could seem. At the same time, it feels more heartfelt than, say, The Name of the Rose, as if behind all the erudition and the po-mo playfulness the man was really trying to convey something close to his own heart. Lastly, I regard this novel as a surprisingly prescient warning about the dangers — and the charms — of conspiracy theorism, 30 or 40 years before it became a major force in contemporary society and politics.
Island, on the other hand, is all but unreadable — it is relieving to see that the feeling appears to be amply shared in this learnèd company.