When I moved to my current house, the first thing I did before unpacking anything else was to arrange my books on an entire wall of bookshelves I had built.
Some might consider this an odd way to settle into a new home, but for me it felt like the natural thing to do. A person’s library says something about who they are. A library is a physical locus and material representation of a mental landscape. The house wasn’t home for me until my books had garrisoned the walls, projecting my personality into the space.
As the physician Sir William Osler put it,
“A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if to the character of a collector he adds—or tries to add—the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.”
Companions and Old Friends
Where others might make their mark on a new house by painting it or tearing out a wall, I plant my flag by populating the house with my intellectual companions: books.
I choose the word “companions” deliberately. A good book can become a traveling companion or even a guide on the pilgrimage of life. Different titles on my shelf speak of different stages of the journey. I recall when I first read them, how they affected me, and how they marked or shaped an era of my life. Sometimes, these memories become wedded to a specific, physical copy of a text. Weathered and worn, the books wear the signs of their history and mine. The marks of dirty fingers, dogears, teardrops, underlinings, marginalia, and mishaps tell a personal story, superimposed on the work itself.
In this way, the physicality of each book becomes an important addendum to what it contains, and dearer to the owner because of it.
As Charles Lamb wrote in a letter to Coleridge, “A book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe.”
Through time and growing familiarity, each book becomes unique and irreplaceable, and each library becomes a record not just of its owner’s interests and intellectual life but also of the development of that intellectual life over time.
Sometimes, books grow with you. A book read in youth that’s taken up again in adulthood can speak to the reader in a new, deeper way. A great book always has more to offer. Each rereading is like panning for more gold from the same streambed. There’s always more in the water, glittering amongst the stones.
Eternal Delight
I have a special affection for leather-bound books. The beauty of such volumes and the work that goes into crafting them lends them a dignity other books lack. They speak to us more eloquently, not just of our personal intellectual history, but of the intellectual history of the world, reminding us of a time when monks hunched over flickering candles to copy, illuminate, illustrate, sew, and bind in leather the much-beloved works of the past, at tremendous pains and expense. The famous “Book of Kells,” for instance, used 185 calves’ skins for its 340 folios.
These manuscripts transformed into mass-produced books with the coming of the printing press, but still, even in the early 20th century, books were often bound in leather and created with craftsmanship and artistry rarely seen today.
It seems fitting that a volume of Dante, Shakespeare, or Dickens should be crafted with the best materials and most scrupulous level of care to express respect for the time-honored masterpieces between the covers.
A leather-bound book enhances and enriches the reading experience by providing a symphony for the senses. Its decoration is a prelude and accompaniment to the story. You look at a leatherbound book on the shelf: its smooth, soft spine is a pleasant mahogany color and the gold lettering flashes forth and flickers with a quiet intensity. You take it in your hand. It has weight and heft. Here’s something you can sink your mental teeth into. Here is something strong enough to sustain your imagination and enlighten your mind. You open the book: Its spine makes a satisfying crackling noise. That indescribable old book smell wafts up—part dust, part leather, part paper, part time itself. It’s as if the book released the memory of old Oxford dons in overstuffed chairs beside crackling fires in the autumn.
New leather-bound books can be beautiful, but old ones are better. They carry reminders, not just of your own journey, but of the journeys of dozens, maybe hundreds of other people who owned the book before you. They’ve endured wars, stock market crashes, and even the coming of their mortal adversary, the ephemeral eBook reader. When you own such a book, you enter a story larger than yourself. I like to think certain books have always been old. They left off the printing press dust-covered, like thoughtful, bearded, old men, weighed down by the weight of their wisdom.
What really makes books a worthwhile thing to collect is that they have something eternal about them. They last longer than a fleeting human life. Here, between two strips of cowhide, a person’s mind, heart, and soul remain, long after they’re gone. You have access to their greatest thoughts; their character shines through the pages. If they were a great soul—an Aristotle, a Homer, a Dante, or a Dickinson—the luminous movements of their minds and imaginations can shine bright enough to illuminate our own path through the world’s “dark wood.” In such cases, a book becomes more than a hunk of leather and linen and paper—it becomes a beacon.
There is an old New Yorker cartoon by George Booth that shows a home with books for sale. Books are literally falling out of the windows and out of the doors. That is not much different than my home these days where over 3000 friends reside. This is the result of marrying my collection to those of my parents after I retired back to the farm of my youth. My favorite quote is from Cicero: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”