Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (17 page)

The system of rolling shelves that Gladstone invented here is used today in the Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera and at
The New York Times Book Review
, among many other places. Like its author’s life, it contained not a wasted cubic inch.

I
have seen a photograph of Gladstone in his own library at Hawarden Castle, which he called the Temple of Peace. He sits in a wooden armchair, surrounded by leatherbound volumes on shelves that are, of course, constructed according to the principles set forth in
On Books and the Housing of Them
(the right-angle-projection plan, not the rolling-shelf plan). For forty-four years, the Temple of Peace provided a haven from his political life. Gladstone wrote the little book there between his third and fourth premierships, not long before his eightieth birthday, noting its composition in his diary on December 17, 1889, the day before he “[r]eviewed & threw into form all the points of possible amendment or change in the Plan of Irish Government &c. for my meeting with Mr. Parnell.”

When the leadership of Great Britain pressed too heavily on him, Gladstone did one of three things: felled large trees with an ax; walked around London talking to prostitutes; or arranged books. It was an odd trio of diversions, especially the second, which, although its ostensible purpose was to reform fallen women, sometimes stimulated so many carnal thoughts in the reformer that he whipped himself afterward with a contrition-inducing scourge. Tree-felling also had its perils (bruised fingers, splinters in the eye). Only book arranging, which Jenkins describes as occasionally reaching the level of “frenzy,” was invariably safe and satisfying. Parliament might be maddeningly resistant to Gladstone’s plans for reduced defense spending or Irish Home Rule, but his books were always pliant. He never entrusted the task—an unending one, since he bought books by the cartload—to a secretary. “What man who really loves his books,” he asked, “delegates to any other human being, as long as there is breath in his body, the office of inducting them into their homes?” A few months before he wrote that sentence, he had endowed a library in the village of Hawarden, moved twenty thousand of his own books there by wheelbarrow, and placed every one on the shelves himself.

I believe that books—buying them, reading them, annotating them, indexing them, housing them, and writing about them—saved Gladstone from paralyzing stress. Without them, he might not have lived to the then-astonishing age of eighty-eight in spite of erysipelas, bronchitis, tonsillitis, indigestion, lumbago, catarrh, pneumonia, and, finally, cancer of the palate. “The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase,” he wrote. “And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!”

As I contemplate the vista of my own book-choked apartment, I sometimes wonder whether the only thing that could prevent my library from extruding me onto the streets of Manhattan would be a visit from Gladstone and a few rolling shelves. We could work side by side—two happy compulsives with dust on our sleeves—and when we were finished, the little book with the red spine would have room to breathe.

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O
n the morning of my forty-second birthday, George informed me that I was about to be spirited to a mystery destination. I followed him to the subway. We got off at Grand Central Station, where he commanded me to stand at a discreet distance during his sotto voce procurement of two round-trip tickets to somewhere. After a half-hour’s ride through the Bronx and Yonkers, we disembarked at a town called Hastings-on-Hudson. What could possibly await us here? A three-star restaurant? A world-class art collection? A hot-air balloon, stocked with a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and a pound of caviar, from which we would achieve a hawk’s-eye view of the Hudson Valley?

I trailed George along the sleepy main street and down a steep hill.

“We’re here,” he said.

Then I saw it: a weather-beaten little shop, perched on such a declivitous slope that it looked in danger of sliding into the Hudson River, with a faded blue sign over the door that said BOOKSTORE. Inside were an unkempt desk, a maze of out-of-plumb shelves, a flurry of dust motes, and 300,000 used books.

Seven hours later, we emerged from the Riverrun Bookshop carrying nineteen pounds of books. (I weighed them when we got home.)

Now you know why I married my husband. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar. You may prefer Veuve Clicquot for
your
birthday, but give me (actually, you can’t, because George beat you to it) a nine-dollar 1929 edition of Vincent Starrett’s
Penny Wise and Book Foolish
, a tender paean to book collecting that contains the following sentence: “Every new search is a voyage to the Indies, a quest for buried treasure, a journey to the end of the rainbow; and whether or not at the end there shall be turned up a pot of gold or merely a delightful volume, there are always wonders along the way.”

Not everyone likes used books. The smears, smudges, underlinings, and ossified toast scintillae left by their previous owners may strike daintier readers as a little icky, like secondhand underwear. When I was young I liked my books young as well. Virginal paperbacks, their margins a tabula rasa for narcissistic scribbles, were cheap enough to inspire minimal guilt when I wrote in them and bland enough to accept my defacements without complaint. In those days, just as I believed that age would buffet other people’s bodies but not my own, so I believed my paperbacks would last forever. I was wrong on both counts. My college Penguins now explode in clouds of acidic dust when they are prized from their shelves.
Penny Wise and Book Foolish
, on the other hand, remains ravishing at the age of sixty-eight, its binding still firm and its bottle-green cover only slightly faded.

After paperbacks lost their allure, I converted to secondhand books partly because I couldn’t afford new hardbacks and partly because I developed a taste for bindings assembled with thread rather than glue, type set in hot metal rather than by computer, and frontispieces protected by little sheets of tissue paper. I also began to enjoy the sensation of being a small link in a long chain of book owners. The immaculate first editions cherished by rare-book collectors—no notes, no signatures, no bookplates—now leave me cold. I have come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room for everyone—the more, the merrier. In fact, the only old book I am likely to approach with unease is one with uncut pages. On an earlier birthday, George gave me a two-volume set of
Farthest North
, Fridtjof Nansen’s account of his unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole by ship. The edges were unopened. As I slit them with an unpracticed fingernail, I was overcome with melancholy. These beautiful volumes had been published in 1897, and
not a single person had read them
. I had the urge to lend them to as many friends as possible in order to make up for all the caresses they had missed during their first century.

“Alas,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher. “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!” Mine is relatively strong at Barnes & Noble, because I know that if I resist a volume on one visit, and someone else buys it, an identical volume will pop up in its place like a plastic duck in a shooting gallery. And if I resist
that
one, there will be another day, another duck. In a secondhand bookstore, each volume is one-of-a-kind, neither replaceable from a publisher’s warehouse nor visually identical to its original siblings, which have accreted individuality with every change of ownership. If I don’t buy the book now, I may never have another chance. And therefore, like Beecher, who believed the temptations of drink were paltry compared with the temptations of books, I am weak.

At least my frailty places me in good company. Southey, noted one observer, could not pass a bookstall without “just running his eye over for one minute, even if the coach which was to take him to see Coleridge at Hampstead was within the time of starting.” Of Macaulay, it was said there was “no one so ready to mount a ladder and scour the top shelf for quarto pamphlets, or curious literary relics of a bygone age, and come down after an hour’s examination covered with dust and cobwebs, sending for a bun to take the place of his usual luncheon.” And when the eighteenth-century London bookseller James Lackington was a young man, his wife sent him out on Christmas Eve with half a crown—all they had—to buy Christmas dinner. He passed an old bookshop and returned with Young’s
Night Thoughts
in his pocket and no turkey under his arm. “I think I have acted wisely,” he told his famished wife, “for had I bought a dinner we should have eaten it tomorrow, and the pleasure would have been soon over, but should we live fifty years longer, we shall have the
Night Thoughts
to feast upon.”

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos to fuel my fantasies of stumbling on, say, a copy of Poe’s
Tamerlane
, like the one a fisherman found under a stack of agricultural tracts in a New Hampshire antiques barn in 1988 and purchased for fifteen dollars. It was auctioned at Sotheby’s later that year for $198,000. I might note that people too well bred to mention money in other contexts do not hesitate, if they think they have gotten a bargain, to quote the sum they have spent for a used book. Lamb wrote Coleridge, “I have lit upon Fairfax’s
Godfrey of Bullen
, for half-a-crown. Rejoice with me.” And he wrote Southey, “I have picked up, too, another copy of Quarles for ninepence!!! O temporal O lectores!” (I came across Lamb’s cries of jubilation in volume 1 of
The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
, an undated two-volume “Edition de Luxe,” complete with illustrations, which I purchased for fifteen dollars. Rejoice with me.)

T
he only problem with lugging home nineteen pounds of books from Hastings-on-Hudson was that several thousand pounds of books already overcrowded our shelves. Over the years, as our loft has come to look less and less like a home and more and more like a secondhand bookstore, I have frequently fantasized about making the designation official. Wouldn’t it be fun, when the children are grown, to become bookdealers ourselves—”COLT & FADIMAN, Old Books Bought and Sold, Dog-Eared Volumes Our Specialty”?

Alas, I fear the reality might be a rude awakening. In a 1936 essay titled “Bookshop Memories,” George Orwell recalled his days as a clerk in a secondhand bookstore. The hours were long, the shop was freezing, the shelves were strewn with dead bluebottle flies, and a large fraction of the customers were lunatics. Worst of all, the books themselves gradually lost their luster. “There was a time when I really did love books,” he wrote, “loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction… . But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening.”

Was this an inevitable response, akin to the ice-cream disenchantment that reportedly overtakes every Baskin-Robbins employee, or was it (as I hoped) just Orwellian cynicism? I consulted my friend Adam, who had spent every Saturday of his sophomore and junior years at Harvard working in the Pangloss Bookshop in Cambridge. He confessed that he had been similarly disillusioned.

“I came to feel that a book without a home is a pointless thing,” he said, “and in a bookshop, that’s all you have. This hit me very powerfully when I visited the apartment of John Clive, the historian, after he died in 1990, to pack up his library and move it to our store. I had taken Clive’s class on the British Empire that semester, but he was an unflashy lecturer and I didn’t feel I’d gotten to know him. It was only when I saw his bookshelves—James Bond paperbacks cheek by jowl with nineteenth-century parliamentary proceedings—that I got a sense of who Clive really was. His intellectual furnishings explained him in a way his lectures hadn’t.