Up, coffee, tofu, e-mail, cook lunch, read book about world with no people, bicycle to work in the rain, make rude gesture at driver who runs stop sign at cross street, data entry, knit, drink hot chocolate, data entry, eat lunch, read book about emotionally confused people, shuffle papers, knit, shuffle papers, data entry, bicycle to library in the rain, return library books, pick up holds (4), pay fine ($1.25), bicycle home in the rain, check post (bills), dinner, coffee, e-mail, internets, read several different books, etc.
Cataloguing one’s home library has its good points. Entering in ISBNs and publication information is a wonderful way to devour time. One also gets a chance really to look at one’s books; one so seldom has the opportunity. One buys the book, sometimes one even reads it,* and then it goes on the shelf, jumbled with books both near and far to it in manner or content.
It was with some pleasure today that I found, tucked between a fat burgundy Faulkner and a dour blue history of England in the 18th century, the Letters of Sir Thomas Browne. More than two years ago I’d bought it, read a quarter of it, then packed it away and gave it no more thought.† As I flipped through to find the publication information, I saw the following on the back of the title page:
This edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Letters was originally issured in 1931 as volume six of The Works edited in six volumes by Geoffrey Keynes.
The unsold remaining stock of the sheets of volumes one to four was destroyed by enemy action in 1941, and the survivors, the two volumes entitled five and six, are now reissued separately with the addition of a few errata. Each volume is complete in itself.
So there it is.
* Lately I’ve been leaning heavily on the library for my browsing needs, so I am, happily, even more likely to read in its entirety a book I’ve purchased, which is, I think, a change for the better.
† By this afternoon I’ll probably have forgotten it again; certainly it will go in the stack of ‘books to read’, one of the many graveyards for good intentions.
This library is a catacomb in which each book is a tomb; and I who disturb its quietness visit the grim place like an improvident necromancer. I revive, as the whim takes me, one or another of the dead, where but for my unwholesome arts would decay peacefully each uncharmed compost of rags and glue and oak and macerated wood splinters. I offer an initiatory strange sacrifice, of time and eyesight…
– James Branch Cabell, These Restless Heads, (p. 195)
Which reminds me of a passage in Kenneth Dover’s autobiography (which I read after drifting through Martha Nussbaum’s review of it), where he says that death is like the returning of a book to the stacks, and so he is unable to get worked up over the act of dying, though he had empathy enough for any suffering caused by it. Since I imprudently returned that book to the library, though, I am unable to provide an exact citation, and the reader must be content with the knowledge that the sentences in question occurred about a third of the way through, on the top part of the right hand page.
Relics of the book trade; but see also a more impressive collection.
O. W. Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table:
Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems:
ibidem
H. W. Auden, Greek Prose Phrase-Book:
A. Kiesling, ed. Seneca Rhetor:
Newton & Treat, Outline for Review: Roman History:
Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats:
Charles E. Bennett, Latin Composition:
R. C. Seaton, ed. Apollonii Rhodii, Argonautica:
from the Cowley Image Archive
All was sunshine and flowers until the library delivered the wrong book for an interlibrary loan. I don’t care what the critics say, Allen Mandelbaum is no Gavin Douglas.*
* Brief critical introduction to and biography of Douglas. He also has the dubious honor of being somewhere commended by Ezra Pound.
To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.:
Bagford the biblioclast.
Illustrations torn from MSS.
Title-pages torn from books.
Rubens, his engraved titles.
Colophons torn out of books.
Lincoln Cathedral
Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay.
Theurdanck.
Fragments of MSS.
Some libraries almost useless.[...]
The care that should be taken of books.
Enjoyment derived from them.
Incidentally, I am still amused by The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, though its table of contents is nowhere near so … poetical:
My First Love
The Birth of a New Passion
The Luxury of Reading in Bed
The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me
Baldness and Intellectuality[...]
The Pleasures of Extra-Illustration
The Odors which My Books Exhale.
I call that day good in which I may spend the morning in bed reading Aubrey’s Brief Lives (cf.) and Cornelius Nepos.((A translation is available, too. Incidentally, I sometimes think that if I could choose to meet anyone in history for a cup of coffee or something, I would choose Atticus — but one can never be sure about such things and the sort of person one would really want to chat with has probaby been entirely forgotten, name and all.))
When Oxford surrendred, the first thing General Fairfax did was to sett a good Guard of Soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. ’Tis said that there was more hurt donne by the Cavaliers (during their Garrison) by way of embezilling and cutting off chaines of bookes, then there was since. He was a lover of earning,a nd had he not taken this speciall care, that noble Library had been utterly destroyed, for there were ignorant senators enough who would have been contented to have had it so.((Aubrey’s Life of Thomas Fairfax, Lord Fairfax.))
Failing that, though, I would settle for late eighteenth-century epistolary novels.
Williston Library
Carrel-choosing at the Library — it seems to be one of the social events of the early fall semester… (Yours truly now the proud resident of of carrel no. 502 — fifth floor, by the window, one shelf away from Greek & Latin poetry, twenty-seven paces from Stendhal.) Up very late reading again.
Ineffably charming, oozing good humor & politic attention; I listen & ask questions—then run to the library and hide among my friends, their dusty spines bristling at imagined indignities.
More and still more work in the library, reading about god and trying to comprehend Epidauros, which just leaves me muddled. I find it frightfully confusing that there were at least four different (?) artists called Polykleitos working in the Greek world during the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC; it just shouldn’t be allowed. Still, feeling deceptively productive.
Friday. Morning in various libraries, reading about the second sohpistic. The
Bod LRR is shut from tomorrow until October, which saddens me a great deal: my last two weeks in England spent without access to its darkened portraits and harried classicists. Still, there are other libraries available, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve gotten into the habit. Yes, it is a habit, and it forms character, shapes the mind into a rigorous academic… machine? For some. The finalists are finishing their exams, the weary, taut expression of the penguin people yielding to joy and relief with the red carnation. These are traditions, without which, well, it just wouldn’t be… Silly thing to write about, though. One might as well ramble at great length about the intricacies of memory (oh, yes, that’s been done too, hasn’t it?).
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.