The Book Ladder

The great chain of being is one of the most beautiful images in Western philosophy. Atop this universal hierarchy sits God and just below Him the angels. Humans are lower than angels in the great chain of being but higher than animals. At the bottom of the hierarchy are plants, followed by minerals. All of creation has a place in this "natural ladder."

The great chain of being gives order and meaning to everything in the universe. Things closer to the top of the ladder have higher powers and more responsibility, whereas things lower have less. While books are not part of the traditional great chain of being, I've often thought that there is a parallel to the great chain of being in the book world.

The divine authors of the modernist and postmodernist world would include Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and James Joyce. The angelic order would include John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino, William H. Gass, and Vladimir Nabokov. Among the human, all-too-human would be Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Robert Coover, Julio Cortázar, Don DeLillo, Raymond Federman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ronald Sukenick, and Kurt Vonnegut. At the level of minerals would exist all of those writers who either reject or avoid the postmodern aesthetic, namely anyone with things like round characters or linear plotlines.

The higher powers of writers like Beckett and Borges are revealed in the many ways in which their work is reflected in that of others. As residents of the top of the book ladder, they cannot produce anything but perfection—there is no such thing as a bad book by Beckett or bad story by Borges. The responsibility and power of their books is to set the highest aspirations for books. Whereas bad books are at least possible within the angelic order, and they are probable in the human order, among the divine order, they are simply inconceivable. At the lowest order, bad books are expected.

Some people might want to think of the book ladder in terms not only of the content of books, but also their material condition. This would mean taking into account the fact that a signed first edition of Joyce's Ulysses is worth more than a highlighted, tattered, used mass-market edition. Material considerations like this might also be taken into account in considerations of the great chain of book being.

I was first struck by this idea many years ago when I worked in one of the oldest and largest used bookstores in the US. Established in the late nineteenth century, the bookstore must have contained at least half a million used books—though I don't think anyone really knew how many books were in the store (while we were asked to count the books in the store once a year, no one took the task very seriously).

The store itself was organized like the great chain of being.

The top floor—the one closest to the heavens—contained the most valuable books. Books here were treated with the utmost care. If the book had a dust jacket, then it was carefully preserved from wear with a protective plastic dust jacket. Glass cases kept rows of leather bound tomes and signed first editions away from the grubby hands.

Each book on the top floor contained a typed slip of paper with details about the book.

Each was also carefully priced and catalogued. None of these books were overlooked or forgotten. In the world of used books, these were the "good" books.

As one descended from this top floor to the lower floors, the value of the books also decreased (as well as the amount of attention placed on them). Whereas on the top floor one might find a first edition Ernest Hemingway, on the balcony—which literally housed tens of thousands of works of fiction—one could always find scores of dusty book-club editions or dog-eared paperback works by Papa.

Whereas the ground floor contained a few new books and some remainders, it gave little indication of what lay below it—book hell.

The lowest floor...