The Bookshelf

Recently, I visited the new home of two dear old friends. Both lawyers, they had moved from a large house on the outskirts of London into a reasonably small flat in the center of town. In order to accommodate their more modest spatial circumstances, my friends had done a “cull” of their personal library. Apparently, they had no choice. But, I wondered, how could they possibly decide which books would be executed. As the husband looked somewhat bereft, the wife explained, “We made a ruthless decision. If neither of us had opened a certain book during the last ten years, then we sent it to the charity shop. Plain and simple.” I quaked inside. How could one possibly discard a precious volume in such a cavalier fashion? After all, if one had not talked to a certain cherished old friend for ten years, one would still be happy to resume contact. Surely?

My friends merely chortled at my hypersensitivity to discarded books. In fact, over many years, I have had to arrive at the painful conclusion that not everyone suffers from advanced bibliophilia, as I do.

Ever since early childhood, I have always enjoyed my books. As the son of parents who collected antiquarian tomes, I grew up savoring leather-bound volumes as great aesthetic thrills. But I have not only enjoyed the books that I have read at home, I have also relished my trips to the library, those great temples devoted to the care and protection of books, ensuring that ruthless readers do not destroy its holdings at ten-yearly intervals.

Emily Dickinson had long ago found just the right words to describe what those of us of a bibliophilic disposition often experience when we enter one of those magnificent storehouses. In her nineteenth-century poem, “In a Library,” Miss Dickinson opined:

A precious, mouldering pleasure ‘t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think.

(1960, 371)

Other great writers have extolled the pleasures of the library in fulsome prose, among them the mid-twentieth-century American author Betty Smith, who, in her novel, Joy in the Morning, described so beautifully the delight experienced by Annie Brown, a teenage newlywed, whose husband, Carl Brown, a struggling law student attending a Midwestern college in the 1920s, allows her to borrow his precious library card. As Smith describes, “Now it was time to go to the library. She prepared for it the way a girl prepares for a party. She bathed and dusted herself with talcum powder; put on fresh makeup. She changed into her other slip, brassière, and pair of step-ins. She brushed her hair, annoyed with the defective brush and aware that no matter how she arranged her long hair, she’d look out of place among the bob-haired coeds” (1963, 51). Smith explains further that “Annie climbed the wide steps and entered the library with the exultant reverence an art lover has entering the Louvre for the first time. She believed what Carl had told her—that there were more than a million books in that library.” Indeed, “She went from room to room, floor to floor, stack to stack, reveling in books, books, books. She loved books. She loved them with her senses and her intellect. The way they smelled and looked; the way they felt in her hands; the way the pages seemed to murmur as she turned them. Everything there is in the world, she thought, is in books.” (52). Ultimately, “It was like old times to Annie to come upon David Copperfield in the ‘D’ rack. She smiled at the book and said, ‘Hello, David,’ then looked around embarrassed, hoping no one had heard her.”

When one savors the writing of Emily Dickinson and Betty Smith, one realizes, with great relief, that one has friends of similarly bibliophilic propensities.

As I practice from an ordinary-sized consulting room, I have very limited space in which to store my books at work. In fact, I keep most of my library at home. In spite of the recommendation of my Freudian forebears that one should provide...