Reading Matter: A Rabid Bibliophile's Adventures among Old and Rare Books (review)

Jack Matthews is more than a scholarly adventurer; he is the philosopher of bibliophily. He values "the mysterious beauty within the text" (vii); he "delights in burrowing for the antiquarian lore in old books" (vii); he comprehends "our abiding need for studying and understanding the Past by means of a passionate and civilized preoccupation with old and rare books" (vii).

The author is also very much in love with words—a romance that sometimes leads to lengthy amatory ambling and rambling in the course of which unfamiliar verbalisms are scattered. We call to mind "concinnity" (15) and "enjamb[m]ent" (51), "panpsychistic" (111) and "esemplastic" (76). Indeed, cumbersome and verbose at times, the Matthews style has the same "exuberant energy" (39) he ascribes to one of his subjects.

Those subjects include a cast of characters unfamiliar to most of us. Reading Matter starts out with one John Timbs, author of Schooldays of Eminent Men, first published in London, a reprint of which, published in Columbus, Ohio, in 1860, Jack Matthews found in Amsterdam. The circumstance evokes the moving comment: "As often happens when I hold a book in my hand, I found it mysterious and wonderful to contemplate its unique journey through time" (4). The author is always intrigued by the "intricate patterns of ownership and exchange throughout the years" (9).

John Timbs is followed by a once-celebrated seventeenth-century German chemist, Johann Rodolph Glauber, the Paracelsus of his time, and Glauber is followed by Theophilus Noel, a bigoted Civil War Rebel, a "fiery old warrior" (36) who hated everything and published his own Autobiography and Reminiscences in 1904. Another author rescued from oblivion by Matthews is Thomas Lupton, whose A Thousand Notable Things of Sundrie Sorts is aptly described as "a teeming argosy of spectacular human error and superstition" (105).

Jack Matthews is not merely the philosopher of bibliophily; his philosophy embraces also the separate aspects of books: their bindings, "the fetish of fine condition" (85), the puffs and designs of book jackets, inscribed copies of books. Of this last the author points out: "It is pleasant to hold a book that was held by someone who has been dead for a century or two; such connections are humble evidence of both our evanescence and our enduring humanity" (139).

The approach of the philosopher is applied as well to such subjects as book catalogs, notably, a 1902 Pickering and Chatto Illustrated Catalogue of Old and Rare Books, and to ephemera such as those "old prescriptions" (77) in manuscript that "open a small window upon worlds that are hauntingly strange to us, yet somehow familiar" (77).

The philosopher's touchstone is discernible too in Matthews's anecdotes about bookish eccentrics as well as in his deathbed recitals of the dying words of the famous, the farewells of writers. Indeed, even the lowly subject of the comma is treated to a philosophical chapter.

To quote the author yet again: "An accurate review provides some sense of what the book is about and how well it has achieved its purpose" (57). Having provided the former, this review addresses the latter. Certainly the ten fine figures printed in color on eight plates help the reader—and the reviewers— visualize the subjects discussed. If the author's exuberant style becomes cumbersome at times, it still conveys to the reader most vibrantly the message that "the Past is an essential human dimension" (172). Neither the unfortunate lack of an index nor the careless error of printing page for plate in the list of illustrations can detract from that. Here, in Reading Matter, an author who has ventured into the dimension of the Past conveys his philosophy to the Present.