Phantoms on the Bookshelves (2008)
Jacques Bonnet
133 pages
… that magical moment when one learns to read, and the infinite horizon that opens up when you decipher something written down. I spent my childhood reading everything that came to hand --- books, yes, but also posters, advertisements, notices, newspaper cuttings, and during meals I would read cereal packets or bottle labelsI paused after reading these words from Jacques Bonnet in his wonderful little book Phantoms of the Bookshelves. His description of his earliest memories on the path that has led him to fill his home with a personal library containing tens of thousands of books hit close to home for me, as I remembered my own childhood when I would sit at the breakfast table reading --- studying really --- every word on the cereal box and milk carton in front of me.
Bonnet has written an homage to his large personal library, but also a short treatise on how one can suddenly find oneself surrounded by so many books, what traits lead one to become a “bibliomaniac.” He distinguishes between to types of bibliophiles: ‘collectors’, who accumulate certain genres or types of books and for whom acquiring books represents the goal, and ‘manic readers’ (such as himself), who acquire a book seeking the content, the knowledge or the connection to a memory that the text of the book contains.
He answers the first questions that bibliophiles with large personal libraries always hear --- that I have heard even if my personal library is over an order of magnitude smaller than his. The first of those questions: Have you read all these books? The easy answer, ‘of course not,’ isn’t the whole answer, and Bonnet makes clear that even the books that haven’t been read have still been at least considered and shelved, and wait there on the bookshelf for their moment to be consulted or finally read. He points out that sometimes a book is acquired to be directly added to the shelf, but with the knowledge that it is there if it is one day needed.
The second question that anyone with a sufficiently large library hears is: How do you find the book you are looking for? Here Bonnet lays out the various ways that books could be organized, and the very personal choice that such an organization represents. Through a description of his personal approach to organizing his books, he also notes the difficulty of holding strictly to any particular method of ordering the books, and the exceptions and odd combinations that cannot help but creep into whatever arrangement one settles on.
Beyond these questions, Bonnet also discusses the challenges of having a library of books in a home environment, from the pests that can attack them to the significant problem having to move them to a new place represents. In an entertaining chapter he compares the knowledge we readers can have about the characters in novels, versus what we can know about the authors of those same books; in another he contemplates the end of a personal library, either of the books themselves or their owner.
Throughout the text Bonnet references books from his collection, using them as support for his points. Although he states at one point that it is not an attempt on his part to list out his favorite books, the books he references nonetheless represent an intriguing cross-section of potential next books for any lover of literature and reading. All the books he mentions in the text are captured in a bibliography as an easy reference. I found more than a few titles for which his descriptions have me curious to search them out.
Anyone who loves to read, and especially a reader who finds themselves the owner of a wide-ranging personal library of books, will find in Bonnet’s Phantoms of the Bookshelves an enjoyable and engaging defense of their addiction.
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