Sep 07, 2011 Luc Sante, On His Outsized Collection of Books: a love affair with tactile literature
I have a fondness bordering on psychotic obsession with the book as both object and content delivery system. This obsessions misdirects my modern evolution to tablet-format electronics, and induces such rolling of the eyes as only a vinyl collector can match when incited to debate over “the future,” “efficiency,” “saving space” or “accessibility.” Very few consummate readers I know, read on iPads, and no one who reads on iPads is making a career being efficient or ecological. Stop kidding yourself.
The Book is North on my compass where the needle is calmest. Wearing a room full of books is like a full-body armor of Russian prison tattoos: a narrative, and a status-symbol. I am not afraid to admit that much hubris. I am literate. I own paper books. You should too.
So it’s nice to read this article in the Wall Street Journal by Luc Sante, who talks specifically and uniquely about the morphology of a library. One’s library. Your library. Everyone has one. Some of us earned it. Others inherit theirs. Fuck infographics. Read an essay for a change.
I’m not a snob about books, but I’m probably a show-off — as who isn’t? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed — much less commented upon — my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic. It’s rather a closed circle; I impress myself. I once felt a certain anxiety about my book-lined living room — it was too much, no? It seemed to belong in the same category as the display of framed degrees in prominent places. Books do furnish a room — in Anthony Powell’s titular phrase — but that room would be the library, equipped with 14-foot built-ins with a rolling ladder, and I’ve never had one of those. I had to consider which impulse was the stronger: the wish to let the world admire my complete collection of the works of Raymond Roussel, or the wish not to appear a bore. Having books crowd every inch of wall space in the room in which I entertained imposed a certain burden on the conversation, as if dead authors were leaning in, contributing dry, derisive chuckles.