User:Lbattich/Benjamin - Unpacking my Library

While unpacking his library Benjamin muses on the practice of a book collector and bibliophile, the recollections the book triggers, the relation of order and disorder in every personal library, and other book-related reflections. He reminds us that books are reservoirs not just of their authors’ words. As objects owned and collected, they are permeated with the collector’s personal memories. The essay is full of shrewd aphorisms:

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

“[T]he acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.”

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

“To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of a book is somewhere on his shelves.”

“[O]wnership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects.”

With a tinge of humour, admitting that “everything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical”, Benjamin states that “of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.”

This is not necessarily about creatively writing your own book. He mentions Jean Pauls’ story of Maria Wutz, who slowly acquired all the works he liked from book-fair catalogues, by writing them himself. In real life, and closer to our time, Simon Morris rewrites Kerouac’s On The Road, one page per day, and ends up with his own book, a copy of which is surely resting in his own library (in case he has one), proving Benjamin right. Benjamin himself was a most creatively uncreative writer, connoting a majestic book composed mainly of quotes, citations, references, in short, other people’s writings: his gargantuan Arcades Project, which remained unfinished at the time of his death, or as T.J. Clark puts it, is “the wreckage of a book that did not get written.”

Of other forms of book acquisition, “the one most appropriate to a collector would be the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning.” The book borrower of real stature is distinguished also for his or her “failure to read these books”. Non-reading books is a pervasive characteristic of a collector, and most of bibliophiles I would add (myself included). Benjamin cites Anatole France’s reply to a philistine who after admiring his library posed the standard question, ‘And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?’ ‘Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?’

Some of Benjamin’s remarks may apply directly to the collector of antique and rare books, but they go beyond that, and the relationship between the acts of acquiring, collecting, shelving, admiring and actually reading books, is of course different in every bibliophile. I’m not into attending antique books auctions (not yet), but books I’ve bought in charity shops, in second hand bookstores in different cities, and even new copies bought on internet, have all of the qualities Benjamin assigns to the collector’s precious objects. Each book, as an object, has its story, the aura of nostalgic relics, regardless of whether it has been read. Personally I feel a library with a surplus of unread books is more simulating than one compromised of only read ones. It provides a ground of possibilities. But can also induce a feeling of pleasure mixed with pain/horror, which borders on the sublime, and I think this has to do with ownership as well as reading.

For the bibliophile the acquisition of books is not governed by the necessity to read them (well, it is, always, but I mean not to read as soon as possible), and the pleasure (“the thrill”, Benjamin would add) of acquiring a new book is on a different order than the pleasure of finally getting down to reading it.

For conclusion, Borges in a 1967 lecture:

“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”

— This Craft of Verse, p.9