Phantoms on the Bookshelves
Jacques Bonnet
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 1590207599
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The enthralling memoir on the art of living with books Phantoms on the Bookshelves considers how our personal libraries reveal our true natures: far more than merely crowded shelves, they are living labyrinths of our innermost feelings.
The author, a lifelong accumulator of books ancient and modern, lives in a house large enough to accommodate his many thousands of volumes, as well as overspill from the libraries of his friends. While his musings on the habits of collectors from the earliest known libraries are learned, amusing, and instructive, his advice on cataloguing may even save lives. Phantoms on the Bookshelves ranges from classical Greece to contemporary Iceland, from Balzac to Moby-Dick and Google. Rich in wit and wisdom, it will be a lasting delight for all who treasure books.
Spanish? Modigliani as Italian or French? Giacometti as Swiss? Do I treat Bernini as a painter or a sculptor (oh yes, sculpture is another sub-section)—or, indeed, as an architect? And what am I to do with Michelangelo? Finally, there is a large wall behind my worktable where I have shelved all my reference works—dictionaries of all kinds, lexicons (philosophical, psychoanalytic, gastronomy, etc.). But the 1970 edition of the Encyclopedia Universalis has recently had to be moved to a nearby
this disagreeable sensation a few years ago, on taking up again a book by Paul Morand—either Ouvert la nuit (Open all Night) or L’Homme pressé (The man in a hurry) or Hécate et ses chiens (Hecate and Her Dogs)—I have now forgotten which. His lively style had enchanted me at the age of twenty, but now I felt oozing from his prose—still admittedly brilliant—a social disdain, a feeling of haughty superiority, a pompous self-satisfaction, which I found intolerable. So all that is left to me now of
are exceptions, like the library assembled in Hamburg by Aby Warburg that was moved to London in 1933 to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis, and that became the heart of an institute for Renaissance studies. But even great libraries, those of schools and cities, have come to ruin, destroyed by fire, war, or decree: Alexandria’s famous library, Dresden’s in 1945, others. An emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, you will learn, the builder of the Great Wall, also ordered the destruction of all
Thematic works are grouped according to links which are sometimes a bit wayward. So Metropolitan Cats by John P. O’Neill and Le Chat et la palette (The Painted Cat) by Elisabeth Foucart-Walter and Pierre Rosenberg rub shoulders quite amicably with Le Chien dans l’art (The Dog in Art) by Robert Rosenblum. Books on Saint Sebastian or Mary Magdalen sit alongside a Rath Museum catalog of an exhibition on Cleopatra and La Calomnie d’Apelle (The calumny of Apelles) by Jean-Michel Massing. But the
sacrifice themselves, are cowardly, go mad, take revenge and end up killing themselves; but once again, even in such specific actions, the invented characters are the most real. We are certain that Carlos and Maria Eduarda in The Maias by Eça de Queiros have been incestuous lovers—even if they do not realize it themselves. But we don’t know what happened between Byron and Augusta, George Trakl and his sister Margarethe, Egon and Gert Schiele, who as teenagers repeated their parents’ honeymoon