if I know one thing better than another

Meanwhile Holbrook Jackson talks about book collectors, and bookworms, and people who love to bind their books, and people who love to assemble libraries of books they never read, and impoverished people who spend their money on books instead of food, and people who will decorate a wall with false bookshelves, but this Bibliomania of his was published initially in 1930 and when I'd finished it I realised that he hadn't mentioned lists of books, which today are everywhere, and then I wondered if I should say to myself, "That's proof the book is old, people didn't publish book lists back then, they didn't make a big thing of them," or if I should say, "They did exist and he forgot them," but instead I wavered and said: "In this respect I am not adequately informed about the habits of bookpersons; I do not know," which only confirms the usefulness of knowledgeable books like Holbrook Jackson's.

1001 Books to Read Before You Die, is one of the lists I'm thinking of, and then there's the ones you see on blogs or just online: My Favourite Books, My Desert Island Books, My TBR Pile, Books I Bought Recently, My Latest Library Haul, Books On My Shelf, and Reading Challenges (the Cat Book Challenge, the Daphne du Maurier Challenge, the Scandinavian Reading Challenge, the Modern Library Reading Challenge, the Essay Reading Challenge, the Art History Reading Challenge, the Read Your Name Challenge for which "the challenge is to read your name in book title first letters, ultimately spelling out your name," and more)* until it seems that if the world was made for nothing more than the production of a book as Mallarmé said, then books were made for the making of lists of books, and that, faced with the great spreading-out of viewpoints that books represent, the reaction is to apply a focus, as we try to make the sun more useful by putting it through a magnifying glass and setting an ant on fire.

A search for focus, for accuracy, for measurement -- huge measurements if the list is a Great Literature canon, and measurement on the micro scale if it's one of those personal canons, like the one Junot Díaz gave to his Oscar Wao, although from the point of view of a person, which is the point of view we all have, I think it's the other way around, and the macro foreground is the personal canon, acquired with our own labour, and the background, the more minor thing, is the Great Literature canon, which exists somewhere like a cloud on a mountain (glance up and there it is, the cloth on the rock, and this, say the Capetonians, came about after a pirate had a smoking competition with the devil -- and likewise the Great Books canon is assembled out of other people's huff-and-puffing work), and phantom university professors might flit by your shoulders shrieking at you if you haven't read Candide (Nick Hornby suffers from that vision) but I think you can neglect the cultural canon in ways you can't neglect the personal canon, the personal canon nestling close to the heart, discovered by you, and the other one existing mystically, outside, like the neighbourhood outside your window, into which you step, but in which you do not live (as John Berger would like you to live) -- no, you live inside your house, among your furniture. Lord of the Rings is part of Wao's furniture; he's furnished the house himself, he puts his books in order solemnly, setting up this secret name or hieroglyph, on which he might meditate as Berger meditates on one of his landscape paintings: "It is only its shortcomings that fascinate me. In these I can see the possibilities of a more accurate metaphor: I can feel all that has escaped me."

The painting is a disguised arrow, pointing to the landscape he has seen and to the idea of himself seeing it, it is the painting not of a tree or a hill but of his viewpoint and contained in that painting invisibly is John Berger, sitting in nature with a paintbrush and possibly a folding chair, both eyes open. "John Berger is not blind," says the painting. "In case you thought he was."**

The private canon, pointing to the personality of the owner, is charged with meaning when the owner looks at it, although other people might grin. "Lord of the Rings? Then he's just a run of the mill fantasy geek," an ignorant boy, this Wao kid, suckled on the obvious. "He hasn't even bothered to go searching for unusual fantasy novels, he's just grabbed the big fat blatant one."

-- the world says, staring at the Wao bookshelves. "I like fantasy," it adds, "but eclectic fantasy please, I like to dig a little, you know what I mean? I have taste. I like Lud-in-the-Mist. Hope Mirrlees. Older than Tolkien. Nineteen twenty-six!" I stare at people's bookshelves, and I feel closer to them when I see a book I know, although I wonder what they think of it; something different to me probably, and so we are apart after all.

The personal canon or the desert island book list is another face for yourself, built by yourself, not the one nature happens to have given you, no, I'll do my own, and stick it together out of the debris I've come across, Wao might say, this fortress and this signboard, yes, Lord of the Rings here and the Dragonlance novels there -- and these are scraps that I will solder together, selecting and discarding (only the first two Dragonlance trilogies, not the later books), and with them I will build a cyborg part, or addendum, which will reach out into the world like a tentacle, directed by myself but not made of flesh, my new hand, waving to strangers and saying, "Hello, I'm here," or, as I watch, picking up a pin that was too small for my natural fingers. If Holbrook Jackson's people had met Nell from The Haunting of Hill House they would have wanted to cure her with books: if I know one thing better than another I know this, that my books know me and love me, he quotes from Eugene Field, and better a library than a monstrous house.

The reader knows that Nell hears the Bibliomania people calling to her, because her excuse, when she tries to explain to Dr Montague why she has been running out of her room at night in a haunted house, is, "I came down to the library to get a book" -- which she offers up as proof of absolute sanity.







* Examples: My Favourite Books, My Desert Island Books, My TBR Pile, Books I Bought Recently, My Latest Library Haul, Books On My Shelf, a page of Reading Challenges, and 1001 Books to Read Before you Die.

** Of course this means that if you own a realistic painting, a landscape or a portrait, then there is an invisible painter sitting on your table or standing on the kitchen counter, or hovering around whatever room the painting is in, exchanging a constant gaze with the artwork, staring ferociously at your wall, and you walk through this person, or put plates through them, or something like that, every time you move in front of the painting. My aunt has two photographers eyeballing walls in her dining room.

so radiantly set out with rings and jewels, lawns, scarves, laces, gold

I went from Holbrook Jackson's Anatomy of Bibliomania to a book of essays by John Berger, a whiplash change of viewpoint, since Berger is a Marxist who hopes that one day a revolution will reduce the desire of human beings for private property, and Jackson is a bookman -- "bookman" is the word he likes -- who spends six hundred and forty-six pages singing glory hallelujah to personal libraries. Anatomy itself is a covetable item of private property, I know, because I wanted to buy it at Powell's in Portland once upon a time, after I found it on a shelf under a window, hardbacked and blue and noted in the margins, and I hung over it like a moon of love, but the book was marked at twenty-five dollars and covetousness never made anyone rich, and so the one I read was a library copy.

He's imitating the Anatomy of Melancholy, as you can see by the title, and he splits his examination of the bibliomaniac into different categories, as Robert Burton did, so that a chapter that opens with The Misfortune of Books is separated into I. Trials and Tribulations, II. Books Lost and Found, III. Neglect and Misuse, IV. Perils of Fire and Water, and the chapter called A Digression of Book Worms is divided into I. A Common Enemy in Every Age, II., The Legendary Bookworm, III. The Bookworm and His Several Variations, IV. Nomenclature and Classification, V. How The Bookworm Discovered America -- etc -- and he fillets quotations into his sentences with Burtonish italics, like this:

Some would have them be microcosms, embracing all life: the making of Shakespeare's mind was the making of the world. Books, said William Wordsworth, are a substantial world both pure and good. Leigh Hunt would have that they are half of the known world, the globe we inhabit being divisible into two worlds: the common geographical world, and the world of books; and he holds further, they are such real things, that, if habit and perception make the difference between real and unreal, we may say that we frequently wake out of common life to them, than out of them to common life. Stephen Mallarmé cries that the world was made for nothing more than to produce a beautiful book, which some even among good bookmen may account a heresy ...

("The making of Shakespeare's mind …" came from Gathered Leaves by Mary E. Coleridge and this fact is in one of Jackson's footnotes.)*

The book is a rush of voices culled and organised and sub-organised and then organised again, clipped off in mid-flow however the author wants, both rabble and order, the author as supervisor or cat-herder, commenting on the personalities of the cats ("and though I adventure to affirm nothing of the truth and certainty of this supposition," adds Jackson at the end of the sentence quote above, "yet I must needs say, it does not seem to me unreasonable") though he doesn't rhapsodise as much as Burton sometimes did,** and he doesn't express himself in lists, while Burton was an author who, overrun by the atmosphere of babble, listed and babbled himself, chucking himself into the stream and babbling more than anyone, a man who fought in two directions, a man saying, "There are too many raindrops to count," and then trying to count them -- lists, lists: -- setting up obstacles for himself and clawing his way over them: -- like this: -- "she," he writes, "was so radiantly set out with rings and jewels, lawns, scarves, laces, gold, spangles, and gaudy devices …" and "For besides fear and sorrow, which is common to all melancholy, anxiety of mind, suspicion, aggravation, restless thoughts, paleness, meagreness, neglect of business, and the like, these men are farther yet misaffected …" and, "Parents and such as have the tuition and oversight of children, offend many times in that they are too stern, always threatening, chiding, brawling, whipping, or striking," and, "For in the head, as there be several parts, so there be divers grievances, which according to that division of Heurnius, (which he takes out of Arculanus,) are inward or outward (to omit all others which pertain to eyes and ears, nostrils, gums, teeth, mouth, palate, tongue, weezle, chops, face, &c.) belonging properly to the brain, as baldness, falling of hair, furfur, lice, &c" -- and then kept expanding his book whenever a new edition came out, well, you might say, there are always more words, some lose their wits by terrible objects, he claims. In this labyrinth of accidental causes, the farther I wander, the more intricate I find the passage, multae ambages , and new causes as so many by-paths offer themselves to be discussed: to search out all, were an Herculean work, and fitter for Theseus: I will follow mine intended thread; and point only at some few of the chiefest.

A zoo of words, a marshalling of ornament, this arrangement of verbs and nouns as if they were objects on a shelf, and this intimation of flood, of flooding; every time he begins a new list he starts us on a road that could go on for twenty lines or end after only three examples, a rollercoastery and exhausting way of writing -- exhausting for the reader, who is suspended in a state of excited and deranged vigilance, never knowing what the writer is going to do next, he might veer off into another list, he might come to a sudden halt and chop the list short with "&c." All writing asks for dominance over the reader but Burton makes the dominance obvious. The book is all dominance, this ragbag encyclopaedia, a Johnsonian exercise, a hysteric maintaining his hysteria.

Johnson used to rise early to read him. "It is, perhaps, overloaded with quotation," he told Boswell. "But there is great spirit and great power in what Burton says, when he writes from his own mind."







* You can find it here, with an introduction by Edith Sichel.

FOR most people there is a beginning and an end. It is important to recall that they were born, and that they died at such and such a date. But to say of Mary Coleridge that she was born in September 1861, that she lived nearly forty-six years, and died in August 1907, means little. She was never of any age, and excepting that as life went on she grew and ripened, she was much the same at twenty as at forty.

** eg. "Expect a little, confer future and times past with the present, see the event and comfort thyself with it. It is as well to be discerned in commonwealths, cities, families, as in private men's estates. Italy was once lord of the world, Rome the queen of cities, vaunted herself of two myriads of inhabitants; now that all-commanding country is possessed by petty princes, Rome a small village in respect. Greece of old the seat of civility, mother of sciences and humanity, now forlorn, the nurse of barbarians, a den of thieves. Germany then, saith Tacitus, was incult and horrid, now full of magnificent cities: Athens, Corinth, Carthage, how flourishing cities! now buried in their own ruins: corrorum ferarum, aprorum et bestiarum lustra, like so many wildernesses, a receptacle of wild beasts. Venice, a poor fisher-town, Paris, London, small cottages in Ceasar's time, now most notable emporiums."