For many years now I have had attached to one of my study bookshelves the following quotation (from whence I know not!): The lives of Bibliomaniacs are rarely ever quaint and can be, in extremis, utterly alarming. I was reminded of it again today. I have been slowly adding details of my books to a great icloud website https://www.libib.com/library/home. Title, author[s], publisher, page totals, illustration of cover or title page and quality are all detailed. I have been slow due to the fact that I often stop to peruse a book, occasionally one I had not touched for a long time. A few, alas, I had forgotten I owned.
Today, a cutting from The Daily Telegraph (Saturday, November 22, 2008) fell out of one reference book. It was an article by that erudite journalist Christopher Howse, which started A collector has been convicted of stealing rare maps and prints that he cut out of valuable old books in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A single page he removed was valued at £30,000! Howse also went on to write about the borderline between bibliophiles and bibliomanes, between collectors and obsessives - a subject I find much more interesting! He gave a few examples of the latter breed. An amiable scholar, who died the previous year, had a house jammed with books. They were on shelves, the floor, in the kitchen - he was unable to use his stove! - and when asked if he could find a particular volume, he would reply "Within a foot or two". Another scholar had the dream job of cataloguing books printed before 1700 in National Trust Properties. He could research and read books at any major institution. That didn't stop him cramming his home with volumes, on stairways - everywhere. I happen to have a friend whose house is similarly overrun!
The man who popularised the word bibliomania was Thomas Dibdin, who in 1809 had published Bibliomania or Book-madness, containing some account of the history, symptoms and cure of this fatal disease. I must look for a copy! I know my 'weakness' - it is for 'sets': Yale's English Monarchs, The New Oxford History of England, Collins' Brief Lives, Haus Publishing's British Prime Ministers, and so on. I have over 400 of the 600-odd Oxford 'World's Classics' pocket volumes, all in first editions. Once I start reading a novelist, I have to collect all his works - the most obvious is John Buchan; but I have done the same for John Meade Falkner, Daphne du Maurier, Constance Holme, Maurice Walsh and many others. The only brake on me is cost - I have all Sir Walter Scott's works on first editions bar Waverley. I only have Stevenson's Treasure Island, because I bought it for £9! Recently, I have been after John Galt and others in the 'Blackwood' Group of early nineteenth century Scottish novelists. Before that, there was a brief stab at Mary Webb and A. E. Housman.
And so the total mounts up, passing 8,000 not long ago. But, I don't waste money on cigarettes and only drink occasionally - that's my argument, anyway. Below are some glimpses of my Library - every book cherished as a friend. W. E. Gladstone (a hero of mine and now pathetically under attack by the moronic pond-life the western world appears to be breeding) sums up my feelings towards these friends:
Books are a delightful Society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you.
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