Still Life , by Francois Bonvin, 1876 (National Gallery, London)
I remember exactly when I fell in love with books. I remember the book, too; it was Smiling Jack Escapes from Devil’s Island . At least I think that was the title. It’s long gone and I don’t even remember who wrote it. I read it around 1947, maybe 48, I think. I’ve tried to find another copy for years, without any luck. But I do remember the circumstances.
I was sick in bed with some childhood flu or something and it was the first full book that I read. It took me about three days to finish it and I was sad when it was over. That book was the best medicine I ever took; it took me out of my illness, out of my room, down along the east coast of South America. I would fall asleep wondering how Smiling Jack would escape from the prison on Devil’s Island. When I finished with it I just turned it over and over in my hands, amazed at the power of a story, all compactly stored in that efficient volume of pages.
I was hooked. Soon after I found a nice little copy of Treasure Island . I printed the words I didn’t know in the back I still do that) and learned how to use a dictionary from my father. I went from Stevenson to Kipling to Conrad, not always getting it, but nurturing a love for adventures in faraway places and seas that I retain to this day., Small wonder that my two top favorite books are The Odyssey and Moby Dick .
Having lost that copy of Treasure Island turned me into a book hoarder and, when a dear friend sent me a clipping of an LATimes piece on book hoarders. it was a comfort to know, as I did intuitively, that there were others like myself who must have their books proximate and value all of them as friends. And that brings me to libraries—not the one that burned at Alexandria, the New York Public, or of Congress—but the problem of the personal library of a book hoarder.
I always wanted a library like the one that Henry Higgins had in My Fair Lady (the movie), the one that lined the walls for two stories with mahogany shelves, the kind that have that tracking ladder to reach the upper shelves of dusty, leather bound volumes that you take to a comfy leather chair for an evening of sherry sipping and reading. I could have a library like that if I bought the condo upstairs and took out my ceiling. I’ve got the books to stock it, how many volumes I have never counted, and very few bound in leather (many were bought for a buck apiece at public library sales).
In fact my “library” doubles as a guest bedroom and triples as a gymnasium (where my exercise bike sits alongside my shelves on the books on Greece, Italy and the Middle East and a huge box of Chinese character flashcards that I try to cram into my hard drive while getting up to “cardio” (so much for mens sana in corpore sano ). But the books dominate, floor to ceiling, everywhere I could put shelves. (I bolted the sometimes double-booked shelves to the walls against any quake over 5.2 after I learned that a fellow San Diego hoarder even worse that me was nearly a victim of self-induced biblio-cide during such a quake.) I have a pretty good system of organization, but I tend to go ballistic when a book is not where I think it was supposed to be, thereby requiring a search of the whole “library.” That means the library annexes as well. Annex one is in the bedroom, where I one read one should not store books because they have molds and little critters that like to eat pages. But some fiction, serial volumes of history and newcomers reside there. All of reference is in annex two, my office, where reference should be.
I don’t like to give up my books, but I have to do a pruning once a year or buy that condo upstairs. What I am able to part with I take to the used books stored in my neighborhood
and trade for “store credit,” which is a little like an alcoholic storing a bottle at his local bar. I don’t get much for them because I like to write in my books, and make marginalia and references in the blank pages at the back. That makes them just the kind of used books I like to find from others who do the same thing. The older the copy or edition, the better; to find a remark by someone who read the book many years ago is one of the pleasures of reading used books.
Bibliophiles also have a variety of quirks. Mine is that, when I travel, it is very important for me to have just the right books along with me. So I spend a lot of time, more time than I do packing anything else, trying to get the selection just right, since space and weight are always a consideration in travel. Sometimes I really get in right.
Now what would really make my day is if anybody out there happens to have a copy of Smiling Jack Escapes from Devil’s Island. Please contact me before posting it in eBay. We’re talking “major bucks” here.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.16.2005)