December 22, 2017

The fate of books

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One of the secondary lessons of the Putin regime’s persecution of the head librarian at the Ukrainian library in Moscow, which began in 2015 and culminated in her conviction last June, is the continued importance of the printed book. This is also evident in the success of the Lviv Publishers’ Forum, held every September, which displays the extraordinary variety and quality of Ukrainian book publishing. And though we see the electronic “book” everywhere now, the printed book is likely to remain, just as the handwritten note has survived alongside the typewritten letter and the e-mail.

There is something comforting about a wall of books – all that information, knowledge and wisdom, all those thoughts and feelings, stories and histories, waiting to be explored. As an undergraduate, I would peer admiringly at the cramped book-lined professors’ offices in Berkeley’s Dwinelle Hall. Gradually, I filled two walls of shelves at my parents’ home, supplementing their books with my undergraduate texts. Not that I read them all. But the thought that at any moment I could take down a volume of Aeschylus or Sophocles, Horace or Vergil, Molière or Racine, Cervantes, Pascal or Balzac and plunge into another world, was deliciously exciting. Perhaps in old age, I would return to these books as to old friends waiting to renew our acquaintance.

This was not to be. When my parents downsized to a condominium, one of the movers, no doubt moved by the prospect of an elderly couple overwhelmed by the stress of packing up the accumulations of a lifetime, took pity and offered to relieve them of those cumbersome tomes. Thus disappeared close to half my books. (A few years later I met this individual. He cheerfully recounted how he regularly sold his booty to second-hand dealers on the East Coast.)

For the next 10 years or so, I thought about those books nearly every day, and not just collectively, but individually. Fortunately, nearly all my Ukrainian books were saved. But this was not my first loss. In Italy, a friend had offered to have my continental acquisitions shipped home from Naples. Those familiar with the ways of that great city will not be surprised to hear that I never saw them again. Then there were the books I lent to friends, which few ever returned. This may be creepy, but after more than 30 years I still remember which books I lent to whom. It is particularly distressing to see books separated from their sets, as if from siblings: somehow, I am left with only two of the four volumes of Theophil Hornykiewicz’s “Events in Ukraine, 1914-1922.” Worse yet, I had the bright idea of preserving a 1919 photo of my grandfather by inserting it into one of the volumes now lost.

If, dear reader, you should find any of these in a used bookstore – for they are inscribed with my name – do let me know. No questions asked. For owning a book is a sentimental matter, from the moment you write your name on the fly-leaf, noting where and when you purchased it. It becomes a memento of what you were reading, thinking, feeling and doing at a certain time and place. On the hot June day on which I graduated from high school, I dared to spend $5 at a Berkeley bookstore on a thick Argentine edition of Federico García Lorca, with reproductions of the poet’s own illustrations. It was my companion throughout a lonely, lovelorn summer. In the depths of existential anguish a few days before I was to board a train for the East Coast and college, I bought a volume of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” Nearly half a century later it sits, as I write, on a shelf just a few steps away.

As every philologist knows, marginalia can tell you a great deal about a reader’s thinking. The tome you pick up in a second-hand shop in a university town may bear the signature of a famous scholar, or perhaps a fancy ex libris, along with revealing notations throughout the text. Used books have their histories too: I once owned an exquisite 1883 English manual of homeopathy that someone had bought in Leipzig, which somehow made its way to San Francisco.

A book can be a precious work of art. Among my lost volumes was an enormous facsimile, given to me by a generous uncle, of William Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer. It was not something you’d actually read from cover to cover. True bibliophiles, I once heard, do not read the books they collect.

But isn’t this wasteful? Was it not by some cosmic justice that I lost the books I hadn’t read? No doubt they have found more deserving owners. Besides, what I retain is more than enough for the paltry remainder of a lifetime. No individual, after all, needs a library like that of the Benedictine Abbey of Melk in Austria, the contents of which, the tour guide claims, it would take several lifetimes to read.

But even if you read all your books, is it not vanity to hoard them? In a wistful reflection, theologian David Bentley Hart, who lost nearly all of his 20,000-volume library, thinks it is (“From A Vanished Library,” First Things, April 2017). If you want to dispose of your books, or are simply out of shelf space, you can send them to Ukraine (see Peter J. Piaseckyj, “Info about donating your books,” The Ukrainian Weekly, May 19, 2017).

Not everyone understands the bibliophile. The wife of the Russian theologian Georges Florovsky reportedly said her husband had two vices – tobacco and books – and both were filth. Once in a fit of pique, I am told, the spouse of a well-known Ukrainian professor simply tossed his books out the window.

But if the Argentine writer – and blind librarian – Jorge Luis Borges is right, the true bibliophile need not despair. He imagined Paradise as – a library.

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