Confession: I’m a bookaholic. And I’ve been one all my life. Once, as a toddler, I was taken to visit my parents’ friends Martha and Eugenio, and the only thing I remember is being fascinated by the huge encyclopedia that lay open on a big wooden bookstand. (I’d never seen a bookstand before.) During childhood summers at my grandmother’s house in South Carolina, my favorite room — which nobody else ever entered — was my late grandfather’s den, its shelves packed with ancient-looking volumes, every one of which I eventually perused, by authors with exotic names like Wendell Willkie and Reinhold Niebuhr. These days, whenever somebody is interviewed remotely on a podcast, I busy myself scanning the spines on the books in the background.
Books can contain worlds. I have a favorite novel that I used to read annually, always worrying that it wouldn’t get to me the way it had before. But it always did. And every time that I turned the last page, inevitably weeping, I looked in wonder at the object in my hand, awed that this unprepossessing paper product held within it the lives of people who had become realer to me than some people I knew in real life, and whom I cared about deeply enough to be moved to tears by their fate. (READ MORE: There is Nothing So Magical as a Book)
We’re all familiar with this phenomenon. But we rarely reflect on it. Umberto Eco did. In a new documentary, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, Eco (1932-2016), who wrote the bestselling 1990 novel The Name of the Rose, mentions a former island prison off the southern coast of France that goes by the fanciful name of the Chateau d’If. The French statesman Mirabeau, notes Eco, was a real-life inmate there, but the reason why tourists flock to the place is that it’s where the Count of Monte Cristo — who was gestated, of course, in the mind of Alexandre Dumas père — did time.
If a real book, albeit one containing imaginary characters, can have such power, what to say about a fake book that contains, well, nothing? On April 28, the New York Times ran an article in which Anna Kodé, a writer for its Real Estate section, reported that fake books are now all the rage. They include “once-real books that are hollowed out, fabric backdrops with images of books printed onto them, empty boxlike objects with faux titles and authors or sometimes just a façade of spines along a bookshelf.” Long used on film sets, they’re also becoming “popular fixtures in homes.”
They took off, apparently, during the lockdown, when corporate types wanted them as backgrounds for Zoom meetings. Jeanie Engelbach, an interior designer, told Kodé she never uses fake books because it “registers as pretentious.” Ya think? Tina Ramchandani, another interior designer, admitted to using them in a number of residences as well as in a club in New Jersey, “where nobody was really going to read the books, but where there were bookshelves.” Well, New Jersey.
Eco, who in addition to being a novelist was also a medievalist, philosopher, and semiotician (that is, a student of signs and meaning), would’ve had plenty of interesting things to say about fake books. I know this because he was obsessed both with books — the new documentary, directed by Davide Ferrario and currently screening at the Film Forum in New York, is largely about Eco’s famously gigantic personal library in Milan — and with the subject of reality and unreality.
Now divided among two different locations — the bulk of the collection is at the University of Bologna — Eco’s library contained at its height about 50,000 volumes. Ferrario, with the assistance of Eco’s widow, son, daughter, and grandson (all of whom are charming, by the way, and made me thoroughly Eco-friendly), gives us generous glimpses of it before it was cleft in twain. We’re also admitted into the special room that — apropos of the matter of reality vs. falsity — housed an additional thousand or so rare old titles about various kinds of ersatz knowledge, from alchemy to witchcraft to the occult, all of which were of particular interest to Eco. (These volumes are now at the National Library in Milan.)
Much as I love my books, I’ve always had to deal with the fact of their sheer physical heft.
As Eco’s daughter explained his idiosyncratic cataloging system — in one part of the library, French and Italian literature are on the lower shelves, with popular fiction higher up and comic books higher still — I thought of the principle by which my own father organized his library of a thousand or so volumes. I’d never thought of it this way before, but the books on the ground floor of our house — modern popular fiction in the living room, old morocco-bound volumes (or sets) of Wordsworth, Byron, Scott, and other classics in the dining room — were, as Eco might put it, portals into worlds that existed only in the mind; in the basement were my dad’s medical texts, books solidly grounded in the reality of the body.
Of course, all books, whether they contain hard facts or products of the imagination, are physical objects — and heavy ones. Among the things we learn from Ferrario’s film is that Eco was evicted from his previous residence because municipal engineers feared the floor would collapse. Much as I love my books, I’ve always had to deal with the fact of their sheer physical heft. Years ago, when I lived in Manhattan, I moved frequently (to avoid rent hikes), and transporting my library — which, thanks to my job as a book reviewer, grew to massive proportions — took on D-Day-like magnitude. When I moved to Europe, I left the books behind — whereupon I began, inevitably, to accumulate what ended up being a whole new massive library. Over the ensuing decades, whenever I visited New York, I dropped in on my New York books, which filled a room of a relative’s cellar. I felt like one of those slippery characters who have two families that don’t know about each other. Not until a few years ago did my two libraries finally become one. The bookshelves in my little flat now crowd not only the living room and bedroom but also the bathroom and kitchen. So far, the floor has held.
Wisely, Eco was far less inclined to dwell on the sheer tonnage of his library than on the weightiness of its contents. “A library,” he pronounces in the documentary, “is both a symbol and an embodiment of collective memory…. Libraries are mankind’s common memory.” And what is memory? “Memory is soul” — nothing less. In the Paradiso, underscores Eco, Dante envisions God himself as “the library of all libraries.” Indeed, on the very last page of his masterwork, Dante, having risen by stages through the various levels of heaven, reaches the very top, where, beholding “the Eternal Light,” he sees
…that in its depths there are enclosed,
Bound up with love in one eternal book,
The scattered leaves of all the universe —
Later in Ferrario’s documentary, as Eco’s granddaughter rollerskates along the passages of his library, we hear Eco, in voice-over, quoting 1 Kings 19, about Elijah going to Horeb to meet the Lord and experiencing a great wind, then an earthquake, then a fire. But God, we read, was not in the wind or earthquake or fire. “You cannot find God where there is noise,” Eco comments.
God reveals himself only in silence. God is not to be found in mass media, nor on newspapers’ front pages; God is never on TV, God is where there is no commotion. And this is also true for those who do not believe in God but think that somewhere there’s a truth to unveil or a value to create. There’s no truth or creativity in an earthquake, only in a silent search.
For all his lofty talk, to be sure, Eco was no literary snob. In his childhood home, we learn, there were no books — but there was a grandmother with a library card, who introduced him to great literature as well as to trash, all of which he devoured indiscriminately. “Don’t let them blackmail you into reading only great books,” he instructs. “I have intense, fond memories of low-rated books that made boring afternoons so exciting.” So do I. And how can you appreciate the triumph of Proust or Flaubert if you haven’t grown up on the Hardy Boys, Doc Savage, and The Iron Duke by John R. Tunis?
Eco also addresses other questions with which I, as a bookaholic, have been confronted. What’s the point of owning so many of these things? If you’ve already read them, why keep them? If you haven’t read them yet, what’s the point of possessing them? Why, over the decades, have you spent so much of your modest income from writing about books shipping them from place to place? For heaven’s sake, why even bother with physical books in an era when you can store millions of words on an I-Pad and carry it in your pocket?
Eco has a ready answer to that last one. There are, he points out, 500-year-old books that look freshly printed and can still be consulted with ease. By contrast, today’s computers can’t even read the floppy disks on which we stored texts 20 years ago — permanently, we thought. To what extent, then, can we rely on this new technology to preserve texts that we consider precious?
Aside from which, adds Eco, there’s an ineffable appeal to words printed on paper that some of us, at least, can’t shake off. On an I-Pad, you can’t underline favorite passages, you can’t fold down the corners of important pages, and you can’t smudge those pages with your dirty fingers — all of which, Eco insisted (and I agree), are important elements of experiencing a book. “Sentimentally,” he sums up, “the book is irreplaceable.”
Well, it is for me, anyway. After all those years during which I was separated from most of my books by an ocean, their presence around me is a constant joy. To scan their titles is to be flung back to when I first read them. Some of them I just plain cherish. Many of them changed me. When people like Norm Macdonald, Christopher Hitchens, John Simon, and Barry Humphries have died — and especially when I’ve lost writer friends like James Lord, Terry Teachout, and Norah Vincent — it’s been a comfort to be able to take their books down and spend some time in their company.
Also, with remarkable frequency, my books actually come in handy for reference. One example: the other day, when I rewatched parts of Band of Brothers, I was glad to own Louis Simpson’s A Dream of Governors, which includes his poems about serving in the 101st Airborne, among them the haunting “Carentan O Carentan.” (Yes, it’s available online, but I preferred reading it in my scuffed-up old copy, which I’ve owned since I was Simpson’s student.)
Another example: just now, citing Eco on the Paradiso, I had an excuse to take down my beautiful copy of the Divine Comedy with the full-page Doré illustrations. (And, yes, that’s online, too, but reading Dante on a computer is like — what? — having carnal knowledge of a blow-up doll.)
Admittedly, the Internet has its own magic. For someone who used to deliver New Criterion articles by hand and submit pieces to The American Spectator by snail mail, it still feels like sheer wizardry to be able to send a new piece from my home in Norway to an editor in New York or Washington or Los Angeles or London and see it posted an hour later for all the world to read. I’m intensely aware, and grateful, that without this modern wonder, I wouldn’t be able to live where I live and do what I do.
But the Internet needs no defense from me. Books are another story. Get this. After my father died in the year 2000, a relative of ours stood beside me in our old living room, staring at my dad’s wall of books, and expressed the opinion that they were a ridiculous burden and should be gotten rid of pronto. Pointing to one worn old hardcover on the top shelf, she laughed at the title: Miss Susie Slagle’s. What on earth, she asked, could that be? I replied that it was a novel about a group of Johns Hopkins medical students living in a Baltimore boarding house, and that my father had read it, and loved it, when he himself was a medical student. She said nothing more that day about disposing of his books — several of his most cherished of which, I’m happy to say, now sit on my shelves in Norway, mixed in with mine.
