A Mind in the Hive: Luc Sante's Living Library
Is it just me, or has the microgenre of library profiles been burgeoning? Bookforum has made it a regular feature, and of course we're all over the bookshelf thing here. And I'm a little late to it (ok, by blog standards, a lot), but a little while ago the WSJ indulged in some book-dork porn with a piece on paring his vast collection by Luc Sante. Sante's one of my heroes, a true Omnivore's omnivore who writes brilliantly on whatever he turns to (vintage NYC street life, his Belgian parents, and endless freelance pieces). And after hearing him talk about his books, well, I like him even more: he's both sensible and obsessive, less interested in building a collection of fetish objects and showpieces than making a room where the sparks can fly. I'm tempted to quote the whole piece, but here are a few sections that get at my own sense of why I want to live surrounded by books better than I ever have myself: a good library is not a hermitage--it's a hive:
There's nothing inert about these shelves, no men's-club-library or college-chapel somnolence here -- it's a hive of activity, abuzz with rhythms and images and ideas. As for time: I shelve literature chronologically. It's the way I think, a landscape of hills and ridges and switchbacks marked off by dates, like a cartoon by Saul Steinberg, here rendered almost literal, so that I can see as well as feel the 19th century turning into the 20th, the prewar cascading into the postwar, the spines gradually becoming brighter as the present day approaches....
Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Seeing that the "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant" is fortuitously shelved directly above "The Ego and Its Own" by Max Stirner might get something going in my subconscious (or it might not). If while writing I try to form a picture of the shape of a decade or the spirit of a country, I can get its lineaments by glancing at my shelves. If I need to emerge from a particular mental rut I can just randomly reach out and pull something down and start reading. Within minutes the ensnaring spell has been snapped and I've entered some other mind....
I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can't remember the quote I'm searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too -- the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint. In the world of books, all is contingency and serendipity. Books are much more than container vessels for ideas. They are very nearly living things, or at least are more than the sum of their parts.
I plan to print out a copy and give to my dear wife as exhibit 421 in our ongoing and good-natured living space negotiations.... --Tom
P.S. And how cool is it to have your library photographed by Walter Iooss Jr? As someone whose library as a kid consisted almost entirely of Peanuts collections and file cabinets full of Sports Illustrateds, what would it be like to have the guy who shot this and this and, yes, this, come over to my house to shoot my books? My only regret is that the image is too small for me to make a giant link farm out of Sante's collection.
Karen at Readerville on June 19, 2008 at 10:11 AM
When Readerville was a print magazine ('02-'03), we had a regular feature called Ex Libris, photographing people's shelves and quizzing them about their habits. We've brought it back online but the challenges are different, so we haven't exactly worked it out yet and have only so far posted a few, but they can be found here — Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, Diane Middlebrook, a pair of poets. We've always liked to include a wide range of subjects, and it's always fun to see how different people handle their books. Watch for Felix Dennis, Jason Epstein, a collector of Pulitzer-winning 1st editions, and many more to come.
(In case that link gets stripped, it's http://journal.readerville.com/readerville/ex_libris/index.html)