Literary Hub: Ed Simon Considers the Many Different Ways an Obsession Can Manifest. “Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven.
For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books. Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus.
From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.
As with the metempsychosis of souls from body to body, this copy made its way across libraries and collections until it was purchased for the equivalent of seventy cents in 1970 by a 22-year-old Umberto Eco, this copy of Aristotle joining some 50,000 others as the philosopher built one of the largest personal libraries on the continent.
“We live for books,” says a character in Eco’s 1980 philosophical Medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, that novel directly inspired by his Aristotle discovery. If you’re reading a site named Literary Hub, I’m going to assume that you understand that sentiment well. Plenty of vociferous readers can sustain themselves by library card alone, but the coveting of the physical object of the codex is its own thing.
Another credo that probably makes sense to you—“When I have a little money, I buy books,” wrote Erasmus in a letter, “and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” Those are priorities that Eco internalized, comprehending the paradox of owning more books than you could ever read, of existing in a slipstream between possession and loss.
This portly, bearded semiotician referred to his “anti-library,” that is the mass of books that Eco would never read but which he owned, their mere presence a humbling reminder of all of that which we’ll never know. “Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then can get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books,” writes Eco in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, but those “who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”
Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior.” The sort of figure mocked in the engraving “The Bibliomaniac” from Sebastian Brandt’s 1497 satirical allegory The Ship of Fools, a work that Erasmus knew well, where he may have recognized himself in the woodcut. I certainly do, seeing a reflection of my own bookish pursuits from half-a-millennia ago in Brandt’s ridiculous figure in monastic robes and scholarly cap and eyeglasses, sitting behind a desk and shelf piled with books, the figure fanning them as if he’s their servant rather than they his possessions. There was a period when first building my collection from used-book stores and yard-sales, Half Priced Books and Barnes & Noble, where (like the bibliomaniac with his fan) I’d take a ruler and carefully inspect that as my treasures sat on the shelf the back edges of each volume were perfectly lined up so that the pages of the paperbacks wouldn’t curl outward around each other. Today I’m less anal retentive—mostly—but I still dedicate time to continually reorganizing my books, which are stored on nightstand and dresser, in my closets and on tabletops, and in a grand wooden shelf that spans the entirety of our living room. Books crammed in every room, in my campus office, and yes, in my trunk. Frayed paperbacks with mid-century modernist covers purchased from used bookstores and advance reader copies from publishers, massive reference works and beloved hardbacks bought at (that ever increasing) full price…”
