Ivebeenreadinglately

{Bibliochaise, from nobody&co..}

From "Prologues to a Personal Library," by Jorge Luis Borges:

A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe.

Anyone with an interest in the various schema by which books may be organized is liable at some point to find himself thinking about the furniture that carries out those organizational plans. Bookshelves are a remarkably simple, effective design for most of our storage and retrieval purposes. Yet they're not very good at handling one of the most basic problems that has faced scholars and dilettantes alike since the first bound volumes: how to deal with the fact that one is often reading half a dozen or more books more or less simultaneously? How is one to keep all those books in easy reach and usefully organized--especially when so many readers, like me, have already given over control of the most natural resting place for extra volumes--the lap--to a cat or two?

Via the Athanasius Kircher Society, I've learned about an admirable solution from sixteenth-century Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli: the Book Wheel.



Here's how Ramelli described it in 1588:

A beautiful and ingenious machine, which is very useful and convenient to every person who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are suffering from indisposition or are subject to gout: for with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying a little space in the place where it is set, as any person of understanding can appreciate from the drawing.

Meanwhile, in this week's New Yorker Anthony Grafton highlights more inventions designed to help sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars deal with the unprecedented flood of books:

Jacques Cujas, a sixteenth-century legal scholar, astonished visitors to his study when he showed them the rotating barber's chair and movable bookstand that enabled him to keep many open books in view at the same time. Thomas Harrison, a seventeenth-century English inventor, devised a cabinet that he called the Ark of Studies: readers could synopsize and excerpt books and then arrange their notes by subject on a series of labeled metal hooks, somewhat in the manner of a card index. The German philosopher Leibniz obtained one of Harrison's cabinets and used it in his research.

The Ark of Studies reminds me of Dr. Johnson's relatively simple system for organizing the source materials for his Dictionary. Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's method in Definining the World (2005):

When he identified a passage suitable for quotation, he underlined with a black pencil the word he meant it to illustrate, marked the beginning and end of the passage with vertical strokes, and wrote the initial letter of the chosen word in the margin. Working in pairs, the amanuenses would then go over the books Johnson had marked. Each time one of them came to a marked passage, he would transcribe it on to a quarto sheet and strike out the marginal letter. . . . The quotations were set out in columns, and, once full, the quarto sheets were cut up into slips, each bearing a single quotation. These copy slips were kept in bins, and arranged in alphabetical order by the amaneuenses. As work proceeded, the juggling of copy slips unfortunately allowed some of the illustrations to be lost. We can see evidence of this occasionally in the finished Dictionary. Explaining one sense of the verb "to cream," Johnson says is "used somewhere by Swift," while another word, "dripple," is "used somewhere by Fairfax."

Of course, even the best scheme and the most ingenious book furniture won’t avail in those situations where the information one desires is simply not there, as Guy Davenport laments in "Dictionary":

Some years ago, on a particularly distraught evening, the drift of things into chaos was precipitated by my consulting Webster's Third International for the word Mauser. All I wanted to know was whether it sported an umlaut or not. It wasn't there. I paid $47.50 for my Webster's; it weighs as much as a six-year-old girl; and I had to build a table for it, as it is too bulky to go into a bookshelf, and will anyway come all to pieces unless it sits open day and night.

Perhaps we should just give up and move into Borges's Library of Babel, where we accept a life of isolation for the certainty that the knowledge we seek is in there, somewhere:

There is no combination of characters one can make--dhcmrlchtdj, for example--that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies. This pointless, verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five bookshelves in one of the countless hexagons--as does its refutation.

To be honest, that probably is where we belong, immured in the endless library. Even the fact that we're worrying about these organizational problems at all suggests that we fit the pejorative connotation that Dr. Johnson ascribes to the term "booklearned":

Versed in books, or literature: a term implying some slight contempt.

To back up his assertion, Johnson turns--this time with attribution in hand--to a sharp little line from Jonathan Swift:

He will quote passages out of Plato and Pindar, at his own table, to some booklearned companion, without blushing.

We book people can tell ourselves that an ingenious piece of furniture may be all we need to establish order, but we know better. Entropy and its constant companion infinitude will never leave off plaguing us.

From Certain of the Chronicles, by Levi Stahl:

After a long night, I have at times slipped into dreams wherein I wander a vast ship full of books, shelves as numerous as the waves of the ocean, floors as many as the footsteps on a mountain, all unread, pages uncut, unknown. I know in my heart that I can find my way out, but I fear in my soul that I cannot find my way in.

{Henri Rousseau, Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!), 1891}

On a night in the mid-1960s, as a young Alberto Manguel read aloud to Jorge Luis Borges from Kipling's stories, Borges lamented,

What a pity not to have been born a tiger.

I think we can be pardoned for being glad that he didn't get his wish.


{Borges in the Hotel Beaux, Paris, 1969}

As a sixteen-year-old in 1964, Manguel became another in a long line of readers who supplied Borges with his necessary daily allowance of those words he could no longer see, and he's gathered his memories of those evenings into a slim book, With Borges (2006). Simultaneously a book of anecdotes and a meditation on Borges and his work, it's a charming, pleasant little book--the sort of book I wish were available for every writer I love. (Just how unobtrusive was Anthony Powell as he watched his contemporaries at parties? What did Haruki Murakami talk about with his patrons and his fellow clerks when he worked in a record store? How irritating--or frustrating--was Casanova for his male friends?)

The Borges that Manguel presents is not unfamiliar or surprising. We encounter yet again his odd reading tastes--in some sense arrested in a precocious adolescence--the Kipling, Chesterton, Homer, Dante, Stevenson, Cervantes that he read over and over again. We are reminded of his unusual reading prejudices:

One could construct a perfectly acceptable history of literature consisting only of the authors Borges rejected: Goethe, Rabelais, Flaubert (except the first chapter of Bouvard et Pechuchet), Calderon, Stendhal, Zweig, Maupassant, Boccaccio, Proust, Zola, Balzac, Galdos, Lovecraft, Edith Wharton, Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Thomas Mann, Garcia Marquez, Amado, Tolstoi, Lope de Vega, Lorca, Pirandello.

Even after Tolstoy, there are half a dozen or so of my favorites there (and then there's the one that's most surprising to me, Maupassant, whose style and subjects I would have expected to resonate with Borges). But it was a matter, he explained in an interview, of simply reading what he liked:

I am a pleasure-seeking reader: I've never allowed my sense of duty to have a hand in such a personal matter as that of buying books.

I think Borges is being somewhat disingenuous there: his reading carried with it a whiff of the obsessional as well, and obsessions, though they may begin in pleasure, rarely end there. Yet it's hard to criticize Borges's choices: as readers we are all riddled with holes, gaps intentional or unintentional, and almost no one has drawn on his reading as fruitfully as Borges, reading and rereading and interpreting and distilling books until they became something totally new.

What Manguel gives us instead of a new view of Borges is a more intimate view--still focused on books, because books were Borges, it seems--a fascinating glimpse of his conversation and passing comments. We learn that he was never satisfied with his story "Shakespeare's Memory," one of my favorites, and that he felt he had never quite honored its inspiration, which was an overheard line in a dream: "I will sell you the memory of Shakespeare." After revealing that Borges asserted the questionable proposition that a writer should not be so impolite as to surprise the reader, Manguel points out, rightly, that Borges, instead, sought conclusions

that were astonishing but obvious. Recalling that Ulysses, tired of prodigies, wept for love at the sight of his green Ithaca, he concluded: "Art should be like that Ithaca--of green eternity, not of prodigies."

Following a discussion of the lost Library of Alexandria--a loss which one would expect a librarian and bibliophile to include among eternity's great laments--Borges explained that

The number of themes, of words, of texts, is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone.

Presumably the Library at Alexandria didn't serve double duty the way that we learn Borges's personal library did: when he found himself with currency, he would tuck it into various books; when he needed money, he would pluck books from the shelves until he found some. {Side note: the book collection as bank, an organizational schema I failed to consider.} Perhaps that was simply another aspect of the playful side of Borges, which appears again and again, as when Manguel reports that Borges

once recited the "Our Father" in Old English, in a crumbling Saxon chapel near Dr. Johnson's Lichfield, "to give God a little surprise."

I suppose it's okay to surprise God--after all, such opportunities are surely rare, and thus such a surprise wouldn't be the cheap shot that surprising one's readers would be.

But the best of playful Borges, and probably my favorite moment in the book, the one I'll recall the other anecdotes and opinions have been forgotten, is an admonition by Borges to his five- or six-year-old nephew:

If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear.

It's Borges at his cleverest and lightest--and yet that line also hints at the essence of his art. Thought is all, subjectivity is can nearly create its own realities--and even the simplest statement can be momentarily dislocating. It reminds me of his "Argumentum Ornithologicaum," collected in Dreamtigers (1964):

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don't know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let's say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.

{Photo by rocketlass}

Sometimes, just as an elephant cannot not be thought of, one may actually need permission to think of a bear.

I'll close with Manguel's account of what could be taken as Borges's ethos:

He believed, against all odds, that our moral duty was to be happy, and he believed that happiness could be found in books, even though he was unable to explain why this was so. "I don't know exactly why I believe that a book brings us the possibility of happiness," he said, "but I am truly grateful for that modest miracle."

Its intentionally limited compass could certainly be argued with--in my morally healthiest moments, I'd replace happiness there with justice--but at the end of a night of passing happily from one book to another book to another book as thunderstorms rumble in the background, I'll gladly adopt it, however temporarily, as my own.

1 Soon after my post last week on the fight against entropy, Ed at the Dizzies, inspired by Jenny at bookshelves of doom, threw down a challenge: tell a coherent story through the titles on a stack of books. The best entry I've seen remains this one from artist Nina Katchadourian, who originated the whole concept, which she calls the Sorted Book Project:

You can see more of Katchadourian's Sorted Books, as well as other works, at her site. Ed has collected a half dozen or so entries for his contest this week, which you can see at the Dizzies.

And here's mine:

In case you can't see the books, they are:

Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas; The Good Son, by Craig Nova; The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, by Iris Murdoch; The Pledge, by Friedrich Durrenmatt; The Chill, by Ross Macdonald; Boredom and Contempt by Alberto Moravia; The Thirty Years War, by C. V. Wedgwood; The Pistol, by James Jones; The Murder Room, by P. D. James; The Confession, by Domenic Stansberry; Can You Forgive Her?, by Anthony Trollope; The Trial, by Franz Kafka; Kiss Her Goodbye, by Allan Guthrie; The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer; and The Afterlife, by Penelope Fitzgerald

2 I thought of another possible organizational system that I didn't touch on the other day: books could be arranged by country. I fear, however, that my collection would replicate nearly all the inaccuracies of the Mercator Projection--though in at least one area I'd do better than Mercator: my utter lack of books by Greenlanders would mean that it would finally appear smaller than Africa. Iceland, on the other hand . . .

3 Speaking of photos of books, Stacey's photo of our Wodehouse books got picked up by The Winged Elephant, the Overlook Pres blog. Because I'm a fan of a couple of Overlook authors, I keep their blog in my reader, and when I opened that post I thought, "Weird. That looks like Stacey's photo." Their headline?

Look How Nice Our Books Look on Your Bookshelves?

Overlook's Wodehouse hardcovers are beautifully designed and produced, so I'm glad we got to help out their marketing staff by providing an example. There are few better gifts than the gift of Wodehouse, and there's no better Wodehouse than the Overlook editions.

{Photos by rocketlass}

Alpha by author.
Library of Congress.
Dewey, the mostly discarded and disused.
Alpha by title.
By subject, as defined by your whims.

Short to tall.
Short to long.
Cheap to expensive.



Certain time-based schema

As my friend Marc files his books, by date of acquisition. In other words, rather than always working to squeeze newly acquired books into the space one has previously allotted--a perpetually failing attempt, however innocent, to pretend that one has not fallen all that much farther behind--one simply accepts that the road laid out by books is neverending, and one's progress on it will always be, at best, relative. Therefore: now; then.

Numerically, based on the first number mentioned in the text. The second number, and so forth, to break ties.
Biblically, based on the first biblical name mentioned and its position in the canonical Bible. As usual, the Apocrypha to break ties.



By spine color, in rainbow order.
By spine color, in reverse rainbow order.

Read; unread.
Read; unread; never to be read.
Given; purchased; borrowed; stolen.
Written by friends; written by enemies; written by those to whom one is indifferent.



Certain time-based schema

On every birthday, you pare your library to one book for every year you've lived. The remainder you give to the library. The list of books that seem worth retaining will, of course, change dramatically over the years; certain books will demand recall. It's not, however, a sin for the person who donated a book to steal it back, so long as another book will soon be donated to take its place. Thus: books kept; books donated. Repeat.

The scholar divides his books into known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The scholar is Donald Rumsfeld, and his library is a prison cell in which he is awaiting sentencing for war crimes. He has not seen another human for days.

Satisfying; disappointing.
Repudiated first novels; unfinished works posthumously published; all the rest of a life's work.
Wodehouse; not Wodehouse.



Certain time-based schema

Decades ago, a lover gave you a topless photo of herself, taken by a kind, though surely titillated, stranger as she sunned herself on a beach in southern France. She gave it to you when she left the country, to which she's never returned. One hazy night, you tucked it into a book; in the morning, you knew not which book. Therefore: books you owned as of that night; those you acquired later. The former are never lent without a surreptitious flip through the pages, which quickens the pulse.

Well books; unhealthy books.
By mood, and therefore by color.
Proust; books about Proust; not Proust.



Certain time-based schema

Your home burned, a spectacular conflagration that you were lucky to escape. The only book to survive, which a weary fireman handed to you, still sooty and warm to the touch, was an old edition, inherited from your grandfather, of J. M. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta. You hire an old booksmith to hollow the book, and into it you pour the ashes of your library. Therefore: before the fire; after the fire.

Histories, in order from Herodotus; lies.
Ends; means.
Borges; not Borges. As all books are in some sense Borges, this schema is ultimately alpha by title.

Certain time-based schema

Decades ago, a lover gave you a smudged charcoal drawing of herself, nude, reclining on a divan. It had been drawn by her previous paramour at a time of panting happiness; her giving it to you was a brazen act of betrayal. Though you had no way to know at the time, that betrayal was the first of many, until finally it was unclear who was betraying whom, or for whom. One hazy night, you tucked it into a book; in the morning, you knew not which book. Therefore: books you owned as of that night; those you acquired later. The former are placed in a wooden frame, then encased in concrete. They will not be read.

Numerically, by number of pages.
Numerically, by number of words.
Numerically, by the numbers painted on the books' spines by your blind niece.
A Dance to the Music of Time; the less-coordinated.

Certain time-based schema

Your home burned, a spectacular conflagration that you were lucky to escape. No books survived. The ashes of your library you scatter on your lawn on a spring morning, where they fertilize a profusion of wildflowers. All books you acquire after the fire you immediately place in a hermetically sealed container that you sink to the bottom your moat--water being the only proof, in our chaotic world, against the return of fire. Therefore: before the fire; after the fire.

By last word, arranged so as to tell a coherent--and unexpectedly troubling--story.

The first book you read as a child; the last book you'll read as an old man; the multitude you've forgotten jumbled between; the countless books you'll never have time for strewn at your feet.

Soon after I finished yesterday's post about libraries, I by chance came across two pieces of writing that seemed, together, to demand that I write a brief postscript. First, moments after I finished yesterday's post, I read the following in John Crowley's Aegypt:

Like many monkish libraries, San Domenico's was a midden of a thousand years' writing; no one knew all that the monastery contained, or what had become of all that the monks had copied, bought, written, commented on, given away, and collected over the centuries. The old librarian, Fra' Benedetto, had a long catalogue in his head, which he could remember because he had composed it in rhyme, but there were books that weren't in this catalogue because they didn't rhyme. There was a Memory Palace in which all the categories of books and all the subdivisions of those categories had places, but it had long ago filled up and been shuttered and abandoned. There was a written catalogue too, into which every book was entered as it was acquired, and if you happened to know when a book was acquired, you might find it there. Unless, that is, it had been bound with another, or several others; for usually only the incipit of the first would be put into the catalogue. The others were lost.

So within the library which Fra' Benedetto and the prior and the abbot knew about there had grown up another library, a library which those who read in it did not catalogue, and did not want catalogued.

The idea of a secret library within a library returned later in the evening when I showed some friends the following handwritten note that I had found in a copy of Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1984) that I had checked out from the Chicago Public Library's Bezazian Branch:

Lew Welch

Step out onto the Planet
Draw a circle 100 ft round

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands,
and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find?

The Internet quickly revealed that Lew Welch was a beat and this one of his poems. But my initial search led me into some confusion, landing me on a site that, had, it seemed, the poem I was looking for. According to this site, it was called "Stepping Out," and it was ever-so-slightly different from the one in the book:

Step out onto the planet.

Draw a circle as big as you can throw a stone.

Inside that circle are
300 things that nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find?

Pick one,
and protect it.

How, I thought, could someone who had taken the trouble to write this poem down and leave it in a book have left off the closing injunction, which the whole poem builds towards? And had they gone out and heaved a stone, discovering that they could throw it a hundred feet? Stacey quickly added the last two lines to the handwritten poem, her purple ink and distinct handwriting making them stand out even more than the poet intended.

But this morning as I was harvesting links for this post, I discovered that I had made a mistake: the longer poem is not a Lew Welch poem but a very close reworking by someone identified as tamo and noted as "After Lew Welch's 'Inside the Circle.'" The library's anonymous note-writer was correct in his transcription, and now, by combining Lew Welch's original and tamo's adaptation, we've created an ever-so-slightly different third poem.

I think this writing and rewriting, this doubling and mistaken identity, this anonymous communication would entertain John Crowley, would resonate with his fascination with the transmission of knowledge--passed through unknown hands and from mind to mind, altered by that sharing--down through the centuries. So I'll fold this note, tuck it in the pages of Aegypt, and return it to the library, helping the poem along in its travels and sowing further confusion for the next unsuspecting reader.

From Jorge Luis Borges's "The Library of Babel" (1941)

The Universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below--one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first--identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer form this mirror that the library is not infinite--if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication. I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. . . . Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compasionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Library is endless.

Busy today, so all I've got for you is a couple of bits I've come across lately about libraries. Borges's infinite library that is the universe seems a good lead into a bit from John Crowley's Aegypt (1987), on the role of distant libraries in forging in the main character, Pierce, a lifelong obsession with mythical, mystical, shadowy pasts:

Such was the family Pierce was to make his way in; in their isolation they were like some antique family of gentry, in the specialness of their circumstances like foreigners living within a pale. It was only the Oliphant children who were taught by the priest's sister; only the Oliphants (as far as Pierce knew) who every month received from the state library in far-off, blue grass-green Lexington, a box of books. . . . Every month the read books were packed up and shipped back, and on receipt another box would be sent, more or less filling the vague requests on the Oliphants' list (Mother West-wind, more horse stories, "something about masonry," anything of Trollope's) and picked up at the post office, and opened in excitement and disappointment mixed, Christmas every month. Pierce remembering his confusion and contempt before this bizarre system--bizarre to a child who had had the vast, the virtually illimitable reaches of the Brooklyn Public to wander in, his father went every two weeks and Pierce had always gone with him and could have any book he pointed at--Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no, not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but Aegypt.

The small town I grew up in had an old Carnegie library, but its offerings were necessarily limited, and we, too, relied on similarly vague requests sent off to larger libraries in other towns and cities. Now I'm spoiled, living half a block from a branch of the Chicago Public Library and also having access to a major research library. Almost anything I want is available--though sometimes just barely. When I decided earlier this week that I couldn't really approach Endless Things (2007), the final volume of John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, without revisiting the first three, which are out of print, I was surprised to find that the Chicago Public Library system only has three copies of each--and one was checked out, presumably in the hands of a Crowley fan who, having the same idea I had, was quicker on the draw. Maybe the uniform paperback editions that Overlook is bringing out in the autumn will inspire the library to increase its holdings.

As regular readers know, I'm at heart more of a book buyer than book borrower, but I still make fairly regular use of the local library. It's particularly good for a summer Saturday afternoon when nothing on my shelves seems right; I can head out to the library confident that within ten minutes I can be back in my chair with a good mystery novel or two. People have of course been using libraries in that way--to pick up a quick bit of pleasurable reading--since they were invented. John Brewer describes a couple of early libraries in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997):

The largest circulating libraries were more than adjuncts to a bookselling business. In the capitals of the three kingdoms, in the large provincial towns and in resorts such as Bath and Margate, circulating libraries offered comfortable, spacious surroundings in which customers could gossip, flirt, browse, examine newspapers and reviews, and choose from a selection of every kind of book. The late eighteenth-century engraving of the library at Margate, sold jointly by its proprietor and engraver, conveys the ambience library proprietors wanted: one of leisure and display as well as learning.



The biggest libraries published catalogues: John Bell's famous London Library contained more than 8,000 volumes; Sibbald's in Edinburgh offered its patrons a choice of 6,000 titles in 1786; and Ann Ireland's Leicester Library, though not as large a Barber's in Newcastle, nevertheless housed 2,500 books. These libraries were not only repositories of fiction. The number of novels and romances was never as great as those of history, travel, and geography; indeed for every "frivolous" volume there were two of more serious reading matter. But these figures refer to books on the shelf: no records survive to reveal the pattern of borrowing in a major circulating library. It may well have been that the sober histories and detailed travellers' tales never received a second glance as readers hurried to the shelves of multi-volumed novels and well-thumbed romances. Isaac Cruikshank's The Circulating Library certainly takes this view.



The shelves for novels, tales and romances are empty--all the books are out--but the sections for history, sermons, voyages and travels are full, attesting to their unpopularity.

That was before libraries had learned to stock multiple copies of the most popular trashy books: the Chicago Public Library has, according to their online catalog, 26 copies of The Da Vinci Code (2004), about half of which are available right now for checkout.

It seems unlikely that any trashy books marred the shelves of the library John Stow describes here in his A Survey of London (1598):

Joceline of Furness writeth, that Thean, the first Archbishop of London, in the reign of Lucius, built the said church by the aid of Ciran, chief butler to King Lucius; and also that Eluanus, the second archbishop, built a library to the same adjoining, and converted many of the Druids, learned men in the pagan law.

Just think of the splendid confusion a time traveler could create by stealing on of Chicago Public's extra copies of The Da Vinci Code and slipping it into the stacks of Eluanus's library. By the time the historical ripples reached the present, Dan Brown's faux-scholarly mishmash might actually have created the sort of secret societies it purports to uncover--though I suppose even Druids might find his characters and sentences a bit wooden.

But people do enjoy fluff and trash, and I'm not one to deny anyone pleasure from books, of whatever kind. I think D. J. Enright, in Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1987), gets at least part of it right:

A love of literature, Virginia Woolf wrote, is often roused and initially nourished, not by good books but by bad ones. "It will be an ill day when all the reading is done in libraries and none of it in tubes." And vice versa, too.

Interplay, too, is out of print, and obscure enough as to be missing from most library collections. But a commonplace book, being a bedside and armchair companion, is best owned rather than borrowed anyway--and there an Enright fan is in luck: searchable used bookstore inventories have made it readily available to anyone anywhere.

And, as John Crowley clearly understands, there are few things more inherently exciting to a reader than getting a box of books in the mail.