will read for food

How is it that I never knew one of the greatest libraries amassed in Europe during the Renaissance–second only to the collection of the Medicis and the Pope,  belonged to an all but forgotten Hungarian king, Matthais Hunyadi, also known as Matthias Corvinus, the Raven King? The man whom Italy looked to keep the Ottoman Turks at bay, whose capital could only be reached from Italy by three months of hard traveling over a bandit-infested mountain wilderness, and who yet drew Italian scholars, poets and intellectuals to his court, (along with certain political prisoners and royalty in exile, such as Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, and sometimes as Dracula). A man who was universally regarded as the ideal philosopher-king.

The King’s Trophy and Sanctuary

Then there was the library, the King’s trophy and sanctuary. Here, Naldo  Naldi wrote, sunbeams poured through high, stained glass windows, casting curious patterns on the vaulted ceilings. Beneath tall lancet windows, light fell on to the King’s couch, a ‘bed with golden coverings on which the royal hero is often wont to snatch some peaceful rest for his limbs.’ Here the King reclined, scrutinising a recently purchased illuminated manuscript, or chairing a debate between rival clerics or philosophers… (p.2)

In reverence of the Goddess of Wisdom

In the library, light also fell on to jewel-encrusted veils, set in place to shield the most expensive and cherished items of the collection from the bleaching sunlight. These books did not lie stacked upon one another in heavy chests like the majority of volumes. They stood upright on snakeskin tripods, waiting for the hand of the King, Queen, or the librarians, to part the curtain and reveal the liquid colors beneath.

According to Naldi, the curious bookrests attracted particular interest ‘because the spotted skin of a snake covered those tripods and a shining gold-colored cloth covered them, adorned with so many heavy gems and sparkling precious stones that you would think Matthias had accumulated whatever the kings of Persia are thought to have possessed.’ The Florentine likened the care lavished on these exotic tripods to Matthias’s reverence for the goddess of wisdom, for it was the tripods that ‘receive the greatest authors’ and wisdom itself that ‘opens the books that ought to be read, which the ancient ones composed, and which taught what wisdom was.’ (p.2)

The literary tastes of an alpha-male

The surviving 216 volumes, containing more than 600 works, show that Matthias had the literary tastes of a classic ‘alpha male’.  It has often been noted that he had a marked preference for secular as opposed to religious works. Indeed, once one subtracts liturgical aids such as bibles, gospels, psalters, missals and brevaries, which in any case belonged in the separate palace chapel library, there are not many books like Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, now kept in Melk Abbey, Austria, which can be categorised as devotional works. Even within the broad category of secular works from the library it is easy to spot Mattias’s particular enthusiasms: war stories, lives of great rules, and books about inventions, geography, medicine, natural wonders and the stars. (p.7)

–From The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library, by Marcus Tanner (Yale University Press, 2008)

Library Tour from Nicki Leone on Vimeo.

This book was one long biblio-fantasy: great literature, re-bound with a writer’s love for the story within, an artist’s eye, an artisan’s care and feel for the beauty in the volume, seeded with secret messages, stories and codes, all written from one disappeared lover to the man she left behind. How can you resist? I couldn’t.

There are quite a few rooms full of books in this novel…nearly every scene is somehow described as a setting for one of Irma Arcuri’s beautiful books. But here are two of my favorites from the novel.

The arrival of Irma’s books:

The books arrived in one week, two refrigerator-sized boxes with protective packaging. They were packed alphabetically, impact-guarded, and marked fragile. He shelved them the way she shelved them–alphabetically, with no consideration of history, nationality, genre, or theme. They transcended these divisions, and Philip knew–somehow understood–that this was why she’d had them. They were splendorous together, in their cloth and leather bindings of jewel toned yellow, green, red or blue, or the more austere black and burgundy. No jackets, with titles embossed in gold, silver, brass, or iron. Most she had re-bound or restored herself, using period materials and tools. This was easy, she told him, because we use tools similar to those used since the fifteenth century. I could walk into an eighteenth century bookbinder’s shop, she explained, and have no trouble sewing up Defoe’s first volumes. Her shop and her mentor’s shop looked like museums, with their mallets and presses, awls and knives. Their work floors held the smells of old leathers, parchment, and linseed. Sometimes in their dark corners he would find a jar filled with a petrified volume soaking in amber linseed, the book’s fused pages beginning to separate like petals. If he lingered too long by one of these jars, she would crouch behind it and peer at him through the xanthic oil, her face magnified, tinted, and swirled around sharply focused eyes. Eyes aimed at him, not the sloughing book fossil. If we stir it softly with a wooden spoon, she taunted, it will all dissolve like a sugar cube in tea. (p.10)

The book collector and her husband:

Miriam Haupt loved Irma. She brokered antiquarian books, but in her retirement had become exclusively a collector. She and her husband owned a small apartment building, painted blue alongside the many other apartment buildings mortared together, all left to face to the colors of again paper along one continuous wall. Each flat in the Haupt building was filled with books. The Haupts themselves dwelled on the second floor, every room lined with bookshelves. The other floors were occupied exclusively by books and a wandering cat to fend off mice. Each decade of Miriam’s retirement seemed marked by the ousting of a tenant and the designation of another floor for books. Her husband Vlad Ballestreros, a professor of mycology at the university, often got himself lost in the stacks. He loved their smells, the breath of the molds and fungi he studied. Whenever Philip went with Irma to visit, Senor Ballestreros could be heard thumping around on one of the floors and he would eventually call down, or up, in his shaky Castilian croak and say he would be right there to join. He would only appear hours later, blinking and out of breath as though he had just surfaced from a dive or dream.

Okay, this doesn’t really qualify as a “room full of books.”  It’s more of a “what books are in the room?” post. But I just spent approximately 24 of the last 48 hours on airplanes and in airports (note to self, Vegas is too far away to be a “day trip”). Naturally, I found myself peering at all the books people were reading. With somewhat surprising results:

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen.   Really, since this was the very first book I noticed someone reading, I thought it was a good omen.

Killer Angels by Jeff Shaara

Santa Fe Rules by Stuart Woods

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.   I have a private theory that in any given group of people reading books, one of them will be reading this one.

Three Cups of Tea

Olive Kitteredge

Great Expectations (Penguin Classics edition) Which begs the question, why, o why would anyone want to read a Dickens novel sitting in a center seat near the engines on a four hour flight that was over-booked?

Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. That would be me. The guy two rows up may have been trying to escape the crowded conditions by reading Dickens. But I, on the other hand, was reading about Joseph Banks in Tahiti. He was having a really good time.

I didn’t see a single Kindle or other eReader, and I was looking. Even the folks with iPhones seemed to be mostly playing games and watching videos. I’m not sure what it means that the books I saw people reading on a plane trip to Vegas included Dickens and Tim O’Brien, but I found it oddly comforting.

I’ve been re-reading Gatsby. And oddly enough, although I am quite convinced that this is the perfect novel, and despite the fact that I’m on my third or fourth reading, and that I am usually inclined to remember when a book talks about rooms full of books, I remembered almost nothing about this odd little scene in Gatsby’s library.

I suppose everyone who prides themselves on their personal library has secretly imagined their books as a kind of ultra-flattering self-portrait. Who hasn’t gazed at their own bookshelves and imagined, smugly, what impressive conclusions a stranger doing the same might draw about their their owner?  Fitzgerald has a rather biting, unkind comment about this sort of self-conceit in this scene, which occurs before the narrator has ever spoken to Gatbsy. Up until this moment, he knows his neighbor only from a late evening sighting on the lawn, and a collection of wild rumors about his exploits during the Great War.

The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?”

He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact, you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real–have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our skepticism for granted he rushed to the bookcasses and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

A woman describes her father’s bookshop, which “In the opinion of our bank manager, it is an indulgence, one that my father’s successes entitles him to. Yet in reality–my father’s reality and mine; I don’t pretend reality is the same for everyone–the shop is the very heart of the affair.”

A is for Austen, B is for Bronte, C is for Charles and D is for Dickens. I learned my alphaget in this shop. My father walking along the shelves, me in his arms, explaining alphabetization at the same time as he taught me to spell. I learned to write there, too: copying out names and titles onto index cards that are still there in our filing box, thirty years later. The shop was both my home and my job. It was a better school for me than school ever was, and afterward it was my own private university. It was my life.”

–Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (Atria, 2006)

The great idea behind Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is that what happens in fiction is real. This is something we’ve all suspected at some gut level. There is just no way, once we’ve closed the book, that Jane and Mr. Rochester ceased to exist. They are too solid, they live, they breathe. We may not be looking, but we have no doubt that their lives go on, off the page.

So what is a library, then but a waystation for traveling from reality to reality? What would such a way station look like?

I closed the book and carefully placed it in my pocket and looked around. I was in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from teh richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterened with geometric designed and the ceiling was decorated with sculpted reliefs that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. running down the center of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor banished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important. Describing the library would be like going to see a Turner and commenting on the frame. On all of the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, were books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound, uncorrected proofs, handwritten manuscripts, everything. I stepped closed and rested my fingertips lightly against the pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks, wind in the winter branches of trees, disant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer–a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the impression of reality–each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject. These books were alive!

–Thursday Next, Lost in a Good Book

Have you ever run your hands along the spines of the books on a shelf and wished that just by touching them, you could absorb everything in them? This has been a common fantasy of mine since I first realized I would never be able to read all the books in the world–in other words, since about the age of five. I don’t think I’d ever bargain away anything important for money or fame, but I might well sign a Faustian agreement for the sake of a glove like the one in Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand:

She made a gesture with her chin over her shoulder. “Back there I’ve got a carton of catalog cubes from the Inter-Sector Broadcast Library.” She laid two fingers on his gloved hand. “Thanks to that, you’re tuned into the compressed textual band. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

She snorted. “What are the four largest geosectors on this world?”

“Abned, Rhyon, Cogonak.” He paused to question why she wanted to know. “And Emenog. . .?”

“. . .You see, in terms of data at hand, right now you’re on a par with the Skahadi Library itself–,” which, when her tongue lifted for the initial sibilant, he had never heard of before, but which, by the time it fell from the final vowel, he knew had been founded in ’12 in Lower Cogonak, back when it had still been officially a part of Abned, before the Severence Decision of ’80–which was when the Yellows had won their first major electoral victory. “You’re in touch,” she explained, “at this point, with a good deal more information than I am. . .Anyway, I figured we’d put all that to some use. Like I said, the carton’s filled with catalog cubes–about five hundred of them. They’re not there at random: they’re all texts I’ve wanted to read but never got around to. There’re more than a few in it I’ve discussed in great detail with various people, just as though I had read them. There’re a whole lot that I’ve read the first chapters of and have meant to read the rest for years. And there’re lots I read when I was much too young and have been intending to reread. Oh yes, and there’re about ten or fifteen I’ve read and reread a lot and just like a lot. Anyway. The instructions of the box your glove came in say that I–ordinary mortal that I am–can only absorb texts from the broadcast band at about one every ten minutes. But, as you may have figured out by now, I’m a lazy bitch. It says that if you’ve been through Radical Anxiety Termination, you can absorb them about one every point-thirty-two seconds; that’s without turning your mind into wet sand. You see, what I want to do is talk to somebody who’s read everything I should have read. I want to control such a man, make him lie down in the sand and lick my toes.” She grinned in the dark. “The glove will give you the texts verbatim. On hot, hazy nights, I’ll let you recite choice passages to me so that I can pick and choose. I can always get them myself with the glove later. But I think this way is more useful, more interesting.” She pushed another pedal. “Don’t you?”

–Samuel Delany, Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand

A library should reflect the personality of its owner. Theodore’s study–one of the few bookish scenes in the whole of Gerald Durrell’s ouevre, reflects the eccentricities of its owner perfectly.

During the last days of the dying summer, and throughout the warm, wet winter that followed, tea with Theodore became a weekly affair. Every Thursday I would set out, my pockets bulging with match-boxes and test-tubes full of specimens, to be driven into the town by Spiro. It was an appointment that I would not have missed for anything.

Theodore would welcome me in his study, a room that met with my full approval. It was, in my opinion, just what a room should be. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves filled with volumes on freshwater biology, botany, astronomy, medicine, folklore and similar fascinating and sensible subjects. Interspersed with these were selections of ghost and crime stories. Thus Sherlock Holmes rubbed shoulders with Darwin, and Le Fanu with Fabre, in what I considered to be a thoroughly well-balanced library.  At one window of the room stood Theodore’s telescope, its nose to the sky like a howling dog, while the sills of every window bore a parade of jars and bottles containing minute freshwater fauna, whirling and twitching among the delicate fronds of green weed. On one side of the room was a massive desk, piled high with scrapbooks, micro-photographs, X-ray plates, diaries, and notebooks. On the opposite side of the room was the microscope table, with its powerful lamp on the jointed stem leaning like a lily over the flat boxes that housed Theodore’s collection of slides. The microscopes themselves, gleaming like magpies, were housed under a series of beehive-like domes of glass.

–Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

This was my favorite of the Narnia series, and the Dufflepuds possibly my favorite creatures in the book:

It was a large room with three big windows and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical. But she knew from her instructions that she need not bother about any of these. For the Book, the Magic Book, was laying on a reading desk in the very middle of the room. She saw she would have to read it standing (and anyway there were no chairs) and also that she would have to stand with her back to the door while she read it. So at once she turned to shut the door.

It wouldn’t shut.

-C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader