<link href="css/hmh.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> <meta content="urn:uuid:6b1eaa74-4469-4a85-b17e-640305979075" name="Adept.expected.resource"/> </head> <body> <h1 class="chaptertitle ">The whiff of books</h1> <p class="left ">I’ve spoken twice in recent weeks about book collecting, and the audience on both occasions included many young people. It’s difficult to talk about a personal passion for books. Once, in a radio interview, I said it’s rather like being a pervert who makes love with goats. If you say you’ve spent a night with Naomi Campbell or with the beautiful girl next door, they follow you with interest, envy, or roguish delight. If you talk about the pleasurable experience of having intercourse with a goat, people become embarrassed and try to change the subject. Anyone visiting the home of a person who collects Renaissance paintings or Chinese porcelain is thrilled by such wonders. If he shows them a seventeenth-century book in duodecimo with reddened pages and says that you can count those who own a copy on the fingers of one hand, the visitor will look anxiously for an excuse to leave.</p> <p class="follow">A bibliophile loves books, but not necessarily their contents. If you’re interested in content, you can go to a library, whereas the bibliophile, though aware of the content, wants the object, and ideally he wants it to be the first off the printer’s press. To such an extent that there are some bibliophiles—I don’t agree, but I understand them—who won’t cut the pages when they find an uncut book, so as not to violate it. Cutting the pages of a rare book would for them be like a collector of watches breaking open the case to look at the mechanism.</p> <p class="follow">A bibliophile doesn’t love <em>The Divine Comedy;</em> he loves a particular edition and a particular copy of <em>The</em> <em>Divine Comedy.</em> He wants to touch it, turn its pages, run his hands over the binding. In this sense he “converses” with the book as an object, for what the book has to say about its origins, its history, the countless hands through which it has passed. At times the book recounts its history through thumbprints, marginal notes, underlinings, an autograph on the front page, even wormholes. And it has an ever finer history to tell when, after five hundred years, its virgin white pages still crackle between the fingers.</p> <p class="follow">A book as object can tell a good story even when it’s been around for only fifty years. I have a copy of <em>La philosophie au Moyen Âge</em> by Étienne Gilson, published in the 1950s, which I’ve owned since the days of my university thesis. The paper at that time was of poor quality, and the book now falls apart each time I turn the pages. If it were simply a tool of my profession, I’d have no option but to look for a new edition, which can be found cheaply. But I want that copy, with its fragile antiquity, with its underlinings and notes in various colors marking the times I’ve reread it. Holding it reminds me of my years as a student and beyond, and therefore forms part of my memory.</p> <p class="follow">Young people need to know this, since book collecting is generally considered a passion only for the rich. There are of course old books that cost millions (a first edition incunabulum of <em>The Divine Comedy</em> recently fetched 1.5 million euros), but those who love books are interested not just in antique tomes but in more recent books, which might be a first edition volume of modern poetry. Some readers collect complete sets of children’s books. Three years ago I found a first edition of Giovanni Papini’s 1931 satirical novel <em>Gog,</em> rebound but with its original cover, for 10 euros. It’s true that ten years ago I saw a 1914 first edition of Dino Campana’s <em>Canti orfici</em> in a catalog for 13 million lire (the equivalent of 6,500 euros)—evidently the poor man could afford to print only a few copies—but it’s possible to build an impressive collection of twentieth-century literature for no more than a few meals at a restaurant. One of my students used to prowl the bookstalls collecting nothing but tourist guides from different periods. At first I thought it a bizarre idea, but using those booklets of faded photographs, he produced a magnificent thesis showing how the look of a particular city could change over the years. There again, a cash-strapped youngster can still browse the bookstalls of a city like Milan and find sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 16mo editions for the price of a good pair of sneakers, and, though not rare, they can still give something of the flavor of the time.</p> <p class="follow">Book collecting is like stamp collecting. The great collector has items worth a fortune, but as a child I bought assorted packs of ten or twenty stamps from the newsstand and spent many evenings dreaming about Madagascar or the islands of Fiji, gazing at multicolored rectangles that were wonderful, though not rare. Ah, what nostalgia.</p> <p class="right ">2004</p> </body> </html>