Jacques Bonnet’s Phantoms on the Bookshelves is a witty homage to the thrill of reading and the tribulations of owning a monstrous personal library, a working library, not one of those bibliophile collections filled with volumes too valuable to touch. Bonnet writes of a library where books are written in, read in the bath, and kept simply because they have been read and inhabited. It is the sort of library built by a lifetime of reading rather than design, a collection that grows organically, compulsively, almost despite its owner.
As an enthusiastic reader of Alberto Manguel, whose voice Bonnet occasionally echoes, I found myself lapping up this brief meditation on the fever of acquisition. Bonnet obsesses, tenderly and a little comically, over problems of organisation and classification, over the mysterious impulses that lead from one book to another, and from reading into ownership.
There is a moment when Bonnet reflects: “[W]e carry on believing what we read in biographies. (Curiosity is too strong: I have masses of biographies in my library!) They are simply imaginary reconstructions based on the necessarily fragmentary elements left by someone now dead, whether long ago or in the recent past. And as for autobiography, it is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.” The weight of libraries, then, is not in facts or certainties, but in memory, imagination, and the invisible threads that tie one life to another across pages and time.
Reading Bonnet feels like listening to an old reader talking to himself, one hand absentmindedly tracing the spines of books, pulling one down without quite knowing why, smiling at the strangeness of the act.
>Oooo, thank you Anthony. Off to order a copy now. As a librarian, I have been professionally concerned with organization and classification of collections in my charge but personally, I prefer to let them run wild about the house. Am more enticed by the content that will lead to further book buying. 🙂
>You'll enjoy this book, Frances. I've already ordered five books as a consequence of reading Phantom on the Bookshelves.You let your books run wild? Eeek. You are such a free spirit! That's why you don't worry about end of year lists or pie chart analysis. I obsess endlessly about classification, and rearrange my books at least 2 or 3 times a year.
>My bookshleves are long since filled, and I now suffer from the far more perilous 'floor piles' scenario – namely, the only part of my carpet which is now visible is the arc in which my door opens. Which isn't as glamorous or erudite as it sounds… man do these things collect dust!!
>Book piles can only be a temporary solution for me, usually for the immediate works that I plan to read. At the moment I have a Kafka and Duras TBR pile, that is this year's objective.You need to build more shelves. If every room has shelves, and they are full, it is time to move.