Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
by Anne Fadiman
Odd Shelves, merged libraries, mail-order catalogues and over-inscribed gifts: eighteen essays on a life lived in books.
Reading about reading seems silly, I’m aware. It’s a bit like taking lessons in breathing: you’ve managed fine so far, but there’s plenty you miss until an expert breather takes you by the hand and shows you how it’s done.
In swoops Anne Fadiman. After racing through Frog and Other Essays, I knew I needed to read more of her work. Scanning the list of her other books in my hardcover copy, I found Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, and (special-)ordered it on the spot. Its 157 pages hold eighteen essays, distilling decades of reading into one slim collection.
You may be frowning, but I promise, she’s not the first to do it. Back in 1345, the medieval English bibliophile Richard de Bury wrote Philobiblon, or The Love of Books, a collection of essays on collecting books, caring for them, and scolding those who don’t: people who eat over them, say, or use straws as bookmarks (the complaints haven’t changed, but I presume the snacks have). Fadiman scolds a bit, too, but she’s far better company than a fourteenth-century bishop. Her writing is warm, light, and very funny.
She’s infatuated with reading and books, and uses them to let us into her life. In “Marrying Libraries”, she and her husband, George, merge their collections. How do you organise hundreds of books between two people? And, most importantly, where does it leave your Odd Shelf?
“It has long been my belief that everyone’s library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.”
Hers holds sixty-four books about polar exploration: expedition narratives, journals, collections of photographs, works of natural history, and naval manuals.
“Reading in bed, I will say to George, ‘Did you know that on Scott’s first Antarctic expedition, Edward Wilson got up at one and five every morning to premasticate seal meat and stuff it down the throat of the pet emperor penguin chick he had captured on the Great Ice Barrier?’ George will grunt. He is a rain forest man himself.”
I went to have a peek at my own Odd Shelf. It’s mostly tennis. Not a single pre-chewed seal in sight.
There are essays on punctuation, on the pronoun trouble in “to each his own”, on reading aloud, on building castles out of books as a child, and one on mail-order catalogues, beautifully titled “The Catalogical Imperative”. And on words—the ones we’ve gained and the ones we’ve lost:
“The playwright said sadly, ‘We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. […] I’ve never seen modem used in a poem.’”
And, holiest of all, on gifting books.
To me, a book simply ticked off a list and handed over isn’t much of a gift at all. You might as well have surrendered the cash. A book chosen with real thought can mean the world. Exactly the right book on grief, received when grieving; a deep cut on the city you’ve just moved to, where you still feel like a stranger; the right bundle of poetry to match the giddy phase of life you find yourself in.
Just whatever you do, don’t go overboard inscribing it.
“Knowing that George liked fish, I gave him Old Mr. Flood, by Joseph Mitchell, a slim volume of stories about the Fulton Fish Market. The author had autographed the book himself in 1948, but did I leave well enough alone? Of course not. I wrote: To George, with love from Anne. Then I mistranscribed a quotation from Red Smith. And finally—on the principle that if you don’t know what to say, say everything—I added fifteen lines of my own reflections on the nature of intimacy. My cumulative verbiage, not to mention the patency of my sentiments, exceeded George’s by a factor of approximately twenty to one. It’s a miracle that the book, its recipient, and the new true friendship weren’t all crushed under the weight of the inscription.”
With love, I guess,
Daniël
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998
