Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 17 Jan 2016

Phantoms On The Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet

Bonnet is a French publisher and writer but he is also a self-confessed bibliophile, incontinent reader and owner of a 40,000 volume personal library. This little 140 page book has been translated from the French by Sian Reynolds and has a lovely, affectionate introductory essay by (the now late) James Salter.

This book is a dream for book collectors but it will also appeal to book lovers who think of themselves as more of an accumulator of interesting reading rather than a collector. In a series of only loosely related essays Bonnet ambles across a series of subjects in a largely anecdotal format that takes him from the problems of shelving and classification to issues of what makes for the ideal personal library and eventually to the future of the book itself.

Bonnet insists that his personal library is a living and working resource. He is dedicated to the idea that his books need to be engaged with and that there is nothing sacrosanct about them – he lavishly annotates the pages he reads and re-annotates them when he re-reads them.

Bonnet belongs to a community that includes such notables as Borges, Alberto Manguel and Umberto Eco – academics and serious students of the art and nature of the book but also people passionately committed he special-ness of the book as an object of desire. All of these men have what might be called an almost mystical attachment to the books they own – they live with them in a way that permeates their very being.

I love the way Bonnet never feels he needs to apologise for his book habit. He knows that he is unlikely to read everything he has and he also doesn’t always buy intending to read them now or possibly even in the future. He buys them ‘in case’, in order to have them should the need ever arise. That, he asserts, is the purpose of a personal library – to anticipate the fact that he may need access to information that only his books can fulfil regardless of the existence of the internet.

Probably my most favourite anecdote in the whole book  however relates to the issue of books and safety. Whoever would have thought that the sedate occupation of accumulating a personal library could result in decisions of life and death? Bonnet talks amusingly about a problem many of us have had – lack of shelf space – and he confesses that he has been reduced in the past to shelving books in his bathroom where to overcome the problems of damp he has to keep his window open at all times. There is, though, he cautions one place to never put shelves -  above the bed. A lesson he learned from the sad death of one collector crushed by falling books in the middle of the night as he slept.

This charming little book was published in the UK by Maclehose Press in  2010 and can be picked up for a modest few pounds on the second hand market.

 

Terry Potter

January 2016