Between 1993 and 1997 Anne Fadiman, now the editor of the quarterly journal American Scholar, wrote a column called "The Common Reader" for Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress. She has recently collected these pieces into a book which chronicles a life-long love affair with books and reading and is an essential volume, combining insightful and incidental anecdote with great humour and erudition.
The opening essay, intriguingly entitled "Marrying Books", relates the problems that Fadiman and her husband had when they decided, five years after tying the knot, that they should amalgamate their libraries. Up to that point, her library stood at the north end of their Manhattan loft and his at the south end. Realising the folly of having her Moby Dick 40 feet away from his Billy Budd, they started the arduous task of mixing the two sets of books and discarding the duplicates. Friction arose when he attempted to shelve her set of Shakespeare plays out of chronological order and when it had to be decided whose duplicates would be brought to the charity shop. Hardbacks took preference over paperbacks, "unless the paperbacks contained marginalia".
On the Melville front, my wife recently asked me if we really needed three different editions of Moby Dick. She was very understanding when I explained that one of the Penguin Classics contained contemporary whaling photographs and images; the other was the corrected text first published by the North Western University Press in 1988, and the hardback a facsimile of the 1979 Arion Press edition with reproductions of the original woodcuts by Barry Moser.
Back in the Fadiman's loft (after libraries had been married) Anne decided one night, when her husband was out of town, to go to bed early and reread Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie. She sat in bed reading the book that she had read when she was 17. When she came across a note in the margin, undoubtedly written in a younger version of her husband's handwriting, she realised, first, that it was his copy that had been saved and, secondly, that they were really married.
In her chapter entitled "Never Do That To A Book" Fadiman eloquently differentiates between the readers who are courtly lovers of books and those who are carnal. The courtly lover is afraid to break the spine, take notes in the margin or fold down the corners of each page, whereas the carnal lover (herself, unashamedly) opens the book right up, indulges in marginalia, and leaves it in a condition where no one could doubt whether it had been read or not.
I would place myself somewhere in between the two categories, depending on the book in question, although I will never forget my horror when told by a friend that a borrowed book was returned to him with toast crumbs down the centre of the first 10 pages. As the author writes, "hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy". But, whatever about a broken spine, I draw the line at leftover food.
Ex Libris is also a tribute to Fadiman's father, who is portrayed as learned and serious, but also a deeply affectionate and encouraging man. This was the man who let his daughter build castles with his 22-volume collected edition of Anthony Trollope and invented the ingenious story of Wally the Bookworm, who was not satisfied with eating the monosyllabic words he found in children's books and so had to look for longer words in the dictionary. This instilled a fascination for sesquipedalians (which means "long words", I discovered) in the young Fadiman, which has not left her to this day. Mr Fadiman, now in his 90s, was a proof-reader with Simon & Schuster at the start of his career and tragically went blind in his mid-80s.
In various sections Fadiman writes about the intrigue surrounding the books of a parent and rightly points out that as much (if not more) can be learned about a parent by rooting through their library rather than their closet. She recounts the joy of finding and greatly enjoying Fanny Hill and also realising that it was well thumbed and thus obviously well enjoyed by her father. What also comes across is a warning to parents about the importance of introducing children to books at the earliest possible stage (in a time when computer games and television could take over).
Other chapters include reflections on the advantages of second-hand over new books; inscriptions written to friends on flyleaves and many anecdotes about historical figures and their relationships with books. My favourite is the story of George Bernard Shaw finding one of his books in a second-hand bookshop. On opening the flyleaf, he found written To X with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He promptly bought the book and sent it back to X with a new line added, "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw".
This is a perfect book for anyone who is passionate about books, and if you never understood the bibliophile's obsession, this is a brilliant insight and introduction.
Cormac Kinsella is the editor of the Waterstones Guide to Irish Books