I have a large library by most normal standards. Seemingly I've arranged my life in order to acquire as many books as possible. I worked for three years right out of college in a large secondhand bookstore -- where I was, all by myself, the paperback department -- then for a literary review where I raided the mailbag on a daily basis. Over the decades I've spent a lot of my free time in book barns and flea markets and charity bazaars and estate sales. I review books, and sometimes have served as a judge for literary awards, and now and then have books sent to me speculatively by publishers and occasionally authors. And I'm bilingual; when I travel to a French-speaking country I literally need an extra suitcase for the books I bring back. Meanwhile I've moved around, often; only once did I live in a single place for as long as 10 years (and it was possibly the rattiest of all my residences). I lived in New York City in that bygone era when as soon as you got a $20 raise you'd move to a slightly bigger apartment. My older friends probably still suffer joint aches from helping carry my hundred boxes up six flights on multiple occasions.

But after living in smallish apartments for decades I just spent seven years in a house with a full-size attic, and everything went to hell. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed. Now that I have moved again -- into a house that's not necessarily smaller but that I am determined to keep from being choked with books like kudzu -- I have just weeded out 30 boxes worth: books I won't read and don't need, duplicates, pointless souvenirs.

A History of Private Libraries

Daniel Talcott of Bangor, Maine, loved his books so much they killed him.

"It is a pathetic fact," wrote Samuel Boardman in 1900. Mr. Talcott wanted to keep the books in his library warm and dry as winter approached, "and it was in persisting to build a fire in the room on an inclement day that he took the cold that brought on his death."

As soon as there were books, there were private libraries, each as unique to its owner as a fingerprint. But book collectors throughout history share one characteristic: They're highly opinionated about how a library should look and what should be in it.

An Ideal Number

In the 1600s, the English diarist Samuel Pepys believed a gentleman should own exactly 3,000 books. In his library, books were numbered from the smallest size to the largest. To make the tops of the books even on the shelves, he built little wooden stilts for the short books, camouflaging the stilts to match the bindings.

The library of the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz reportedly contained books by only nine writers, all from ancient Greece and Rome. Sir Thomas Phillipps, on the other hand, had 100,000 books in his collection and 60,000 manuscripts. When he moved them in 1864, he needed more than 100 horse-drawn carts and 160 laborers.

The Essentials

The question of which books belong in a small home library was warmly debated in early 20th-century America. The Bible, a dictionary, an atlas and Shakespeare were almost universally prescribed. Dr. Charles Eliot, then president of Harvard University, said in 1909 that he could put together "five feet of books" -- 25 books -- that "will give any man the essentials of a liberal education" in 10 minutes a day. It included Goethe's "Faust" and Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations."

Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was in the "model library" of 500 books assembled by the St. Louis Public Library in 1921. "It provoked adverse comment," reported a librarian in The Library Journal, with "several visitors declaring, 'Books like that nobody reads, and why should they be in a private library?' "

Unsuitable books can corrupt a library -- and its readers. In a 1916 copy of The Journal of Home Economics, young women were told, "Be sure to avoid immoral books -- those which make a direct appeal to our lower nature." If nothing else, don't let them fall into innocent hands: "Lock up your Rabelais and perhaps even your Fielding, where little fingers may not happen upon them," wrote Arthur Penn in "The Home Library," published in 1883.

Burning Shakespeare

When not making war, Napoleon was a big reader. He traveled with a field library of books, which eventually consisted of about 40 volumes about religion, 40 of epics, 60 of poetry, 100 novels, 60 histories and some historical memoirs.

Henry M. Stanley took an estimated 180 pounds of books with him when he explored Africa in the 1870s. "As my men lessened in numbers, stricken by famine, fighting and sickness, one by one the books were reluctantly thrown away," Mr. Stanley wrote. Near the end of his journey, he had only a few left, including the Bible, Shakespeare and the Nautical Almanac for 1877. "Poor Shakespeare was afterward burned by demand of the foolish people of Zinga."

For an African safari in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt brought, or had sent to him, a "pigskin library" (the books were bound in pigskin to protect them from the elements). It included Charles Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend," Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" and Thomas Carlyle's "Frederick the Great." "Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed," Mr. Roosevelt wrote in "African Game Trails."

Mr. Roosevelt, like other presidents, took his library with him when he left the White House. To create a permanent library, the American Booksellers Association in 1930 presented Herbert Hoover with 500 books selected as a model home library. It included 20 detective novels and such forgotten classics as Zona Gale's "Miss Lulu Bett."

Whether to Read

For some bibliophiles, the merits of the content are irrelevant: They judge books by their covers. An often-told tale has a collector, a Mr. Locker, taking a rare book with a small imperfection back to a binder. The binder examined the faulty cover and then, looking over his spectacles, said reproachfully, "Why Mr. Locker, you've been reading it."

—Cynthia Crossen

Shelf Life

LibraryThing is a Web site where more than 400,000 bibliophiles list the books in their personal libraries. Here is what's on their shelves:

76,909 Number of William Shakespeare books listed
135,986 Number of Stephen King books
2.5 to 1 Ratio of Agatha Christie to Leo Tolstoy books
6,059 Number of people who list the Bible in their libraries
1,426 Number who list Christopher Hitchens's "God Is Not Great"
4.19 Average user rating of James Joyce's "Ulysses" (out of five)
4.89 Average rating of Bill Watterson's "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes"

I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of Andr&eacute; Breton's "Nadja," not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway's "True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality," identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don't actually read. It occurred to me that I had little need for most of the shrubbery surrounding the works of major authors: the letters (with one or two significant exceptions), the critical approaches (unless they are worth reading on their own terms), and any biography over 500 pages long (except maybe those by Richard Ellmann and Leon Edel). I also had no need for books with funny titles, books acquired only because everybody else was reading them, books with no value except as objects, and books that inspired a vague sense of dread whenever they caught my eye -- possible cornerstones of culture that nevertheless only solitary confinement would ever compel me to read.




Now I've herded almost all of my books into my office, which is half of a finished basement. The ceiling is low, but then again I have continuous running 25-foot-long shelves. Books separated for decades by the limitations of furniture and room dimensions are suddenly reunited, sometimes in new category arrangements. I find that I can take in the sweep of my library in a single glance -- a diagonal glance, of necessity. As well as a riot of shapes and colors, the glance takes in a large array of conflicting personalities and vast stretches of time.


This glance also forces me to confess that I am, after all, a collector. I resist the thought, since it summons up images of rapacious agglomerators and pasty-faced completists. But still, while I may not have many fine editions, my library reveals an underlying logic that may only be visible to me. As Walter Benjamin put it, in his 1931 essay "Unpacking My Library," "The purchasing done by a book collector has very little in common with that done in a bookshop by a student getting a textbook, a man of the world buying a present for his lady, or a businessman intending to while away his next train journey." The purchasing done by a collector of whatever stripe usually involves filling in holes. There are people out there who collect Penguin Classics or Dell Map-Backs and arrange them in numerical order, and there is always one title that eludes them. There are people who collect every stray opuscule by prolific and disparate authors -- Henry Miller, say, or Ezra Pound -- and they will forever be chasing down that one pamphlet printed in an edition of 12 in Orvieto in 1932. This is part of the pleasure for them, and it is closely related to the passion that goes into collecting baseball cards.

For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas. I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it's ever truly complete. When I'm truly passionate about a subject, anything can be grist for the mill. Poetry can be as materially informative as journalism, and railroad timetables can be as evocative and lilting as poems. I derive nourishment from the copyright pages, from the publishers' ads in the back, from even the most misguided attempts at cover design.

Over the years I've gotten used to the inevitable questions about my accumulation of books. No, I haven't read all of them, nor do I intend to -- in some cases that's not the point. No, I'm not a lawyer (a question usually asked by couriers, back in the days of couriers). I do have a few hundred books that I reread or consult fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire, and I have many, many books speculatively pointing toward some project that is still barely a gleam in my eye. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live 40 minutes away from the nearest really solid library. I have some books that exist in the same capacity as the more recondite tools in the chest of a good carpenter -- you may not need it more than once in 20 years, but it's awfully nice to have it there when you do. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind -- my brain isn't big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help.

Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Seeing that the "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant" is fortuitously shelved directly above "The Ego and Its Own" by Max Stirner might get something going in my subconscious (or it might not). If while writing I try to form a picture of the shape of a decade or the spirit of a country, I can get its lineaments by glancing at my shelves. If I need to emerge from a particular mental rut I can just randomly reach out and pull something down and start reading. Within minutes the ensnaring spell has been snapped and I've entered some other mind. Just as they told you in grade school, books really do build mental muscles. They may not, per advertisement, necessarily imbue you with deep thoughts, but there is no question that they expand consciousness simply by opening the door into the minds of others. If you allow yourself to really feel and absorb the style of a good writer, you will take in his or her vocabulary, frame of reference, sense of humor, and at least temporarily make it your own. It is a bit like the stories of cannibals eating their adversaries' brains in order to acquire their strengths and skills, only with books no one gets hurt.

These days it may appear that books, per se, are doomed. The electronic readers are ever lighter, smaller, and more sophisticated. Google is undertaking to scan and digitize every book in the world -- not without some resistance. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that even the reading devices are pointless, since according to him nobody reads anymore, at least not in the sense of sequentially taking in long and complex works. I have nothing against the readers, and may find myself buying one eventually -- they'd come in very handy on trips, the way the iPod does. I'm all in favor of the comprehensive digitizing of the world's books, since that would very much ease small points of research (and I'm not worried about losing control of my copyrights, since it's unlikely many people would read entire books online that way). As far as the decline of reading goes, I am nervous, but also believe that matters of taste and inclination do swing around on long orbits.



Luc Sante, the author of "Low Life" and "Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005," teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.