This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

It was the house-sitter who, as he marvelled at the book-lined walls of our sitting room, made me doubt my sanity. “What a great collection of books you have!” he said. “I was sad to part with mine, but now I have a much larger library on my Kindle — and it takes up no space at all.”

Marcus, a gentle giant and evidently a well-read one, could not have been more courteous. In a sense, he was absolutely right. In the course of my lifetime, the private library has gone from being a necessity for any thinking person to becoming at best a luxury, at worst a burden. Nobody has to own books any more in order to read them. Few young people can give them house room. Are books as physical objects already obsolescent?

My instinctive reply is: no. Technologies are all ephemeral, but whilst the book has been the primary vehicle for the transmission of knowledge for millennia, its electronic offspring are lucky to last a decade or two. They are also owned by shameless monopolists. Amazon, which owns Kindle, has recently announced it will cease to offer its customers newspaper and magazine subscriptions — heedless of the devastation this will cause for independent periodicals. It is also closing down the Book Depository, an online bookseller it bought to eliminate one of its main competitors. 

For book lovers, the advent of the internet has been a mixed blessing

Kindle is to literature what Instagram or TikTok are to visual images, or Spotify to music. They have their uses, but it would be absurd for the British Library, the National Gallery or the Proms to rely on them to preserve our heritage, let alone declare themselves redundant. Even Project Gutenberg, the free online library of 70,000 ebooks, is a poor substitute for a unique, idiosyncratic collection that reflects the personality of the collector. Marvellous resource that it is, Gutenberg’s very name serves to remind us of the incomparably greater part that the printing press has played in the dissemination of knowledge.

I plead guilty to buying books from Amazon on occasion. I may be technologically incompetent, but I am not technophobic, let alone Luddite. Like most people I know, I spend an inordinate amount of time online. For book lovers, the advent of the internet has been a mixed blessing. It is much easier to seek and find that elusive missing volume, but when you do it is much less likely to be a bargain. The effect on prices of booksellers going online has been relentlessly inflationary. 

It’s a good bet that the books I own will see me out. The problem is that there are too many of them — or at least too many to store, let alone to cherish or even to read. Moreover, over the years I have succumbed to the lure of beauty in bookish form. The desire to be surrounded by books is forgiveable in one who earns his living by writing. A fascination for the aesthetics of books turns one into a bibliophile, however — a breed usually despised by writers and scholars alike.

It gets worse. The tendency of my library to become ever more voluminous sometimes threatens to drive my wife to desperation. She has tried to impose Sarah’s Law: one in, two out. It has never worked.

Perhaps I have crossed the invisible line between mere bibliophilia, which is tiresome, and bibliomania, which is pathological. There is an overlap between melancholia, or depression, and bibliomania. When we feel let down by friends, family and life itself, books are our most constant and reliable consolation. 

Nearly a century ago, Holbrook Jackson published his Anatomy of Bibliomania, a bookman’s homage to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and almost equally compendious. Before coming to bibliomania proper, Jackson leads us through every variety of bookish excess. He devotes a chapter to the bibliophagi or book-eaters, who include many of the greatest authors in the canon. 

Here is a note inscribed by Queen Elizabeth I on the fly-leaf of a copy of the New Testament that she had bound in an embroidered covering, her own handiwork (now preserved in the Bodleian Library): 

I walk manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holye Scriptures, where I pluck up the goodlie green herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chewe them up musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seat of memorie by gathering them together; that so having tasted thy sweeteness I may the lesse perceive the bitterness of this miserable life. 

There is of course nothing wrong with devouring books. Even such gluttons, whose tastes were utterly indiscriminate, are superior to the philistines of the present day who starve the young by emptying public libraries, first of books, then of readers, before finally closing them down. 

What is a true bibliomaniac — and am I one? In Ancient Rome, Jackson tells us, Seneca ridiculed bibliomaniacs who collected books (the most treasured manuscripts being autographic or written on elephant intestines) but knew nothing about them except their outsides. The Greek satirist Lucian mocked such a book obsessive for “buying haunts for mice and lodgings for worms, and excuses to thrash his servants for negligence”. 

In Letters to his Son, Lord Chesterfield warned: “Beware of the Bibliomanie”, by which he meant “understanding editions and title-pages too well”. Isaac D’Israeli (the polymathic parent of the Prime Minister) saw the “motley libraries” of those afflicted by bibliomania as “mad-houses of the human mind … an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity”. 

I may even have tamed my book-hunting passion

The most notorious bibliomane of all, Richard Heber, accumulated at least 147,000 volumes, hoarded in eight houses: three in England, one each in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Germany.

Even statesmen are not immune. W.E. Gladstone could not enter a bookshop without buying books by the cartload — though the Grand Old Man read most of them, leaving copious annotations. If it is possible to love books not wisely but too well, whilst serving as Prime Minister four times, then bibliomania is clearly not necessarily a disabling form of dotage.

I may even have tamed my book-hunting passion. Over Easter I went twice to our local second-hand bookshop and emerged with only one modest purchase for just £1: the 1949 edition of The Penguin New Writing. There were other volumes of John Lehmann’s annual, some in mint condition, but I chose this water-damaged copy because of a prose fragment by Saul Bellow: “The Thoughts of Sergeant Flavin”, which may have been his first appearance in print on this side of the Atlantic. 

Bellow’s stream of consciousness of a Chicago policeman, a virtuoso piece in the style that would later make his name in The Adventures of Augie March, did not disappoint. Neither did Bellow’s chosen platform: a crumbling, discoloured, dog-eared paperback — even though no true connoisseur or antiquarian would have given it a second look.