An Embarrassment of Books
THOSE WHO ASPIRE to the status of cultured individuals visit bookshops with trepidation, overwhelmed by the immensity of all they have not read. They buy something that they’ve been told is good, make an unsuccessful attempt to read it, and when they have accumulated half a dozen unread books, feel so bad that they are afraid to buy more.
In contrast, the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing
their composure or their desire for more. “Every private library is a reading plan,” the Spanish philosopher José Gaos once wrote. So accurate is this observation that in order for it also to be ironic the reader must acknowledge a kind of general unspoken assumption: a book not read is
a project uncompleted. Having unread books on display is like writing cheques when you have no
money in the bank—a way of deceiving your guests.
In a book neatly entitled A Handbook of Consumer Motivations, Ernest Dichter speaks of this guilty conscience as it affects mail-order book club members. There are those who sign up with the idea that they are gaining entrance to a cultural extravaganza. But as the books arrive and the time required to read them adds up, each new shipment becomes a less-than-festive reproach, an accusation of failure. Finally the discouraged members withdraw, resentful that books are still being sent, even though they have paid for them.
This explains the invention of books that aren’t meant to be read. Books, in other words, that can be displayed without consequences or guilt: dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, art books, cookbooks, reference books, bibliographies, anthologies, complete works. Books that tasteful gift-givers prefer—because they’re expensive, which is a sign of esteem, and because they don’t threaten the recipient with the task of responding to the questions “Have you read it yet? What did you think of it?” In fact, the most uncommercial slogan in the world might be: “Give a book! It’s like giving an obligation.”
Authors aren’t so mindful of their readers. Even excepting the extreme cases (those writers who call to see what page you’re on, when you’ll finish, and above all, when you’ll publish a long, intelligent, and objective review), they feel obliged to bestow obligations each time they publish. It is understood that the elegant sidestep in such cases is to reply immediately with a card that reads: “I just received your book. What a wonderful surprise! I congratulate you, and I congratulate myself in advance for the pleasure that reading it will give me.” (Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes used printed cards, with blank spaces for the date, name and title.) Otherwise, the debt multiplies and compounds as time passes, until the moment comes when the pending responsibility of reading the book, writing a letter (which can no longer be so short), and coming up with praise that isn’t false or faint becomes a nightmare. It’s hard to say whether this or the card sent by return mail is worse.
But there is more: what to do, physically, with the book? The author might appear one day and discover it in pristine, untouched condition. A good strategy, which unfortunately also requires discipline, is to ruffle the first pages upon receiving it and insert a bookmark as proof of your good intentions. Or make it disappear, explaining (if necessary) that a friend was so excited to see it that she borrowed it before you could read it. In this case, it is prudent to remove the dedication page: signed books have an unfortunate habit of ending up in the hands of dealers, and there are terrible stories about books by Rilke fulsomely dedicated to Valéry and later found in bookstalls on the Seine. Or there is the story about the Mexican author who found his book— uncut—in a used bookshop, and bought and re-sent it to his friend, “With the renewed affection of Artemio de Valle-Arizpe.”
A terrible solution is to keep books until you’ve accumulated a library of thousands of volumes, all the while telling yourself that you know you don’t have the time to read them but that you’ll be able to leave them to your children. This is an excuse that grows weaker and weaker as science makes ever greater strides. Almost all books are obsolete from the moment they’re written, if not before. And marketing strategies engineer the planned obsolescence even of classic authors (with new and better critical editions) to eliminate the ruinous transmission of tastes from one generation to the next, which once upon a time so stifled the market.
The creation of an obsolete library for one’s children may only be justified in the way that the preservation of ruins is justified: in the name of archaeology. Better excuses exist for collecting books than the construction of a library for posterity. If you amass a collection dedicated to the history of the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, or, better yet, of editions of Don Quixote, no one can expect you to have read Don Quixote thousands of times, once for each edition—though plenty of innocent visitors will be scandalized to see the same title repeated over and over.
Isn’t it a little like having your picture taken thousands of times and from thousands of angles with the only big fish you ever caught in your life? In keeping with the Categorical Imperative of Reading and Being Cultured, a library is a trophy room. The Magic Mountain is like an elephant’s foot, lending prestige, serving as a footstool, and prompting the discussion of dangerous trips to Africa. And what about the lion who winked an eye at the hunter before falling at his feet? Thus, the owner of Churchill’s memoirs, signed and unread, can say: “Poor Winston! I’m keeping them as they were when I got them, out of respect for his memory. What a formidable British lion! I begged the taxidermist to be careful to preserve the wink . . .” Hunters are famous for exaggerating. That is why it is a matter of professional ethics for the reader who aspires to be cultured never to display pieces that haven’t been properly bagged—not to mention pieces that were actually read by a friend, or the guide, on cultural safari. As a result, a book can only be seen as a dissected cadaver, not a captive live animal. Tigers in the gas tank?
All right. But roaring all over the house, lounging in the bathroom or on the bed, stretching and yawning in the windows, perched on shelves? Never! Out of respect for one’s guests. The Categorical Imperative derives from the old belief in the sacredness of books. In In Search of a Better World, Karl Popper surmises that Western democratic culture was born with the establishment of the book market in Athens, in the fifth century before Christ: the book as commercial product did away with the book as sacred object. But did it really? The market is ambivalent. To have at home and at hand what once could only be viewed in the temple is a great boon for demand, because books embody all the prestige of the temple.
Democratic desacralization flourishes like simony: it allows the selling of something priceless. It doesn’t do away with sacred books; it causes them to multiply. Socrates criticized the fetishization of the book (Phaedrus). Two centuries later in another bookcentred culture (the Biblical world), it was written in Ecclesiastes (12:12) that “. . . of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” In the first century, Seneca wrote to Lucilius: “In the multitude of books is distraction.” Ibn Khaldun, in the fourteenth century: “Too many books on a subject make it more difficult to study” (The Muqaddimah, VI, 27). Montaigne: “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books” (Essays, III, 13). Don Quixote, upon learning of the writing of Don Quixote: “There are those who compose books and pop them out like so many buns” (II, 3). Samuel Johnson: “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue . . .” (Rambler No. 106, March 23, 1751).
I once proposed a chastity glove for authors who were unable to contain themselves. But an icy plunge works too: like Johnson, writers can try submersion in a great library, among a multitude of neglected authors, to discourage themselves. Progress has ordered things so that all citizens, not just the prophets, may give themselves the luxury of preaching in the desert. What could bring a halt to the proliferation of books? For a time, it seemed as if television might. Marshall McLuhan wrote (wrote!) prophetic books about the end of the age of the book. But the explosion of publishing left McLuhan himself preaching in the desert.
Until 1947, there were only seven commercial television channels in the United States, which became 50 in 1949 (when the major networks appeared) and 517 in 1960. From 1947 to 1960, the percentage of households with television sets jumped from almost zero to 88 percent. The stage was thus set for the demise of the book. Nevertheless, the number of titles published each year in the same period more than doubled: from seven thousand to fifteen thousand. Even more surprising, from 1960 to 1968, the number of titles doubled again, and in a shorter period, where as the number of homes with television sets could naturally only rise to the saturation point: 98 percent (Statistical Abstract of the United States).
In the middle of the fifteenth century, the printing press with movable type appeared in Europe. It didn’t immediately replace the copyists, or printing with wooden blocks, but it made many more titles available. From 1450 to 1500, between 10,000 and 15,000 titles were published (the socalled incunabula) in 30,000 to 35,000 editions, with average printings of 500 copies, according to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800)— say 250 titles per year, starting with 100 in 1450. By 1952, 250,000 were being published (Robert Escarpit, The Book Revolution). This implies a rate of growth five times that of the population. It was assumed that television would put an end to both explosions, but that end never came, as can be seen in the statistics for the year 2000, extrapolated from the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1999.
Since the invention of the television, the world population has grown 1.8 percent each year (as compared to 0.3 percent annually over the preceding five hundred years) and the publication of books has grown 2.8 percent (as compared to 1.6 percent). From these rough figures, some rough interpolations may be made. Five hundred titles were published in 1550, 2,300 in 1650, 11,000 in 1750, and 50,000 in 1850. In 1550 the cumulative bibliography was approximately 35,000 titles; in 1650 it was 150,000; in 1750 it was 700,000; in 1850 it was 3.3 million; in 1950 it was 16 million; and in 2000 it was 52 million. In the first century of printing (1450–1550), 35,000 titles were published; in the last half-century (1950–2000), there were a thousand times more—36 million. The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds. Supposing an average price of £20 per Date 1450 (Gutenberg) 1950 (Television) 2000 Titles per year 100 250,000 1,000,000 Population 500 2,500 6,000 (in millions) Titles per million 0.2 100 167 inhabitants book and an average thickness of two centimetres, twenty million pounds and close to fifteen miles of shelves would be required for the yearly addition to Mallarmé’s library, if today the poet wished to be able to say: The flesh is sad, alas! and I’ve read all the books.
Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn’t read would pile up four thousand times faster than the books he did read, and his ignorance would grow four thousand times faster than his knowledge. “There is so much to learn and so little time to live,” as Baltasar Gracián wrote. But once again, the aphorism functions poetically, transcending its quantitative truth, its melancholic tone erasing the feelings of guilt aroused by our finiteness in the face of the infinite tasks demanded by the Categorical Imperative. Yes, there is something deeply sad about visiting a library or bookshop full of books that we will never read. Something that brings to mind the following lines by Borges: There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.
There is a door I have shut until the end of the world. Among the books in my library (I have them before me) There are some I shall never reopen. Why read? And why write? After reading one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand books in a lifetime, what have we read? Nothing. To say “I only know that I’ve read nothing,” after reading thousands of books, is not false modesty. It is strictly accurate, to the first decimal place of zero percent. But is that not perhaps exactly, Socratically, what our embarrassment of books should teach us?
To be aware of our ignorance, to fully accept it; to go from being simply ignorant to being consciously ignorant? Maybe our understanding of our finiteness is the only access we have to the totality that beckons and vanquishes us, that creates an outsize totalizing ambition in us. Maybe all experience of infinity is an illusion, if it is not precisely an experience of finiteness. And maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us.
What does it matter how cultivated and up-todate we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.
