Athough there is no evidence that all of those people I’ve listed were certifiably mad, many would argue that they were at least touched by lunacy or they would not have collected so exuberantly, so obsessively, and so well; for a great collection of books is a grand achievement, and grand achievements are not possible without a skewing of common sense and quotidian priorities.⁸ In short, great collectors are likely to be peculiar, which is to say, obsessed or touched by some version of madness.

The scope and character of so much divergence from our stereotypes of normality are inexhaustible studies—so obviously inexhaustible that it would not be practical to enter upon them here and try to explicate their intricacies in the small space proper to this essay. It would take volumes to speak of so much passion expended upon so many volumes, and there is surely not volume enough for it here.

But I will glancingly refer to one venerable source, the ostensibly fictitious testimony given by the narrator of Eugene Field’s The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. In one passage, this genial septuagenarian reports on Gladstone, saying he was so mad a collector that he fell into the habit of entering a bookstore and with one grand sweep of his arm buying all the books in it. Though appearing in a fiction, this report itself is evidently not entirely without substance.⁹

In our dreams, we have all made that expansive gesture, gathering whole libraries in our embrace, enriching our shelves to proliferation and bursting. But Field’s narrator claimed to have witnessed this phenomenon personally, and was so impressed that he decided that any politician who showed a greater passion for collecting books than votes deserved both.

All true, in its way … although that way may be tortuous. In fact it’s possible that Field’s narrator got carried away … which should not surprise us greatly, for he has shown a certain instability from the very first pages. “I started out to be a philosopher,” he said. As if that’s not bad enough, a few pages later he gets so heated in talking about book fever that he crosses over the boundaries of metaphor, and begins to think of it as a real fever, the sort that actually causes physical discomfort, pain and even hallucination.

He then becomes so infatuated that he speaks of hearing about specific courses of treatment, treating bibliomania in such a way that it makes you think of mumps or measles: “To make short of a long story,” he wrote, “the medical faculty is nearly a unit upon the proposition that wherever suppressed bibliomania is suspected immediate steps should be taken to bring out the disease.”

When this solemn pronouncement is followed by the report that a physician named Woodbury claims that book-madness can be aborted in the first phase, our suspicion that he is having his fun with us turns into a certainty. For one thing, Woodbury is identified as being from Ohio. But even if that didn’t signify a humorous turn, we would surely catch on some ninety pages later, when the narrator tells about a miligram of bacillus librorum being injected into the femoral artery of a cat, causing the demented creature to devour the covers of its own especially coveted edition of Rabelais. This edifying anecdote is immediately spoiled, however, when we are told that at least one person argued that Rabelais was actually an old rat.

Edifying or not, we immediately recognize Field’s anecdote. It is even a sub-genre, of sorts (which makes it “a sort of sorts”); it gives us information about the collecting habits of men of old. Beyond any question, they were majestic in their bookish lunacies. And yet, it is my thesis that the species of grand eccentrics has not entirely died out. Its members are still here, and you may encounter them if only you know where to look.

And where should one look? Well, in antiquarian bookstores, of course; or in the memberships of Friends of the Library organizations. And at book auctions, book and antique shows, antique shops and malls, flea markets, junk stores, estate and yard sales … and in the several publications whose readerships are explicitly and densely bookish.

You will not, of course, recognize them according to the stereotype of a bent and bearded old man shuffling in his slippers among the prized volumes of his library, ensconced away from an indifferent world of mindless noise. They will be young women with long dresses and long hair, and fat women in shorts, holding onto the hand of bewildered children; they will be bearded men in overalls and bespectacled men wearing neatly pressed suits and sharp-toed shoes. They will be students, lawyers, electricians … even politicians, like the late Maynard Sensenbrenner, Mayor of Columbos, Ohio, who years ago—even as the chief officer of a very large midwestern city—liked to haunt Salvation Army stores, looking for bargains among their accumulations of books. All variety of people, in short; but all possessed of uniquely furnished minds.

Finally, it must be admitted that this essay I am about to end is not the account of an outsider, or some sort of disinterested—much less, uninterested witness. The subject is not something remote I have travelled to, as a foreign correspondent might travel to Nepal or Uganda; for I myself am a member of that exotic population under scrutiny. Even though I am not aware of possessing any of its more spectacular and grandiose singularities, I am nevertheless something of an antiquarian—which is to say, one who is fascinated with the lives, deeds, habits and beliefs of people long dead.

In any popular view, that in itself is a certificate of eccentricity, if not madness. I do not have to sport a corduroy jacket over my raincoat in a downpour or speak of the dense clutter in an empty room or protest that a coffin that never existed did not contain a specific corpse to prove my membership. Simply devoting so many of my hours to the artifacts of the long dead is all that is required, and it is something I do willingly and with ineffable pleasure. Old disenfranchised realities show how fragile, and how pathetic and evanescent, all the passions of the moment will eventually prove to be. This is true of all moments, those of every time and every generation. It is, of course, one of the few absolute truths we know.

But what alternative is there to our imprisonment in the present moment? The Past is always there, and it’s always interesting and always changing. We learn more and more about it, and are nourished by what we learn. It is, appropriately, antiquarian wisdom that the Past is an essential human dimension, and to ignore it utterly is a terrible evasion.

If books, as interior instruments, can seem to unfit us for the reality of the moment, such a sacrifice of “relevance” is a price some sensible people are willing to pay … even if other sensible people, those who are malignly unaflicted, cannot understand why they should pay anything at all, or what they are getting for their money.

⁸ For those afflicted with logic, I will admit that the argument is circular; but like many circular arguments, it’s true anyway—it’s truth is just not proved by the argument.

⁹ Gladstone’s great political antagonist was none other than Benjamin Disraeli, son of that Isaac whose malicious attack on bibliophiles was quoted earlier. It is pleasant to contemplate the possibility that these two facts might be connected.