The book collector and "The Subconscious Shelf"

The New York Times looks at the history of our bookshelves: "Because books can be owned without being read and read without being owned, bookshelves reveal at once our most private selves and our most public personas. They can serve as a utilitarian tool or a theatrical prop." "To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self," writes Leah Price. She continues:

Of course, not all the spines we display have real books behind them. In the 1830s, the poet Thomas Hood devised a set of painted spines for a door to a library staircase in the Duke of Devonshire’s grand country house at Chatsworth (the original for Pemberley in “Pride and Prejudice”). Puns traditionally painted on dummy spines, like “Essays on Wood,” stood next to titles of Hood’s invention, like “Pygmalion, by Lord Bacon.” A few decades later, Charles Dickens had a door in his study painted with fake spines bearing titles like “History of a Short Chancery Suit” (in 21 volumes) and “Cat’s Lives” (in nine).

Price's stance on the book collector is pretty clear (and not uncommon):

But why display fakes when you can buy real books you have no intention of reading? More than a millennium before print, Seneca criticized “those who displayed scrolls with decorated knobs and colored labels rather than reading them,” noting, “it is in the homes of the idlest men that you find the biggest libraries.” And before there were coffee-table books (a 1962-vintage replacement for “grand-piano books”), “furniture books” had already attracted scorn. An 1859 article of that title compared bibliophiles who cared more about bindings than about words to lovers who “think more of the jewels of one’s mistress than of her native charms.”

But Price also invokes an argument for the book collector, without really addressing it, which is interesting. "The artist Buzz Spector’s 1994 installation 'Unpacking My Library' consisted of all the books in his library, arranged 'in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest, on a single shelf in a room large enough to hold them.'" Most likely Spector's piece (and Price's new book, also called Unpacking My Library [cf. her byline]) drew inspiration from the famous Walter Benjamin essay of the same title; and where Price provides example after example of "the lazy child whose books are 'only on your shelves," Benjamin's essay instead gives comfort:

ActualIy, inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector's attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner's feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility. You should know that in saying this I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust. But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.

[...]

For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

Read "The Subconscious Shelf" in full here.