My Odd Shelf

Pradeep Sebastian leafs through his stack of eclectic 'books on books' and the interesting trivia they hold.

If you look at the bookshelves of most devoted readers and book collectors, you're bound to find at least one shelf (sometimes just a row of books) that is odd. Odd for the books it holds. They'll all be books about something very special or peculiar or quaint to the person who has bought or collected them.

A shelf of books on maps rows of books about ships or books on esoteric food. This, then, is our most personal shelf. We don't expect others to really share our intense interest in these subjects, in these quaint obsessions. My own odd, personal shelf contains books about books. This is a fairly new genre in contemporary non fiction writing that records readers, book lovers, book collectors and writers speaking of their love and devotion for books. From the large, obvious themes like the lure of first editions and second-hand bookshops to small, fringe asides about reading in bed, different kinds of bookshelves and strange book titles.

Not content with reading books, collecting books and handling them, I grew hungry over the years to hear other book-haunted voices and began to seek out these books about books. Soon I had a whole shelf of them. I'd like to look at three of the finest books about books from my odd shelf. The most entertaining book about books from my shelf is Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World (St.Martin's Press) by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. This is a lively, enchanting, knowledgeable and stylish account by a young couple about their travels to old bookstores in search of rare books and first editions. In their first ever visit to an antiquarian bookstore they discover that the more beautiful the edition, the more suspect it is. They stare longingly at a row of classics bound in leather with gilt edging, only to be told by the owner they were worthless. The only edition that really matters, they learn, is the First Edition. And it is not long before the First Edition fever grips them.

"We didn't want condition," they write, "we wanted character." My favourite part is the lore on rare books, how to identify a First Ed and what they are priced at. The most legendary bit of lore on rare books concerns the discovery of a book called Tamerlane by a Bostonian that was found in the dustbin of a garage sale for $15. When it turned out to be actually Edgar Allan Poe's first book, it was auctioned at Sotheby's for a quarter of a million dollars. To their utter astonishment the Goldstones discover that the most expensive First Ed is not something by Shakespeare or Dickens or Austen but Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, priced at $50,000. Ayn Rand's own copy of The Fountainhead is $15,000. Catch 22 is $500. Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is $8,500. The very rare Call for the Dead, John Le Carre's very first novel, is $20,000. A Wodehouse ranges from $150 to 250. Dracula is $ 9,500. H.P. Lovecraft First Eds are so rare that even a reprint will go for as much as $10,000. The Goldstones never find out the price of The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye because they never even sight a good edition of these books, let alone a First Ed.

The second book from my odd shelf is Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) a collection of 18 personal essays about a lifelong love affair with books. Ann Fadiman writes: "I didn't feel truly married until my husband and I merged book collections." That's from the chapter "Marrying Libraries"; other intriguing chapter titles are: 'The Joy of Sesquipedalians' (you look that one up) and 'The Literary Glutton', books on food. When she was 18, Fadiman wrote in her paperback copy of Middlemarch such marginal advice to the heroine as "Don't marry that creep Casaubon". This may not be of value to anyone else, she notes, but reminds her of the kind of person she once was. For Fadiman making these margin- jottings is a form of conversation, turning monologue into dialogue.

Easily the most interesting book on books is Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Flamingo): an elegant, erudite book that lovingly and painstakingly narrates the history of reading. It, too, has beguiling chapters such as: The Silent Reader ,The Missing First Page, Forbidden Reading and -my favourite - The Book Fool which records the different kinds of spectacles worn (and looks sported) by bookworms down the ages! He devotes an entire chapter called 'Stealing Books', which traces the earliest instances of entire civilisations stealing entire libraries from others, detailing the methods of the earliest know book thief - Conte Libri- Carucci della Sommaia (b.1803).

A more contemporary true tale of bibliokleptomania is the story of the notorious book thief Stephen Blumberg who, over the years, stole 18, 900 rare books worth 40 million dollars from several famous libraries, including the Widener (670 books) in Harvard. He liked books, not just to read them but to see them on his shelves (eighty six floor-to- ceiling bookshelves) and smell them.

Manguel lists some reasons why he holds on even to books he doesn't read or want anymore: "I tell myself that every time I get rid of a book, I find out a few days later that it is precisely the book I'm looking for…but the main reason I hold onto this ever-increasing hoard is a sort of voluptuous greed. I delight in knowing that I'm surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life. I know something dies when I give up my books, and my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia The more decrepit my memory becomes, the more I wish to protect this repository of what I've read, this collection of textures, voices and scents. Possessing these books has become all-important to me, because I've become jealous of the past."

Nothing has captured the drama of bookishness better than this new genre, and I can already see my one Odd Shelf devoted to books on books turn into many shelves. I'm drawn to them because they are really one long meditation on the intellectual and inner life of a reader.