The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words by Tom Mole

A real treasure trove for book lovers' - Alexander McCall Smith 'Every sentence is utterly captivating . . . probably the most compulsive text ever penned about what it means to handle and possess a book' - Christopher de Hamel, author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts 'Wonderfully insightful' - Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading 'Tom Mole's enthusiasm for books is infectious. If you also love books . . . you'll want to discover The Secret Life of Books' - Sam Jordison, author of Literary London 'A treat for bibliophiles everywhere' - Gavin Francis, author of Shapeshifters 'A treasure-chest, filled with bookish wonders' - Adam Roberts, BSFA award-winning author of Jack Glass 'I suspect I'll never look at a book the same way again' - Jon Courtenay Grimwood, author of Stamping Butterflies Editorial Reviews Review Probably the most compulsive text ever penned about what it means to handle and possess a book. --Christopher de Hamel, author, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts A real treasure trove for book lovers. --Alexander McCall Smith Wonderfully insightful. --Alberto Manguel, author, A History of Reading I suspect Ill never look at a book the same way again. --Jon Courtenay Grimwood, author, Stamping Butterflies A treasure-chest, filled with bookish wonders. --Adam Roberts, author, Jack Glass A treat for bibliophiles everywhere. --Gavin Francis, author, Shapeshifters Tom Moles enthusiasm for books is infectious. If you also love books . . . you'll want to discover The Secret Life of Books. --Sam Jordison, author, Literary London About the Author Tom Mole is Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh, where he runs the Centre for the History of the Book. His book What the Victorians Made of Romanticism won the 2018 Saltire Prize for Research Book of the Year. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 BOOK/BOOK The things we do to books and the things they do to us When I was a student, one of my professors was almost driven out of his office by his books. He had a large room on the ground floor of the English department, with bookcases around the walls. Slowly but surely these bookcases had filled over the years, and other shelves had been squeezed into every available space in the office. The bookcases had started to sprout out from the walls into the room, creating book booths, book niches and book nooks. But these, in turn, proved insufficient for his evergrowing collection of books. Soon he started to pile books on top of the bookcases, and to stack them double on the shelves, so that he had to move the books in front in order to reveal the ones behind. Before long, the books had spilled onto the floor, where the piles encroached further and further into the room with each passing month. Every time I visited the professor's office, it seemed a little harder than before to navigate a route across the room on the decreasing area of visible carpet. Attempting to keep the books in some kind of order seemed like a full-time job. I'd knock on the professor's door and hear a muffled shout telling me to come in. But when I opened the door there was no professor to be seen - the room was full of books, but apparently empty of its occupant. For a moment, I would think perhaps the professor had been crushed under a toppling pile of hardbacks. Then his head would appear from behind a ziggurat of volumes on a bewildering variety of topics. 'Just doing a bit of sorting out,' he'd say, as though he could ever hope to bring order to the evergrowing library that seemed, like the universe itself, to be continually expanding at an accelerating rate in every possible direction. My professor was doing a number of things to his books. He was acquiring them - choosing to buy these books rather than others. He was classifying them - putting them onto shelves and into piles with other books. These categories might be based on some quality such as their subject matter (history on one shelf, biography on another), or their size (larger books on the floor, smaller ones on the shelves), or their place in the cycle of his reading (as-yet-unread ones over here; the ones he was currently reading over there; the ones he had finished reading but not yet shelved somewhere else). He was reading them, taking notes from them, referring back to them, citing them in the articles he was writing, using them to prepare his lectures, lending them to his students, and so on in an endless process of erudition and amusement. But his books were also doing things to him. As well as pushing him out of his own office, they were shaping the spaces and the ways in which he worked. The books formed a complex ecosystem that he, too, inhabited. Sometimes, they made his work easier and better. Writing scholarly articles amid such a large private library allowed him to keep reference works, books by other scholars and the literature he was writing about within easy reach. All scholarship depends to some extent on other scholarship - even when it reaches different conclusions - and so the thousands of books he kept to hand assisted his work. Sometimes, on the other hand, the sheer number of books and their disorganised state must have made things more difficult. It must often have been tricky or impossible to find the book he wanted. Eventually the department secretary decided enough was enough and sent in a structural engineer to test whether the building could take the weight of so many books. Armed with the engineer's report, she persuaded the professor to give some books away. (He gave one to me.) But it was hard to convince him to downsize his library. His professional life, indeed his understanding of himself, was ranged around the shelves for all to see. Giving up some of his books felt like giving up part of his mind. There were benefits and difficulties in having such a large collection of books. But, for better or worse, his books were not just his passive tools; they were also exerting forces of their own on his life.