But sometimes this order would not satisfy me and I'd reorganize my books by subject: fairy tales on one shelf, adventure stories on another, scientific and travel volumes on a third, poetry on a fourth, biographies on a fifth. And sometimes, just for the sake of change, I would group my books by language, or by colour, or according to my degree of fondness for them. In the first century a.d., Pliny the Younger described the joys of his place in the country, and among these a sunny room where "one wall is fitted with shelves like a library to hold the books I read and reread."35 At times, I've thought of having a library that consisted of nothing but my most thumbed volumes.
Then there would be groupings within groupings. As I learned then, but was not able to articulate until much later, order begets order. Once a category is established, it suggests or imposes others, so that no cataloguing method, whether on shelf or on paper, is ever closed unto itself. If I decide on a number of subjects, each of these subjects will require a classification within its classification. At a certain point in the ordering, out of fatigue, boredom or frustration, I'll stop this geometrical progression. But the possibility of continuing it is always there. There are no final categories in a library.
A private library, unlike a public one, presents the advantage of allowing a whimsical and highly personal classification. The invalid writer Valery Larbaud would have his books bound in different colours according to the language in which they were written, English novels in blue, Spanish in red, etc. "His sickroom was a rainbow," said one of his admirers, "that allowed his eye and his memory surprises and expected pleasures."36 The novelist Georges Perec once listed a dozen ways in which to classify one's library, "none satisfactory in itself."37 He halfheartedly suggested the following orders:
alphabetically by continent or country by colour
by date of purchase by date of publication by format by genre
by literary period by language
according to our reading priorities according to their binding by series
Such classifications may serve a singular, private purpose. A public library, on the other hand, must follow an order whose code can be understood by every user and which is decided upon before the collection is set up on the shelves. Such a code is more easily applied to an electronic library, since its cataloguing system can, while serving all readers, also allow a superimposed program to classify (and therefore locate) titles entered in no predetermined order, without having to be constantly rearranged and updated.
Sometimes the classification precedes the material ordering. In my library in the reconstructed barn, long before my books were put away in obedient rows, they clustered in my mind around specific subject-headings that probably made sense to me alone. It seemed therefore an easy task, when in the summer of 2003 I started to arrange my library, to file into specific spaces the volumes already consigned to a clear set of categories. I soon discovered that I had been overly confident.
For several weeks I unpacked the hundreds of boxes that had, until then, taken up the whole of the dining- room, carried them into the empty library and then stood bewildered among teetering columns of books that seemed to combine the vertical ambition of Babel with the horizontal greed of Alexandria. For almost three months I sifted through these piles, attempting to create some kind of order, working from early in the morning to very late at night. The thick walls kept the room cool and peaceful, and the rediscovery of old and forgotten friends made me oblivious of the time. Suddenly I would look up and find that it was dark outside, and that I had spent the entire day filling only a few expectant shelves.
Sometimes I worked throughout the night, and then I would imagine all kinds of fantastical arrangements for my books that later, in the light of day, I dismissed as sadly impractical.
Unpacking books is a revelatory activity. Writing in 1931, during one of his many moves, Walter Benjamin described the experience of standing among his books "not yet touched by the mild boredom of order,"38 haunted by visions of the times and places he had collected them, of the circumstantial evidence that rendered each volume truly his. I too, during those summer months, was overwhelmed by these visions: a ticket fluttering away from an opened book reminded me of a tram ride in Buenos Aires (trams stopped running in the late sixties) when I first read Julian Green's Moira; a name and phone number inscribed on a fly-leaf brought back the face of a friend long lost who gave me a copy of the Cantos of Ezra Pound; a paper napkin with the logo of the Cafe de Flore, folded inside Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, attested to my first trip to Paris in 1966; a letter from a teacher inside a collection of Spanish poetry made me think of distant classes where I first heard of Gongora and Vicente Gaos. "Habent sua fata libelli," says Benjamin, quoting the forgotten medieval essayist Maurus. "Books have their own fates." Some of mine have waited half a century to reach this tiny place in western France, for which they were seemingly destined.
I had, as I have said, previously conceived of organizing my library into several sections. Principal among these were the languages in which the books were written. I had formed vast mental communities of those works written in English or Spanish, German or French,
whether poetry or prose. From these linguistic pools I would exclude certain titles that belonged to subjects of interest to me, such as Greek Mythology, Monotheistic Religions, Legends of the Middle Ages, Cultures of the Renaissance, First and Second World Wars, History of the Book. . . . My choice of what to lodge under these categories might seem whimsical to many readers. Why stash the works of Saint Augustine in the Christianity section rather than under Literature in Latin or Early Medieval Civilizations? Why place Carlyle's French Revolution in Literature in English rather than in European History, and not Simon Schama's Citizens? Why keep Louis Ginzberg's seven volumes of Legends of the Jews under Judaism but Joseph Gaer's study on the Wandering Jew under Myths? Why place Anne Carson's translations of Sappho under Carson but Arthur Golding's Metamorphoses under Ovid? Why keep my two pocket volumes of Chapman's Homer under Keats?
Ultimately, every organization is arbitrary. In libraries of friends around the world, I have found many odd classifications: Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre under Sailing, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe under Travel, Mary McCarthy's Birds of America under Ornithology, Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked under Cuisine. But public libraries have their own odd approaches. One reader was upset because, in the London Library, Stendhal was listed under "B" for his real name, Beyle, and Gerard de Nerval under "G." Another complained that, in the same library, Women were classed "under the Miscellaneous end of Science," after Witchcraft and before Wool and Wrestling.39 In the Library of Congress's catalogues, the subject-headings include such curious categories as: