Nor is The Company Store alone among mail-order catalogs in giving prominence to the old or little-known work of literature. I counted thirty-six hand-me-down books, none with their original jackets on, in fifteen different settings, in the Crate & Barrel catalog for the spring of ’95. The books lie open on chairs, on hammocks, on the floor, as if whoever was reading them had left off briefly to check the status of an earth-toned lentil soup; on their pages rest studiously haphazard placeholders — a shell, a twist of ribbon, an apple, a daisy. The Crabtree & Evelyn catalog for spring offers a pair of three-and-a-half-ounce containers of Southampton Rose Home Fragrance Spray, which is a kind of highbrow air freshener, for seventeen dollars; its dignity is enhanced, and its price defended, by its placement next to a fancily bound Italian biography of Queen Elizabeth from 1965, whose title, translated, is Elizabeth I of England: The Virgin with the Iron Fist—itself not such a bad name for an air freshener. On page 28 of the spring Tweeds catalog, a woman wearing a nice cotton sweater holds open an unidentifiable clothbound book bearing visible, and quite beautiful, mildew stains. In one of the latest J. Crew catalogs, there is a literary interlude on page 33: a man in shorts and plaster-dusted work boots, sitting in a half-remodeled room — on break, apparently, from his labor of hammering and gentrifying — is looking something up in what close inspection reveals to be a Guide Bleu to Switzerland, probably from the forties, in French.
What is it with all these books? Isn’t the Book supposed to be in decline — its authority eroding, its informational tax base fleeing to suburbs of impeccably edged and weeded silicon? Five minutes with the tasteful Pottery Barn catalog of March 1995 may be somewhat reassuring. A closed universe of about fifty books circulates decoratively in its pages. The Pottery Barn catalog’s library may have been selected for the alpha-wave-inducing beige and blue-gray and dull red of its bindings, but the actual titles, which are nearly but not quite unreadable, sometimes betray reserves of emotion. In the tranquillity of a cool living room, a cream-colored book entitled Tongues of Flame appears, minus its jacket, on a shelf of the Trestle Bookcase, near the Malabar Chair. Then it shows up in some peaceful shots of iron end tables. Next, on the page that offers what the Pottery Barn’s furniture-namers call a Library Bed—“a bed whose broad panels suggest the careful woodworking found in old English libraries”—a historical novel called A Rose for Virtue makes its quiet entrance, underneath a handsome ivory-toned telephone. Three pages later comes the big moment, the catalog’s clinch: for, lying at the foot of the Scroll Iron Bed, open facedown on the cushion of the Scroll Iron Bench, as if it were being read, is a half-hidden volume that can be positively identified as Tongues of Flame, and leaning fondly, or even ardently, against it, at a slight angle, is A Rose for Virtue. Whether the rose’s virtue survives this fleeting flammilingus, we are not told; it’s enough to know that the two books, after their photographic vicissitudes, are together at last.
So I went to the library again, and checked out Tongues of Flame. It’s a collection of short stories, by Mary Ward Brown, which was published by Dutton in 1986. (There is also a novel called Tongues of Flame, by Tim Parks, set in England, that came out in 1985, but the large pale-gold letters on the binding of the Dutton edition are unmistakable.) The title story is about a married woman who wants to help a stuttering drunk reform his life by taking him to church. Her program seems to work at first, but one evening the preacher delivers a sermon so potent it sends the alarmed man right back to the bottle; in a matter of hours, his clumsy cigarette-smoking has set fire to the church. “Save the Bible!” hollers one of the parishioners as the flames rise from the roof, and it is eventually saved. The author writes:
The wet pulpit, with the Bible still on it, had been brought out into the churchyard. Pews sat haphazardly about. Songbooks, Sunday School books, and Bible pictures for children were scattered on the grass.
Were it not for the color-coordinating book lovers at Pottery Barn, I would never have read Mary Ward Brown’s short story — and it’s worth reading, more flavorful, perhaps, for having been found circuitously. Nor would I ever have troubled to determine which hymn it is that contains the simple but stirring phrase “tongues of flame.” It’s from “Father of Boundless Grace,” by the prolific Charles Wesley (Methodist, brother of John Wesley, and inspirer of William Blake), and it was probably written sometime in the 1730s:
A few from every land
At first to
Salem
came,
And saw the wonders of Thy hand,
And saw the tongues of flame!
And if I hadn’t read Tongues of Flame, I might never have been reminded of the story of another, bigger book fire. It took place in London on Saturday, October 23, 1731, at two o’clock in the morning. What was to become the library of the British Museum — a set of about a thousand books and manuscripts, which included the collection of the old Royal Library, along with the fabulous accumulation of Robert Cotton — was shelved, far too casually, in a room in a house in Westminster, and was overseen (according to Edward Miller’s That Noble Cabinet) by the son of the by then aged classical scholar Richard Bentley. The room below the library caught fire; tongues of flame found their way up through the wainscoting and reached the backs of the bookcases — or book presses, as they were often called — and, as the conjoined libraries began to sigh and crackle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, who lived nearby and had hurried over when he heard the clamor, plucked warm and smoking bundles of ancient parchment off the shelves and tossed them out the window to save them. Like Chuck Yeager, smoke-smirched but ambulatory after his plane crash at the end of The Right Stuff, Dr. Bentley himself emerged from the conflagration with the Codex Alexandrinus, the priceless fifth-century manuscript of the Greek Bible, in his arms. He was dressed in his nightgown, but he had apparently taken a moment, in the name of scholarly dignity, to slap on his wig. A hundred and fourteen books were ruined or lost that night — some of them “burnt to a Crust,” many of them irreplaceable — and a number of the ones that had been flung out the window to safety were swept together into heaps of shuffled and water-damaged pages and boxed away. Librarians didn’t succeed in restoring order to some of the surviving fragments until a century later.
And if I hadn’t been reminded of that British Museum fire I wouldn’t have been moved to reread the great book-fire scene in Mervyn Peake’s novel Titus Groan, published in 1946, which uses some of the elements from the mythical pre-history of the British Museum. Here’s how Peake describes the passing of Lord Sepulchrave’s library at Gormenghast: