What, then, will the Pottery Barn’s armoire hold in practice? The catalog copy quietly goes on to note that this piece of furniture is “roomy enough to hold a 20”-deep television or stereo equipment (holes must be drilled in back).” Now we see: it makes a nice decorative envelope for a TV — but it can’t be pictured performing that primary and perfectly legitimate duty, because that would interfere with the catalog browser’s notion of him- or herself. What will make the browser pause and possibly lift the phone is the promise, the illusion, that the armoire is magical, that the spirit of those beautiful shadowy books in the picture will persist after delivery, raising the moral tone of the TV — in other words, that the armoire’s bookish past will give the TV a liberal education.
It’s undeniable that books furnish a room, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. They require furniture, in the form of bookshelves, but they are themselves furniture as well. “No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them, or read a single word”—so Sydney Smith, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, and a devoted Victorian reader, told his daughter as they had breakfast in his library. By chance, the book immediately to the right of The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus where I found it in the library was something called Bits of Talk, in Verse and Prose, for Young Folks, published in 1892, by Helen Jackson. She devotes a chapter to tips on making rooms pleasant to live in. She recommends sunlight first, and then color, especially the color red:
In an autumn leaf, in a curtain, in a chair-cover, in a pin-cushion, in a vase, in the binding of a book, everywhere you put it, it makes a brilliant point and gives pleasure.
She goes on:
Third on my list of essentials for making rooms cosey, cheerful, and beautiful, come — Books and Pictures. Here some persons will cry out: “But books and pictures cost a great deal of money.” Yes, books do cost money, and so do pictures; but books accumulate rapidly in most houses where books are read at all; and if people really want books, it is astonishing how many they contrive to get together in a few years without pinching themselves very seriously in other directions.
Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb, the Two Bad Mice in Beatrix Potter, try their best to maneuver a dollhouse bookcase holding a faux Encyclopædia Britannica, bound in red, into their mousehole, but it doesn’t quite fit. At the age of eighty and between Prime Ministerships, William Gladstone became fascinated with the problems of book storage, and during a visit to All Souls College, Oxford, he “launched out on his theme one evening in the Common Room,” in the words of one observer, “and illustrated his scheme of bookshelves by an elaborate use of knives, forks, glasses, and decanters.” Gladstone was not entirely sure how England was going to shelve all the books it produced without its citizens’ being, as he writes, “extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions of their own libraries.” But one thing Gladstone was sure of: bookcases should be plain. “It has been a fashion to make bookcases highly ornamental,” he says. “Now books want for and in themselves no ornament at all. They are themselves the ornament.”
Books are themselves the ornament. A tenth-century Arabic-speaking scholar learned the truth of this proposition as he was browsing in the book bazaar in Córdoba, Spain. Córdoba was a literary capital; it held what was then the largest library in the world. Our scholar (whose name I don’t know) was looking for a particular manuscript that he hadn’t yet been able to find for sale. Finally, to his inexpressible joy, he came across a copy, written in an unusually fine script. He bid for it eagerly. “But,” he writes,
always the auctioneer returned with a higher bid, until the price far exceeded the actual value. Then I asked the auctioneer to show me the competitor who offered so much. He introduced me to a gentleman in magnificent garments and when I addressed him as Doctor, telling him that I was willing to leave the book to him if he needed it badly, as it was pointless to drive the price up higher, he replied: I am neither a scholar nor do I know what the book is about; but I am in the process of installing a library, in order to distinguish myself among the notables of the city, and happen to have a vacant space which this book would fill.
Books fill vacant spaces better than other collectibles, because they represent a different order of plenitude — they occupy not only the morocco-bound spine span on the shelf, but the ampler stretches, the camel caravans of thought-bearing time required to read them through. If you amass a private library of hundreds of thousands of volumes, as the great Caliph Hakim II of Córdoba did before he died, in the year 976, you can feel confident that you have secured a kind of implied immortality: you die owning in reserve all the hours and years it would take those who outlive you to read, not to mention copy over, the words each book contains — and that bank of shelved time is your afterlife. And if you will your books to a cathedral library, or to a university, with the firm injunction that the books you give be chained in perpetuity (a stipulation that a number of English and Italian library benefactors included in their wills), you can’t truly die, or so you may secretly believe: you can’t sink to infernal sub-basement floors or float off to some poorly lit limbo, because your beloved delegation of volumes, the library that surrounded you in life, and suffered with you, and is you, is now tethered firmly to the present; you will live on, linked by iron and brass to the resonant strongbox of the world’s recorded thought. One testator of 1442 asked that his rare books be chained in the library at Guildhall, so that, he says, “the visitors and students thereof be the sooner admonished to pray for my soul.”
But no deterrent, including chains, is a guarantee of immortality. Books can burn, and they can suffer depredations under various kinds of zealotry, and they can simply get sold off for cash or mutilated by misguided conservators. The particular manuscript that the tenth-century Arabic scholar coveted and couldn’t afford (he doesn’t tell us what book it was) was very probably a casualty of several attendant centuries of civil war and turmoil in Spain. A satisfyingly heavy blue tome from 1939, called The Medieval Library, tells us that by the time Philip II of Spain was fitting out the library of the Escorial, not a single Arabic manuscript, nothing from the glory days of Córdoba, could be found anywhere in the kingdom. (“Fortunately, the capture of a Moroccan galley in which a considerable number of Arabic books and manuscripts was found relieved the royal librarian’s embarrassment,” writes S. K. Padover.) In England, tens of thousands of manuscripts — works that would have been dusted with foxtails by dynasties of whispering attendants in the Vatican if they had been fortunate enough to escape there — perished during the suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. They died slowly in some cases: used to polish candlesticks and boots, to wrap pies, to press gloves flat, or to repair broken windows. Manuscripts of Duns Scotus, who later became Gerard Manley Hopkins’s preferred scholastic philosopher, were nailed to the walls of outhouses and torn off page by page, forced to become, as one proud library purger wrote, “a common servant to evere man.”
All this distant adversity has one positive effect, however: the books now on our shelves become more ornamental and more precious — regardless of their intrinsic worth — by the charged, Lindisfarnean absence of the books that could have influenced or improved them, directly or at many removes, but can’t because they are lost. This explains why some of us, like eager high-school science students doing a unit on fruit flies, are drawn to study up close the short-lived images in catalogs or magazines, in search of tiny, attractively arbitrary points of literary embarkation. These books happen to be the books we have now. They’ve made it — made the leap from library catalog to mail-order catalog. They’re survivors. I haven’t yet ordered one of the tall revolving-shelf bookcases that the Levenger company, that very successful maker of “Tools for Serious Readers,” sells, but I did recently look up the multi-volume Biographical History of Massachusetts, published in 1909, that Levenger has shelved for display in the revolving bookcase shown on the cover of its early-summer catalog. I found, in Volume II, the story of Henry Albert Baker (no relation), a nineteenth-century dentist and lecturer on oral deformities, who in 1872 discovered the principle of the pneumatic dental mallet, a device used for forcing wads of silver amalgam into excavated molars. Baker, in the words of his biographer,