The library in question is not the Great Library of Alexandria, but it is every bit as much a thing of the past, existing now as scarcely a memory—almost legendary, positively Edenic. I think it had been my ambition throughout much of my life to accumulate a collection of books in the ideal, grandly compendious style of the personal libraries assembled by the most literate of prosperous Victorian gentlemen. I knew I would never be able to amass the literally hundreds of thousands of volumes that Gladstone and Disraeli each left behind when they departed this life, but at its apogee my library was around 20,000 volumes, which in our day, and within the practical material constraints pressing on me, was a fairly estimable hoard. Some of the books were rare and beautiful, many were ordinary, a great many superfluous, but I clung to all of them like a miser guarding the heaps of gold coins kept in his vault.
And somehow I had deceived myself that my particular kind of greed was more pardonable than that of men who fill their sprawling garages with antique motor cars or drape themselves in the costliest lines of designer suits. Surely, I told myself, a great personal library is an almost spiritual achievement, a kind of generous hospitality to the world at large, an open heart inviting in all the mysteries and beauties of art and culture and wisdom, a sort of noble annex of honorable knowledge that one has attached to one’s own soul and mind. But, of course, owning a complete set of Ruskin bound in gleaming green hand-tooled leather, for instance, or a complete collection of Max Beerbohm or Saint-John Perse or Vladimir Nabokov or Saul Bellow or S. J. Perelman or Patrick White first editions, or a nearly complete collection of Lafcadio Hearn’s most beautifully designed books, or six different editions of Gibbon, or twenty-three different editions of the Alice books is as much a sensuous indulgence and carnal extravagance as an Italian sports car or a mistress with expensive tastes.
And to what end? Probably just to revel in the gasps of surprise that the sight of the collection fully displayed might very occasionally evince from a new visitor to one’s home. That may be the pettiest motive possible in this life for an exaggerated acquisitive habit. If, as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians, those whose works will have merited no reward at the end of days will have to be saved “as though by fire” when the damnable works they did leave behind are consumed, the insatiable bibliophile may prove to have chosen a particularly combustible vice to indulge.
In any event, it is all gone now, except for a few jagged fragments. In 2014, a natural catastrophe of an insidiously furtive and unanticipated kind overtook both me and my library, and ultimately (though in agonizingly protracted stages) the latter had to be liquidated. The bereavement of losing nearly forty years of accumulated texts, however, was not nearly as great as I thought it would be (allowing for the possibility that I am still in a state of shock). It turns out that all those texts are still out there to be read, and that many of them I did not need anyway. I found the books of theology the easiest to part with, since many of them are very dull; I am never going to read Barth’s Church Dogmatics again, for instance, and did not really enjoy it very much the first time. And all those yellowing Vintage paperbacks of the authors who were considered especially significant when I was in high school or college—Camus, Faulkner, Sartre, Mann, Gide, and so on—dissipated like a pale morning fog without any profound sense of desolation descending on me. Even the loss of many volumes of a rarer and more recherché nature somehow left me more or less emotionally intact (does anyone really need all five volumes of Osbert Sitwell’s memoirs?). The books published abroad in various European and Asian languages, ancient and modern, were somehow harder to part with in many cases, and I suspect that was because they had subtly served my vanity more than the volumes in English, but their loss too did not destroy me.
I learned from the experience, in the end, that all vanity is vanity, all lust is lust, and all excess is excess, no matter what the objects of one’s desire. The aesthetics of bound volumes is unique and exquisite; but there are more important things. I love Robert Louis Stevenson. I think there was no greater prose stylist in English in the nineteenth century, no better storyteller, and no better travel writer. It astonishes me that he has often been held in higher esteem by judicious foreigners (like Borges) than by British or American readers. And I especially loved reading his work from the complete twenty-six-volume set I had owned since boyhood, with its evocative dull red covers and rough-cut pages and illustrations shielded by translucent slips of rice-paper. But, now that those volumes are gone, I find that the texts have lost none of their power to delight when I read them in the Delphi Classics eBook edition of his collected works (about $2.00 for the whole thing) on a Kindle device. And I no longer have to drag the ponderous burden of the bound set about the earth, along with all the other volumes in my library, like Jacob Marley’s chains.
Even so, I am going to indulge in a little nostalgia for that vanished library, which was a happy retreat for many years. A friend recently asked me for a reading list of roughly twenty-five volumes, and this immediately struck me as an ideal way to take one last stroll around the grounds before locking the gates on that particular estate of memory. So here is my catalogue of suggestions for reading on a very long trip—maybe a convalescent’s journey down to the seaside to take the purging air, or some other trip suitably Edwardian in nature and extent. All are books I especially love, or at least revere, though none may seem like an immediately obvious choice (because, really, no one needs to be told to read Homer or Dante or Shakespeare or Milton or Tolstoy or Proust or Rilke). Honestly, they are all quite marvelous in their diverse ways. So, in no particular order: