Bibliomania: A Quintessential Passion

by

Amanda Joseph

I was at the beach in Margaret River, a town located in the South West of Western Australia that is renowned for its surfing beaches and wineries. The breeze off the sea was full of salt and seaweed so that when I opened my mouth, I caught little drops of ocean that popped and sizzled on my tongue.

The beach was crowded but my attention was caught by a small dark-haired girl, sitting just at the edge of the tide. She must have been about six or seven, but what drew my interest was the intensity of her actions, her absolute obliviousness to the world around her.

As I walked past her, I saw that she was collecting and organising seashells. There were blue ones and pale pink ones and conical ones and flat ones, all stacked in piles, one next to another. I was suddenly in vivid mind of myself at the same age sitting on a tiled floor, only instead of shells I would collect and organise—with the same unwavering intensity—different words. I can remember sitting with Golden Books scattered around me, pouring over them and sorting in my mind the different words that I came across.

There were the small words, the plain words that were not pretty but were strong. Words that were like the string on which you could weave many pretty stones together and allowed you to create an elegant bejewelled necklace to parade around. Words like and and it and there.

With these words you could produce sentences that were darkly beautiful, or beautifully dark: “The island in its starkness, in its unyielding bleakness, held no deceptions, no illusions,” wrote Anne Bishop in Daughter of the Blood. “Poisons weren’t sugar-coated, brutality wasn’t masked in silk and lace. There was nowhere for cruelty to hide.”

There were pretty words in my collection too, words that, when spoken made the air dance, words like aria, gossamer, ethereal, serenity, and rhapsody. There were words that I hoarded like a dragon, words like quintessential and redolent and talisman. I could never keep them for long. Words in all their sempiternal beauty cannot be held prisoner any more than one can hold and keep a shooting star.

Ex-Libris by Anne Fadiman is a trove of essays that explores just such logophilic and bibliophilic infatuations. Its crispy, cream-coloured pages are brimming with quirky little anecdotes that wink at its readers. In ‘The Joy of Sesquipedalians’ she brings up the fact that finding big, beautiful words in today’s world seems to be far more difficult than it was, say, back in the 1920s.

There just aren’t that many new words that have the same wonderful cadence as grimoire (which isn’t even a word according to my Microsoft Word spell-check) and tintinnabulation. Instead we have words like ladsy (an Australian word for a guy who is very drunk) and rad (short of course for radical) and crunk (a mixture, according to the Urban Dictionary, of the words ‘crazy’ and ‘drunk’).

The words I love tend to be Latin-based words. This may have something to do with the fact that, until I was eleven years old I attended a French school in Montreal, Canada, and French is a language that is more Latinate than English. I love the sound of Latin-based words. They make music when they slip through your teeth; they feel good when they rest on your tongue, when they hover in front of you after they are spoken. To me, they seem more romantic, they are laced with a sort of eroticism that Germanic-based words seem to lack.

When Fadiman asked her friends whether they thought we knew more words today than in the 1920s, the split, she said, was down the middle. Her comedian friend thought that the words on the Internet made up for all the words that we had lost, a thought Fadiman describes as ‘mephitic’ (noxious).

The thought, to me, is repulsive! To think that the words we have gained from the Internet could ever be compared to the words that we have lost is beyond me. Pick up any old volume, be it Shakespeare, Keats or Wordsworth, and look at the words that are used. Compare them to the words you hear around you every day.

Those words, they make you feel. Whenever I read a classic, like The Divine Comedy by Dante, I feel the words in my whole body;

The time was the beginning of the morning;
And the sun was climbing in company with those stars
Which were with him when the divine love

First set those lovely things in motion; and this,
With the hour it was, and the delightful season,
Gave me reason to entertain good hope

(Canto I, Inferno, translated by C.H. Sisson)

The words are powerful, powerful enough to create the pictures of the story the writer is telling. I have never gotten the same vivid euphoria from reading a blog. (Even that word makes me shudder; it doesn’t invoke beautiful pictures, does it?)

Fadiman’s playwright friend comes to what I believe is the most apt conclusion: “We know fewer words, and the ones we’ve gained tend to be less beautiful. Just listen to the words on your list! The words we’ve lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we’ve gained tend to be denotative. I’ve never seen ‘modem’ used in a poem.”

That statement struck me as depressingly true. Modem doesn’t have the same romance. It’s technical. Mechanical. Boring. Bland. Most of the words that thump through the streets today are. How can one possibly compare these modern scraps of coal to the shining jewels of words like vermillion and serendipity? I think it has a lot to do with us as a society. Our society is one where time is money. We rarely take time to allude to things, we’re expected to be direct, use simple language, make our point quickly and in a straightforward manner, and move on to the next point. There is no time to make it sound pretty, to dress it in silk and lace.

Just look at the legal profession, the area where I make my living. Every day I write advice letters to clients that are short, succinct—and use ugly words. They aren’t musical. In fact, they seem jarring, like loud metallic banging instead of a beautiful instrumental symphony. There is no place for words like forthwith and aforementioned and alas. There is no place for poetry.

Even in the non-professional world, the music in words is disappearing in our rush to get our point across. There is a new language developing, one seen in chat rooms, heard on cell phones and read in e-mails the world over, one that cuts, abbreviates, obliterates words that were once beautiful. And all so that we can say what we need to in a short, succinct, and ugly, manner; words like LOL (Laugh Out Loud), devo (devastated), msg (no not the chemical found in Chinese food, but “message”).

As a young girl, by the time I had exhausted the Golden Books in my search for more words to add to my collection, I had found a new collection to begin—my passion for words had grown into a love of beautiful writing and a love of story. The ability to take words and thread them into a tapestry is one of the most ancient and wonderful of all arts. Stories are powerful elixirs that can grant  a reprieve from mundane life. It may be a form of escapism, but a healthy form that enriches by allowing you to experience the heat of the Egyptian desert (Gene of Isis) or the upheaval in the court of Henry VIII (The Other Boleyn Girl).

And so my love for words and stories progressed naturally into a love of books. I love their smell, their shapes, their textures. They are a portal away from my world, away from billable hours, clients, bosses, and  long hours. What I love most of all is that just by sitting on your shelf books can tell a person more about the ‘inner’ you than anything you ever say or do in your life. They mark the passage of your growth from child, to youth, to adult.

The state of your books can also say a lot about you, according to Fadiman. Bibliophilia can apparently take many shapes. ‘Never do that to a book’ is a hilarious essay in Ex-Libris that any bibliophile can read and relate to with an insuppressible giggle of embarrassment (even when sitting on a crowded rush hour train). In the essay Fadiman’s brother, when in Copenhagen, left a book splayed open on his bedside table in the hotel room. When he returned, the book was closed with a bookmark between the pages and a note from the maid saying ‘Sir, you must never do that to a book.”

To Fadiman, who loves books and who is unable to imagine a “more bibliolatrous family” this was mortifying. It was only later that she came to realise that, just as there is more than one way to love a person, there is more than one way to love a book. There is the courtly love,  the love where preserving the physical sanctity of the book is as important as the words themselves, “her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration.”

Then there is the carnal love. Where the book’s words are considered sacred, but “the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated.”

I undoubtedly and somewhat abashedly fall into the second category, I am a carnal lover of books. As I type this, I’m surrounded by ten books, all scattered over my bed.  Plus three that have slid off my bed and onto the floor where I can’t see them. I know they are there because I tripped over them yesterday, but didn’t bother to pick them up.

I even partake in the cardinal sin of dog-earring my books on occasion. But I have my limits—I’ll never break a spine or tear the cover off my books. It’s just that sometimes I forget about the coffee cup in my hand when I’m turning a page, or that steam can be as damaging to pages as bath water.

Needless to say that not all the books in my collection are pristine. Court of the Midnight King by Freda Warrington is like a well-loved childhood toy that’s been carted around with me all over the world. When I open it, pages fall out, the corners are tatty from being shoved into backpacks and purses, from being dropped in the Underground in London and from skidding down a hill in the Yorkshire dales.

I’ve read it whilst sitting in the ruins of Middleham Castle where King Richard III, the main character of the novel, lived most of his life and whilst walking down the narrow, cobbled streets of York where he was most loved by his people. I stood under Micklegate Bar with the book in my hand and looked up to where the head of Richard’s father had been placed by the Lancastrians and I could almost see it, his head, half eaten by ravens, sunken cheeks and waxy skin, up there staring down at me.

The seductiveness of a good book is the same for readers whether they are carnal lovers of books or courtly lovers, whether they think words today are as precious as the words from yesteryear or not. The power of story will always have the ability to transcend age, gender, time. I think that is why I love collecting books. I have an idea that by collecting them I hold with me some of the most precious treasures created by humankind, the window into one person's soul or into another world altogether different from mine.

Ex-Libris is like a glass of champagne. Its golden, lively anecdotes leave you with a bubbly, happy feeling brimming in your chest long after you turn the last page. It is one of those precious, light-jewelled books that now make up part of my collection, where it sits amongst the dark ones and the pretty ones and the strong ones. And long after modems are replaced by some new advanced technology and the word for them falls into disuse, the treasures I have horded will still remain, glittering and eternal.

Books mentioned in this column:
Ex-Libris by Anne Fadiman (Penguin, 2000)
Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop, (HarperCollins, 2001)
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Oxford University Press, 1993)
Court of the Midnight King by Freda Warrington (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
Gene of Isis by Traci Harding (HarperCollins, 2006)
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (HaperCollins, 2005)


Having frequently moved around during her childhood, Amanda found a constant companion in books. Being an only child with a vivid imagination, she began not only consuming them but writing them as well. Recently admitted as a solicitor in the Supreme Court of Western Australia, she is now aiming to enter the publishing industry. Until then she manages to feed her addiction to books by rummaging through her local bookstore on her lunch breaks. Amanda loves to travel and is leaving on her first solo trip to Europe, intending to romp through the moors of Ireland and Wales and sail the Greek islands with her trusty companion (a book or three) by her side. A resident of Australia, she loves history and anything quirky and inexplicable. Contact Amanda.