Books and Book-lovers
BY V. M. INAMDAR
I have a friend who is a great lover of books.
There must be many of his kind, for love of books is a common enough weakness
or strength?–in most people who have been fortunate to have been initiated into
the great of mystery of knowledge. But my friend’s case is peculiar. Love of
reading is surely one of the most unselfish kinds of pleasure which man may
have, but the love of books can, I think, be clearly differentiated from the
love of reading. It is quite possible, and perfectly natural also, that one,
may be a lover of books because one loves to read them. But he who loves
reading may well satisfy his craving by borrowing books either from a library
or a friend who by might have them. No doubt
those who love to read books would naturally like to have at hand some
favourites of theirs, old as well as new. It is surely innocent luxury to be
able, at odd moments, to dip into an old favourite the novel which we have read
and re-read a number of times, to be able to re-live the first fascinating
experience of contacting a great
mind, to wander into the romantic heart of an ancient legend, or again to pluck
the delicate crest of charming poetical efflorescence of ages ago. It is a
common fact experience of all those who read their books for the love of them
that they feel sometimes unaccountably drawn to an old masterpiece that has
opened its heart to odd moments of leisured reflection and, if at some moments
the particular book to which you feel drawn is not at hand, the sense of and
real disappointment is too keen for words. Such moments come unbidden indeed,
and not to have at hand the book to which wayward fancy has mischievously
greatly led you seems to be the end of the world.
In such a person the love of books and love of
reading happily coincide, but my friend’s case has convinced me that love of
reading and love of books are not quite the same thing, that they can exist
independently. They seem to be two distinct types of attachment, though
generally and understandably a good lover of books is also a good reader of
books. Such a reader generally has with him some of his favourites, if not all
the volumes he might love to possess. But what makes the love of books seem odd
and has peculiar is the case of people who seem to love books (may it be for
their own sake?) too ardently to be suspected as pretence, who are ever eager
to the welcome a new publication, to fondle and caress the fresh bright
exterior without ever the possibility, for a variety of reasons, of being able
to detect peep into the insides. I and this in mind when I said that my
friend’s case is peculiar. He is an omnivorous lover of books and, for all that
I know, he cannot possibly read a tenth of what he goes on buying: He cannot do it even if he wishes to. Not a
week passes without his lugging home a beloved load from the bookseller with
whom he seems to have placed a standing order that, of whatever issues from the
press, a copy must be reserved for him. It does not matter in the least for him
whether it is fiction or philosophy, whether it is a play or a penny-dreadful,
whether it is an anthology of poems or a manual on street acrobatics, whether
it is travel or biography or what not. That is nothing to him; for all books
have a place in his expansive affections. The result has been that he has
cartloads and cartloads of books, books of every description, books good, bad
and indifferent, not stacked and heaped in a medley, as such greedy buyers may
be expected to let them fall into, but neatly arranged on shelves and well
looked at and after. A book definitely means to him something more than printed
pages bound together decently or otherwise. How else can we explain the loving
care he bestows on each individual volume, in giving it a warm brown paper cover
in addition to the jacket it may have, in providing for it a place on a
well-ordered shelf, and always taking scrupulous care to see that the greedy
white-ants and the not less greedy outside reader is never allowed to devour
the contents. The love of books is something religious with him, something
mysterious, something which has always challenged my understanding.
How then can this love of books be explained? Is it
mere fad, a fancy, or a desire to be in the fashion? Is it merely an aesthetic
pleasure that one might derive from the mere sight of books? Is it the
possessive instinct that can boast of a valuable collection, or is it the wish
to surround oneself with books, as Arnold Bennett advised in one of his books,
so that constant association with, or the mere presence of, books in one’s room
might possibly keep away bad thoughts and inspire good ones? Or is it, again, a
short cut to social prestige and dignity by creating an impression of profound
scholarship, for no outsider can suspect that so many books can ever be
purchased for mere possession. To impress? To shock? To surprise? Which of these, if any, is the inspiring
motive? It may be any, it may be all,
or it may be none.
Fad it cannot be, neither can it be a fleeting
fancy, because both fad and fancy cannot sustain long. They have their day and
then are heard no more. They vanish with our perceiving the ridiculous that
lurks behind them. And my friend is a buyer for decades now! Nor can it be the
desire to be in the fashion, for the simple reason that fashions change these
days as swiftly as pseudo-politicians’ opinions and for the reason that
book-buying is today being regarded too academic a habit to be practically
useful. In this century of speed and change what is fashionable today may be
out-moded tomorrow and discarded as mediaeval the day after. A time was when it
was fashionable for a gentleman to buy books, to have for himself a library of
his own, a library that housed the classics of old as also the new volumes
advertised on the tongue of the fashionable gossip of the day. However much of
a fashion it was, the gentleman was a gentleman who knew that books were meant
for reading, and he never failed, though today it might look vain and
ludicrous, to pass on to his hearers a tag from Shakespeare or a quotation from
Cicero or an adage from the age-old Subhashitas.
If it was fashionable for gentlemen to buy books then, it was also
fashionable to read as them and make such use of them as individual
propensities dictated. But today when
gentlemen have become less gentle and are trying to move further away from
their ideal portrait in one of Newman’s exquisite essays, book unfortunately
are denied the ordinary courtesy of but being read. But even this, after all,
is an inadequate explanation of my friend’s case. For possession of books can
neither by itself make for fashion nor give to one the qualities of a
gentleman-a symbol of all that we associate with culture. May it then be a
purely aesthetic fascination?
No doubt there is a kind of pleasure to be derived
from the mere sight of books, for books after all are beautiful things. He must
be an unfortunate man who cannot experience the thrill of handling a brand new
book, of delicately feeling the smooth cover jackets and the soft pleasant
cover boards, of devouring with avidity the neat gold lettering on the back or
take in with contented eyes the shining gold of the top edge. There is
undoubted pleasure in cutting open the leaves that have an odour of their own
and in glancing with hasty curiosity into the contents of a page which the
delighted finger might open by chance. But need it be said that all this
pleasure is not so much the result of the physical contact with the crisp
exterior of the new book as it is of the innumerable imaginative associations
which cling to it? We never purchase a book blindly and at random without
knowing what it is about. We have either a fascination for the subject of which
it treats or for the writer who writes it. That it is so can be seen from the
experience of a reviewer who does not know what odd books the mail may bring
him, and who would therefore naturally be drawn first to the titles and the
contents, unless a particular volume is arrestingly beautiful.
The War has cost us a lot of art and beauty in the
production of books but there are many old books bound in thick leather with
quaint designs the embossed in gold. We love them for the very quaintness of
their covers, for the colourful irregular pattern of the first- inside pages,
for the far-away look of fading print. Such books hold an old glamour such as
hangs about historical monuments crowded with the memories of a bygone past. I
have before me now a copy of Sir William Jones’ translation of Sakuntala, printed nearly a hundred
years ago and I can never part with it or cast it away–no “not for all Venice!”
–though it is bound and produced in the antique style, though its pages have
become so fragile that the least irreverent handling will surely “break” them.
Its age is only less attractive than the contents that have spread their
fascination lover twenty centuries! And who would not love Tagore’s Gora or the Gitanjali in those soft supple covers of Santiniketan, with their
designs full of a seductive gorgeousness? Who would not love to greet and welcome
to one’s shelf a copy of Shakespeare’s quaint old folios, an old dust-eaten
first edition copy of the Religio Medici,
or The Vicar of Wakefield, or the
huge portentous volumes of The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, an early edition of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, or Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, Carlyle’s Past and Present, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy or, the most
graceful of all, a copy of the Rubaiyat?
Who would not love the slim Shropshire
Lad and meet the robust challenge of The
Testament of Beauty? But here, again, we are confusing the issue. For what
would all these books be worth, however beautiful and hover fragrant with the
dust of ages, unless we have read them and loved them and have loved to return
to them time and again? The pleasure surely is the pleasure which the contents
have brought to us, the intellectual and emotional responses they have evoked
in us, the visions of life they have afforded us and the light they have shed
on our path, the intangible way in which they have moulded our attitudes–that
is what makes us return to them and wish for
their possession. The look of a book can allure sometimes, no doubt, but it is
an allurement that cannot hold its own for any length of time. Books will not
teach us the use of books, said Hazlitt, nor can they by themselves confer
prestige or dignity or scholarship through the sheer right of possession.
But books are books and book-lovers are book-lovers
after all, and, baffled by my friend’s case, I have often wondered at my own
officious curiosity about his expensive habit of removing books from the
bookseller’s shelf to his own. Of one thing, however I can be definite: and
that is his conviction that a book is too good and beautiful a thing to remain
without human affection on the bookseller’s shelves, that it is too good a
secret to be left on the market-place, that it must decorate the home, and,
finally, that life cannot be lived well and wisely without books. This, I
believe, condones every fault in him and makes his strange behavior so full of
sense and significance. After all, how many are there today who are prepared to
give to books such reverence, love and care, in these days when regard for the
academic accomplishments is definitely on the decline?