Some Thoughts on Bookshelves

One of the things I've enjoyed about being on Twitter is being able to see the bookshelves of other booklovers.  It’s the same voyeuristic thrill that I get from visiting someone’s home and stealing a glance at their shelves (if they have any - sometimes they don’t, and that’s a horror story in itself). I’ve recently drooled over the book caves of Javier Marias and Alberto Manguel, the latter of which formerly occupied a rustic, converted stone structure in the Loire Valley (sigh).   I’ve searched in vain for photos of the library of Jorge Luis Borges, with whom Manguel had an early acquaintance, although one can find fascinating representations online of Borges’ famously infinite “Library of Babel”.   For a few years now, when I’m feeling down or bored, I’ll get online and seek out photos of Neil Gaiman’s magnificent and well-stocked shelves.  I haven’t read an awful lot of Gaiman’s stuff, but I sense in him a kindred spirit when it comes to the written word.

Beyond famous authors, it’s the shelves of ordinary booklovers that I enjoy seeing.  While some are rather sparse, with fresh, neat softcovers (and there’s nothing wrong with softcovers) lined up, with ample room for photos and tchotchkes, by far my favorites are the big, overcrowded ones, with books crammed into every available space.  This is what I have at home, with books behind books, books stacked on top to the ceiling, books horizontal on top of those vertically shelved, in a manner to make an archivist or serious collector (as opposed to a bibliophile) cringe.  While I’m biased, this to me is the home of a true booklover, the kind of person who can rarely return home without a new find in his or her satchel.  The joys of a bibliophile are generally twofold: the hunt and the reading, but I’d add a third category – the sheer visual and tactile enjoyment.  Bookshelves are obviously essential for the best enjoyment of this pastime.

For those just starting out and with limited budget, shelving may be cinder block and lumber affairs, and, poised to disparage the latter a few weeks ago, I remembered my own early days, and the cinder blocks of my own that I had to lug from place to place whenever I changed address.  Cheap shelving meant more money for books, even if it meant sore muscles as well.  I later ditched the bricks and honed my meager carpentry skill by building and staining my own shelves.  I used to dream of constructing my shelves in the manner of Thomas Jefferson, who ingeniously designed his as sort of packing crates, so that lids could be screwed on if they needed to be transported.  At this point, most of my shelving is store-bought, and much more aesthetically pleasing than my own handiwork.

A project I’ve contemplated for some time is posting a complete, annotated set of photos of my own shelves and their contents, because I know that there are others out there just like me, who would enjoy seeing them and who would try to zoom in to assess the titles and editions either out of curiosity (an essential virtue of the bibliophile) or to add to their own wishlists.  We’re bibliomaniacs, and that’s just what we do.

It should come as no surprise that one of the subjects I collect are books about books.  Most of these are descriptive; however, I do have a few with an emphasis on photographing books on the shelf.  A recent acquisition that I’ve been drooling over is BiblioStyle by Nina Freudenberger, which is intensely packed with exquisite photos of books and shelves, along with profiles of collectors, including the late and lamented bookseller Michael Seidenberg, who ran Brazenhead Books, a “speakeasy”-type bookstore and literary salon, out of his apartment on the Upper East Side until his recent death .  

In closing, some of my favorite books of biblioporn are:


At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live With and Care for Their Libraries by Estelle Ellis (Carrol  Southern Books, 1994).  My sentimental favorite.  Everything from Nicholas Barker’s crowded shelves to Keith Richards’ man cave.




Living with Books by Alan Powers (Soma, 1999). A nice design guide to different book environments in the home.



Books Make a Home: Elegant Ideas for Storing and Displaying Books by Damien Thompson (Ryland Peters and Small, 2017). Newish book, excellent photographs.




Living with Books: 118 Designs for Homes and Offices by Rita Reif (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1973) – an interesting look at New York bibliophilia in the early 70’s. Lots of chrome, shag, and awkward hairstyles.




BiblioStyle by Nina Freudenberger (Clarkson Potter, 2019) – arguably the best of the lot, 270 pages of shelves and profiles.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

The only novel of a scion of Sicilian aristocracy, published posthumously because, famously, no one would publish it in his lifetime, ranks among my all-time favorite works.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa fully inhabits the world he describes in The Leopard, a world of both change and timelessness, a world deep with melancholy. I first read this in my late 20’s and thought it exquisitely rich; now, at 58, I find it even more so.  A common comment on this work is that the reader never wants it to end, but, of course, the ending is the point.  In Don Fabrizio, the Sicilian Prince of Salina, we witness the slow decline from vigor and sensuality to helplessness and decrepitude.  It is a most sad elegy, brilliantly told through the eyes of an aging Prince of a parched and dusty realm.  To read this homage to patriarchy - published in 1958 - in 2019 may seem hopelessly anachronistic, but read it for the language, for the achingly beautiful descriptiveness, for the sense, on paper, of time's inevitable passing.

The Book of Contemplation by Usama ibn Munqidh

The Book of Contemplation was published in 2008, around the same time as Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travelers in the Far North (the original of which was the source of Michael Crichton’s fictionalized Eaters of the Dead) and a few years before The Ultimate Ambition in the Art of Erudition (2016) and Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange (2017).  Like those texts, it is a terrific addition to the Penguin Classics collection of Islamic/Arabic works in translation, and I can only hope that others will follow. 


Usama Ibn Munqidh was a 12^th century Syrian nobleman and man-of-letters who was turned away from his family estate, by his uncle after his father’s death, leading him into a life of intrigue and adventure.  Rather than a straightforward memoir, his text is a series of incidences, mostly from the time of the Crusades, which by Usama’s reckoning exemplify the mysteriousness of – and merit the contemplation of - the ways of God. For us, their obvious value is the light these tales shed on the Muslim experience of the Crusades and their attitudes towards the “Franks” (i.e., western Europeans) who initiated them.  The descriptions of military encounters, often mere skirmishes, are vivid and come alive in Paul M. Cobb’s translation, which conveys an intimate, conversational tone to the memoirs.  This translation supersedes that of Philip K. Hitti, an eminent Arabist who published his version in 1929, and which is incidentally available on Internet Archive here.  Cobb respectfully updates and corrects some of his predecessor’s errors.


In addition to acts of valor, there are descriptions of the inscrutable ways of the Franks, glimpses of the lives of the nobility in medieval Syria, humorous vignettes, and enough accounts of gruesome injuries to keep the text interesting. It is the immediacy and vividness of these tales that fascinates, bringing to life the thoughts and reflections of a person who died almost a millennium ago.  Usama was apparently in his nineties when much of this was written, and he laments in the closing pages (perhaps coyly) that God has given him a long life descending into irrelevancy rather than an earlier, glorious death on the field of battle.  


Supplementing the main text is a long digression on hunting, usually with reminiscences of Usama’s father for whom hunting was a pastime that he pursued with apparently fanatical enthusiasm, and a selection of anecdotes on holy men and healers as well as selections of other works of Usama.


Cobb’s introduction fills in the biographical blanks in Usama’s life, and fleshes out some of the intrigues that Usama perhaps chose to downplay.  A valuable edition.

With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple by Dr. Susie J. Rijnhart

Dr. Susie J. Rijnhart, a spunky Victorian-era Canadian missionary, spends a few years (1895-1899) in Tibet, being spectacularly unsuccessful in converting the heathen and complaining about Tibetan hygiene.  Still, her notes on Central Asian lifeways and record of political unrest make interesting reading.  Her recollections of her baby boy, who is born and dies in Tibet and is buried in an unmarked grave, are tender, as are her memories of her husband, a displaced Dutch ne’er-do-well who was, apparently unknown to her, on the run from a rape charge.

Rijnhart’s frank notes on Tibetan culture are in decided contrast to Blavatsky’s fanciful Theosophical view of the plateau as the abode of floating lamas bathed in eternal celestial light.  You can almost smell the rancid butter that is generously offered to her by poor villagers at every turn and which she, to her credit, graciously accepts. On an ill-fated attempt to reach Lhasa, her small expedition is turned back and, abandoned by her guides, she and her husband are beset by bandits.  He goes off to reconnoiter and is never seen again.  Whether he is killed by the bandits or simply decided that this was a good opportunity to skedaddle is never established, but he was never heard from again.  Desperate, she puts her fate in the hand of some decidedly unsavory characters and, in veiled Victorian language, describes her stressful efforts to evade sexual assault (the pistol comes in handy) as she attempts to reach some outpost of civilization.

She eventually did reach safety and, after a period of recuperation, returned to China a few years later to continue her missionary work. She remarried (another missionary) and bore another son: she died soon after childbirth, in 1908.  In this adventurous memoir, she shows immense fortitude, bravery and compassion for the people she encounters, despite her biases against Lamaism, the Tibetan world-view, and disregard of basic hygiene.  My copy is the 1902 edition published by the Fleming H. Revel Company, via the Bible School Library of the Congregational Church in Binghamton, New York. My copy warns that “This book is on loan to you – it is not yours!” I suppose that, in the broad scheme of things, this is quite true.

The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition by Elias Muhanna

If you are a bookish-minded person with an interest in Middle Eastern history and culture, you might likely find The World in a Book: al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton, 2018), to be a good introduction to the medieval concept of adab (i.e., wide ranging literary works reflective of the author/compiler’s cultural cred).  We are fortunate that  the Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri the enormous work that is the subject of this study, compiled in thirty-one volumes in the early 14th century, survived intact so that a modern edition, published over many years (alas, seemingly only in Arabic), could be prepared in the twentieth century.  Al-Nuwayri, an official of the Mamluk court, whose duties largely had to do with financial and real estate management for the sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, decided at the end of his career to embark on an enterprise not uncommon to cultured members of high Islamic society, the preparation of a vast compendium of universal knowledge encompassing natural history (zoology, astronomy and the like), history (secular and religious, although the distinction was not likely made), instructions for court officials (particularly scribes) and whatever else piqued his interest. 

In addition to preparing this study, Elias Muhanna is also the translator of the only English edition of the original text, translated as The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, a volume in the Penguin Classics series published in 2016.  I won’t go into that edition too much except to say that, for most, the introduction to that work is quite adequate in introducing al-Nuwayri’s work, without the scholarly apparatus.  I’m delighted that this translation has been made, and the selection is interesting enough (the other night I read several selections relating to the Islamic version of the story of Adam and Eve), but when you consider that this is the winnowing down of a thirty-one volume work, it seems quite inadequate, and I believe that it would have benefitted from an enlargement with a taste of some of the more esoteric selections.  But then, this is my issue with other works of this sort, such as the Pliny’s Natural History, also published by Penguin (among other editions).  I have a personal animus towards abridgements (although there’s no way in hell I would have ever gotten through al-Nuwayri’s work anyway, it would be comforting to know that it’s there).

For The World in a Book, Muhanna has prepared a study that seems to be aimed more towards the scholar than the general reader, and he seems more often than not inclined to pass off to future scholars questions that require a bit deeper consideration.  Still, for a committed biblio-enthusiast, this is an absorbing study that digs into the origins and context of a fascinating and forgotten work.  If you share my interest in Middle Eastern/Islamic history and thought, I’d say this is well worth reading.

Robert Graves Interview

I've been enjoying reading the last volume of Richard Perceval Graves's unnecessarily gentle biography of his uncle, the poet Robert Graves.  Graves was certainly an eccentric, and rather manipulative to boot, which the younger Graves seeks to downplay. It occurred to me that I don't believe I've ever heard Robert Graves speak, so I went looking for an interview and found  this piece from 1965 with notable British prick Malcolm Muggeridge, whom Graves admirably tolerates.

By the way, despite my near total lack of media savvy (I still blog, for God's sake) I now post to Twitter: just photos of my books and other curiosities, under the name Bibliophilia Obscura.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics)

My presumption is that when he published a portion of these key texts in 1927, W. Y. Evans-Wentz chose this title to mirror that of Wallis-Budge’s 1895 translation of the Papyrus of Ani, now and forever known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead.  It turns out that the document we know as The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a more accurate title of which is The Great Liberation by Hearing) is but a portion of a larger corpus of materials discussing Tibetan Buddhist concepts of death, and the passage from this plane of existence into that intermediate state.  Penguin’s extraordinary volume, published in 2006 and available not only as a trade paperback but also as a volume of their Penguin Classics series (2008, reprinted with corrections in 2017), rectifies the omission with a new and lucid translation.

Counting the Evans-Wentz translation and others by Robert Thurman (Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994) and Francesca Freemantle/Chogyam Trumpa (Shambala, 1975), this is the fourth version of this work I have acquired over the years, and, despite my fondness for Evans-Wentz’s weird and wonderful translation and commentary, published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane by Oxford University Press (with The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, or the Method of Realizing Nirvana Through Knowing the Mind as a companion volume), this is now my favorite.*

An excellent feature of this volume is the introductory essay by the Dalai Lama, which places this material in context of the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the self and its relationship to existence.  This is a thoughtful piece of writing that merits close attention in preparing the reader for the different texts included in this publication.  As explained in the general introduction, this translation was vetted and deeply informed by consultation with masters of Highest Yoga Tantra, the preferred name of the tradition to which these documents belong.  This lends a value and credibility to this translation, which I’m sure will become the standard one.

Now, having said that, get yourself ready for some strange, sometimes difficult, sometimes enlightening reading (and be sure to read Book 5 out loud, for merely by saying the names of the deities listed within “one will avoid rebirth in the lower existences, and Buddhahood will eventually be attained”).  The perspective here is clearly not of the West, and that may require some getting used to – but no worries.  Maybe the best approach is to read each section through with an open mind, awake to the possibilities of the esoteric perspectives being expounded.  A return for a more close reading would then likely be in order.

The preliminary books consist of prayers, supplications, acknowledgement of the peaceful and wrathful deities, acknowledgement of the power of those deities, requests for forgiveness for having strayed from the path, prayers of gratitude, enumeration of some of the omens of impending death, guidance on how to know what form of existence one is likely to pass on to, the means of knowing when death is imminent, and rituals which might assist in averting one’s death.  The essence of the text, of course, is the chapters on consciousness transference and the great liberation by hearing.     By the guidance of one’s associates (which would typically be other monks, because, due to their complexity and degree of personal investment, these are essentially monastic rituals), one’s consciousness is guided and comforted as it passes through the intermediate or transitional states (usually translated as the bardo states, with the guidance text referred to as the Bardo Thodol, however that nomenclature is not used here).  From here, one may pass into one of the innumerable heavens (or hells), rebirth on one of the physical planes, or, much more rarely, some version of nirvana.  One seeks, through these rituals, to pass through to the highest state of which one is capable of in this existence.

The texts are repetitive and trancelike, meant to be spoken out loud and presumably, through their repetitiveness, inductive of a trancelike and opened state of consciousness.  Bear in mind that some of these texts are meant to be repeated literally tens of thousands of time.  Ultimately, the teachings, through contemplation and repetition become internalized and one acquires great merit through diligence and understanding. This is not a task for the dilettante, and in the cultural context of Tibetan monasticism there is significant preparation required before one is even exposed to these texts. 

Still, by reading the texts, and giving oneself over to them, a rewarding experience may be had – a change of awareness or a change of perspective that is expansive.  The experience can be an immersive one if approached with the correct frame of mind.  Maybe, like me, you’ll find yourself drawn back again and again for a taste of a different reality and a means to gain a transformed perspective of the world.

*You may be interested to know that Evans-Wentz also wrote a volume entitled The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, which was recently republished by The Lost Library, Glastonbury (n.d.)