The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words - Hardcover

Tom Mole is Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh, where he runs the Centre for the History of the Book. His book What the Victorians Made of Romanticism won the 2018 Saltire Prize for Research Book of the Year.

1
BOOK/BOOK
The things we do to books and
the things they do to us

When I was a student, one of my professors was almost
driven out of his office by his books. He had a large
room on the ground floor of the English department,
with bookcases around the walls. Slowly but surely
these bookcases had filled over the years, and other shelves
had been squeezed into every available space in the office.
The bookcases had started to sprout out from the walls into
the room, creating book booths, book niches and book
nooks. But these, in turn, proved insufficient for his evergrowing
collection of books. Soon he started to pile books
on top of the bookcases, and to stack them double on the
shelves, so that he had to move the books in front in order
to reveal the ones behind. Before long, the books had spilled
onto the floor, where the piles encroached further and further
into the room with each passing month.
Every time I visited the professor’s office, it seemed a
little harder than before to navigate a route across the room
on the decreasing area of visible carpet. Attempting to keep
the books in some kind of order seemed like a full-time job.
I’d knock on the professor’s door and hear a muffled shout
telling me to come in. But when I opened the door there
was no professor to be seen – the room was full of books,
but apparently empty of its occupant. For a moment, I
would think perhaps the professor had been crushed under
a toppling pile of hardbacks. Then his head would appear
from behind a ziggurat of volumes on a bewildering variety
of topics. ‘Just doing a bit of sorting out,’ he’d say,
as though he could ever hope to bring order to the evergrowing
library that seemed, like the universe itself, to be
continually expanding at an accelerating rate in every possible
direction.
My professor was doing a number of things to his books.
He was acquiring them – choosing to buy these books rather
than others. He was classifying them – putting them onto
shelves and into piles with other books. These categories
might be based on some quality such as their subject matter
(history on one shelf, biography on another), or their size
(larger books on the floor, smaller ones on the shelves), or
their place in the cycle of his reading (as-yet-unread ones over
here; the ones he was currently reading over there; the ones he
had finished reading but not yet shelved somewhere else). He
was reading them, taking notes from them, referring back to
them, citing them in the articles he was writing, using them
to prepare his lectures, lending them to his students, and so
on in an endless process of erudition and amusement.
But his books were also doing things to him. As well as
pushing him out of his own office, they were shaping the
spaces and the ways in which he worked. The books formed
a complex ecosystem that he, too, inhabited. Sometimes, they
made his work easier and better. Writing scholarly articles
amid such a large private library allowed him to keep reference
works, books by other scholars and the literature he was
writing about within easy reach. All scholarship depends to
some extent on other scholarship – even when it reaches different
conclusions – and so the thousands of books he kept
to hand assisted his work. Sometimes, on the other hand, the
sheer number of books and their disorganised state must have
made things more difficult. It must often have been tricky or
impossible to find the book he wanted.
Eventually the department secretary decided enough was
enough and sent in a structural engineer to test whether the
building could take the weight of so many books. Armed
with the engineer’s report, she persuaded the professor to
give some books away. (He gave one to me.) But it was hard
to convince him to downsize his library. His professional life,
indeed his understanding of himself, was ranged around the
shelves for all to see. Giving up some of his books felt like
giving up part of his mind. There were benefits and difficulties
in having such a large collection of books. But, for better
or worse, his books were not just his passive tools; they were
also exerting forces of their own on his life.