I was at home minding my own business last Saturday afternoon when a friend texted about something he thought might interest me.
He was reporting live from a skip in Drumcondra, which was full of books being cleared from a terraced house where the occupant had died. A full-blown bibliophile, the deceased was said to have had up to 100,000 volumes. Now they were all being thrown out.
Part of me thought: you have enough books already. The rest of me disagreed, jumping on a Dublin Bike and cycling to Drumcondra, where a scene reminiscent of Millet’s The Gleaners (except in a skip with the bent-over humans harvesting literature rather than corn) unfolded.
One person had already filled a shopping trolley. Most just had carrier bags. Luckily, I was limited to the Dublin bike’s basket. Browsing the vast pile, I occasionally clicked “add to basket” until it was full. By then I had about 15 volumes, ranging from The Economist’s Book of Obituaries to Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang.
Skipping pages – Frank McNally on trawling through the discarded library of a lifetime
Trying times for Ballinsloe: The Galway town and Ireland women’s World Cup squad
For the Birds – Frank McNally on an encounter with Dublin’s Pigeon Man
Blades and Fades – Frank McNally on New York’s ‘Lads of Kilkenny’ and a Joycean Fenian in Paris
My haul also included Vol 1 of Chambers Book of Days, a 19th century almanac I had previously known (and often dipped into) only in an online version.
[ Hot Wheels - Frank McNally on the mystery of why anyone would steal a Dublin BikeOpens in new window ]
The hard copy is of no great rarity or value, I think, but it smells attractively of old book. Also, I recall that compiling it “ruined the mental health” of its author, Robert Chambers (1802-1871). So rather than see his magnum opus end up in a dump, I decided to give it a home.
Even as we scavenged, the family of the former bibliophile – who were happy for people to take what we wanted – were still working on the house. When I asked if the departed had read all the books, his brother laughed that, no, he couldn’t possibly have. “He read a lot in his 20s and 30s all right,” apparently. In later years, “he just liked having them”.
In a twist that literary critics might call “meta”, one of the titles I took home is Buried in Books: A Reader’s Anthology (2010), by Julie Rugg. Compiled by a self-confessed “bibliomaniac”, it’s a miscellany of writings by or about others who live with the condition.
Those quoted include the Chicago newspaper columnist Eugene Field (1850-1895), writing about the biblio-erotic qualities of a woman he fancied: “[S]he approached closely to the realization of the ideals of a book … fair to look upon, of clear, clean type, well ordered and well edited, amply margined, neatly bound.”
The great Myles na gCopaleen of this parish makes it in too, via one of his special offers for collectors with more money than sense: “Limited edition of 25 copies printed on steam-rolled pig’s liver and bound with Irish thongs in desiccated goat-hide quilting - a book to treasure for all time but to lock away in hot weather.”
In her introduction, Rugg notes that women do not tend to be bibliomaniacs and speculates: “Perhaps this is because men can continue to indulge manic behaviours long into adult life, but women invariably have to grow up.” Contradicting which, there was at least one woman in the skip – literally - at Drumcondra. And Rugg might have been in it too had she known.
Likening herself to “a recovering addict – prone to spectacular lapses”, she confesses: “Too often I wander out of a second-hand bookshop with a blush and a bag that is just a little too heavy. When I get home I hide the purchases by spreading them about on existing piles of books, so my husband won’t notice. It’s a method learned from the tunnellers in The Great Escape, and I heartily recommend it.”
Later she broaches the subject of bookshelves designed to project an image of the owner but betrayed by untouched pages (Myles’s famous “book-handling” service was designed to address just this problem of the vulgar rich). Of certain writers, she adds: “In all the academic offices I’ve been in, I’ve never found a copy of Foucault that shows any sign of being read; Baudrillard looks similarly pristine.”
Interestingly, this is one of many passages in my copy of her book that the previous owner had marked in the margins. So even in his later years, he read that one anyway. But he was a shy and minimalist adder of marginalia. There’s no “Yes, but cf. Homer” or “I remember poor Joyce saying the same thing to me” (the kind of detail Myles’s professional book maulers would have added).
Instead, the man whose library was now in a skip had noted interesting passages only with short dashes, in pencil. Modest as these are, however, some give glimpses into a life’s philosophy.
He marks, for example, Harold Bloom saying: “We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” And he also notes this, from the 1911 diaries of WNP Barbellion, a sick man who would die aged only 30: “Real happiness lies in the little things, in a bit of gardening work, in the rattle of the teacups in the next room, in the last chapter of a book.”
