Lunacy and the

Ali"li"angem_en t of

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by Terry Belanger

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LUNACY and the

ARRANGEMENT of BOOKS

Oak KnoH Press New Castle, Delaware

2003

First Edition, Third Printing, 2003

Published by Oak Knoll Press 310 Delaware Street, New Castle, Delaware, USA

Web:http://www.oakknoll.com

ISBN: 1-58456-099-1

Title: Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books Author: Terry Belanger

Cover Designer: Michael Guessford Publishing Director: J. Lewis von Hoelle

Copyright:© 1982 by Terry Belanger. All tights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief

excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to: Oak Knoll Press, 310 Delaware St., New Castle, DE 19720

Web: http://www.oakknoll.com

This work was printed in the United States of America on 70# archival, acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American Standard for

Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

One promtsmg method for detecting madness among book dealers, book collectors, and librarians is to examine the manner by which they arrange their books on their shelves. As a modest contribu­tion to the literature of this subject, I propose to discuss the lunatic arrangement of books according to principles of color, size, number, aesthetics, sub­ject order, Grangerization, and kleptomania.

Various sorts of books have, either formally or informally, taken advantage of color in their titles: think of Andrew Lang's multi-colored fairy books, of The Yellow Book (or of the Yellow Pages, for that matter), or of governmental White Papers. Mean­ings can become complicated: by Blue Book, for example, we might mean a guide to the prices of used cars, a college examination writing book, a handbook of contract bridge bids, the Social Regis­ter, or a book of etiquette; and determining the intended meaning depends on context. To a poli­tician, a Blue Book is a government report; and because Blue Books tend to proliferate like Med­iterranean fruit flies, one can understand the reply made by an Edinburgh bookseller to a woman who came into his shop one day and said she wanted a set of Blue Books: "I don't keep any, but I will pro­cure what you want from the Stationery Office, What is the subject?"

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"The subject? The subject doesn't matter. I want them in blue."

With the help of a piece of blue tapestry which the customer had in her hand, the bookseller at length grasped that it was books of a certain shade of blue binding that she desired-books to match her carpet and the curtains in her living room. Once his mind "had coped with the initial absurdity of the idea of buying books for the colour of their bind­ing," he found her an easy and profitable client. The blue books he sold her included E. H. Young's The Misses Mallett, Somerset Mangham's The Moon and Sixpence, and Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.

The Edinburgh bookseller concluded that he was a house decorator as well as a bookseller: he decor­ated minds and rooms.1

How many people, I wonder, do arrange their books according to the color of their bindings, for purposes of decorative appeal or otherwise? I am told that there used to be an outlet in New York City called Books by the Yard, where decorators and others could view books arranged by color and buy them at so much per foot of leather, so much per foot of cloth. To this day, some booksellers issue what at least privately they call "leather catalogues" and "cloth catalogues," with the color of the leather or of the cloth of bound sets carefully described. While we may scoff at this sort of Philistinism, the

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color of bindings is a fundamental part of life in most libraries, private or public. The late Martin Breslauer made a special point of always having his reference books bound in morocco of the brightest colors: red, blue, green, yellow-saying that they were his close friends, and that he used them often, so why shouldn't they be cheerful in appearance. 2

Many of us who are habitual users of one or a small number of reference libraries tend to look for the red book or the blue book or the green book, and not bother ourselves otherwise about the exact wording on the spine or title-page-or, on occasion, even the name of the author. I have found myself more than once in the embarrassing position, when working in a strange library, of having to enquire about the location of a particular reference book by its color, because I couldn't remember the name of the author; and too bad for me if that library had rebound the original, or (if I am used to the volume without a dust-jacket) had left the dust-jacket on the book, or ( if I am used to the book with a dust­jacket) had taken it off.

If color is one kind of organizing principle for the arrangement of books, then size is another; indeed, not till the eighteenth century did book collectors generally bother to label the spines of their books, being confident that they could identify them by color and size alone. Spine labels became common only when the sixteenth and seventeenth century

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habit of issuing standard works in large folio vol­umes gave way to the tendency to issue such works in multiple quarto or octavo volumes. Thus in 1623, 1632, 1665, and 1684 we have the First, Second, Third, and Fourth collected editions of the works of Shakespeare, all folio volumes, whereas the eight­eenth century editions of Shakespeare by Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Johnson, and Steevens, and so on, are all octavo in format.

Not all book collectors like small books. Theophile Gautier disliked octavos, because when stacked up on the floor they made less successful footstools than folios; and taken separately, octavos were less suit­able than folios for putting under children who would not otherwise be able to sit at table-besides which, Gautier pointed out, a good, big folio volume makes an admirable book press for flattening out creased and rumpled engravings.3

The celebrated nineteenth-century English book collector, William Henry Miller, was also concerned with the size of his books. He invariably carried a pocket-ruler with him on visits to bookshops and sale rooms in order to determine the exact size of the volumes he proposed to buy for his library at Britwell Court - with the result that he became known throughout the Trade as Measure Miller. Most libraries, private or public, must make some concession to the size of the books they contain, with big shelves for tall books and small ones for

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little books-with disastrous consequences for those who insist on a strict subject or other order. Ian Mac­Laren once noted that the bookman is perpetually engaged in his own form of spring cleaning, which is rearranging his books; and he is always hoping to square the circle, in both collecting the books of one subject department together, and also having his books in equal sizes. After a brief glance at a folio and an octavo side by side, he gives up that at­tempt.4

There are, of course, various lunatic solutions to this problem. Samuel Pepys liked all his books to make an even appearance on the shelves of his li­brary. To secure this end he had little high-heels of various heights built which could be set on his shelves under smaller books, in order to bring their tops into the same horizontal line. Pepys was an orderly person. He bequeathed exactly 3,000 vol­umes to his Cambridge college, 3,000 volumes num­bered from one (the smallest) to 3,000 (the largest folio), the whole collection fitting exactly into twelve wainscot bookcases-some of which may be seen to this day at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they have rested since 1724.

If there are some collectors who acquire and ar­range books according to their size, there is a related passion having to do with uniformity of size. Rich­ard Bennett, of Manchester, the collector who pur­chased William Morris's valuable library of books

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and manuscripts, had an aversion to books taller than about 14 inches. What William Morris had owned that was larger than 14 inches, Bennett sold, to the detriment of the Pierpont Morgan Library, the eventual resting-place of Bennett's collection. The Morgan thereby never acquired certain books, in one case a monument of medieval bookbinding because of its equally monumental size. 5

Collectors of miniature books frequently give as the reason for this remarkable activity the conven­ience of storage of their collections; and catalogs of miniature (or nearly miniature) books are issued frequently to satisfy their habit. Walter Hamady, the proprietor of The Perishable Press, Limited, in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, once received a letter from a bookseller, informing him that the latest Perish­able Press book, The History of Perry Township, was, unfortunately, three and one-fourth inches high, and therefore not truly a miniature book­which, said the bookseller, must be 3 inches or less in height to qualify. Hamady wrote back suggesting that anybody dissatisfied with the height of his book could simply crop off the offending one-fourth inch, and then encapsulate the shavings in a Mylar en­velope for binding-in at the back.

Aesthetic considerations are frequently important in the arrangement of books. Here on the subject is Irving Browne, author of In the Track of the Bookworm, published by Roycroft in 1897:

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There was a time when I loved to see my books arranged with a view to uniformity of height and harmony of color without respect to subjects. That time I regard as my vealy period. 0 That was the time when [my wife] used to have all the pictures hung on the same level, and to buy vases in paris exactly alike and put them on either side of the parlor clock, which was generally surmounted by a prancing Sara­cen or a weaving Penelope. However, the author's taste changed, and later

he preferred to see a little artistic confusion-high and low together here and there, like a demo­cratic community; now and then some giants laid down on their sides to rest; the shelves not uniformly filled out as if the owner never expected to buy any more, and alongside a dainty Angler, a book in red or blue cloth with a white label-just as children in velvet and furs sit next a newsboy, or a little girl in calico with a pigtail at Sunday School, or as beggars and princes kneel side by side on the cathedral pavement.6

Book collectors frequently arrange their books 01 had to look this one up: vealy means immature, as in veal, as opposed to beef.

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with aesthetic considerations in mind, as do their decorators and architects.

A former student of mine once had a superbly lunatic encounter with the architect of a new read­ing-room in one of our nation's most ancient and honorable academic institutions.

Everything in the reading room, like everything in the building containing it, was specially de­signed. Furniture and fixtures were made to har­monize with each other in so precise a fashion that when my former student was shown what was to be her new reading room in its nearly final stages of completion, she discovered that the large, over­head, hanging electric light fixtures were suspended 14 inches from the surface of the reading-room tables.

She pointed out to the architect that some of her readers would be consulting large books, which could not even be opened on tables with light fix­tures hanging 14 inches above them.

"How large is a large book?," asked the architect. My former student replied, "Some of our illus­

trated books are enormous, several feet tall, in fact." "Nonsense," said the architect. "Show me a book

like that." So my former student took a book truck and two of her assist ants into the stacks, and brought out an English plate book which measured three feet in height and four-and-a-half feet across the front cover.

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"That's not a typical book," said the architect. "What am I supposed to tell my readers," she said,

"that they can only read typical books?" "All right, then," said the architect, "how far off

the tables would you like the light fixtures?" My former student thought this over carefully,

and then said, "about five feet." "Five feet!" said the architect. "You don't under­

stand the concept of the building."7

Books do furnish a room, as George Orwell point­ed out, or indeed an entire home. An acquaint­ance of mine has friends in the country with a large house, the spare bedrooms of which are distin­guished from one another by the subject of the books and prints on the walls. Guests have their choice of the opera room, the architecture room, or the cookbook room. 8

Various guides have been published, especially since the Second World War, explaining how books and people can most efficiently, conveniently, and artistically co-exist. One of my prized possessions is a large, glossy, 48-page pamphlet published in 1956, with the title, The New York Times Shows You 65 Ways to Decorate With Books in Your Home. It instructs you with missionary zeal to divide rooms a new way, to capitalize on corners, to be intelligent in foyers, and to work it out with wood.

Decoration in your home, the preface of this book informs you severely, "is important, for it is here

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that friends will be received and by [its] contents the family's interests and tastes will be judged."

The English poet Lionel Johnson had a great many books and not enough room to put them in, so much so that he once wondered if it might not be possible to find some way of hanging new shelves from the ceiling, like chandeliers. 9 One solution to the space problem is high-ceilinged rooms, shelved bottom to top, solid-though such an arrangement is not without its hazards. The late A.N.L.Munby, the librarian of King's College, Cambridge, once noted that in his college library, "volume one of Hansard is at least fifteen feet from the floor, and immediately above the main door, which on be­ing unexpectedly opened carries away the ladder." Munby added that "a most ingenious device for con­sulting books on a ladder is to be seen at Althorp, where a special piece of furniture was designed for the great Earl Spencer-a sturdy pair of steps on wheels, surmounted by a craw's nest containing a seat and small lectern, the general effect resembling a mediaeval siege-machine."'o

The great bibliomaniac Richard Heber had at least five separate libraries: "books everywhere, for­ests of them, jungles to wander in, feel about them, alleys, avenues, groves, lanes of books," as Holbrook Jackson says.11 In this connection, one is reminded of the visitor to Mark Twain's house in West Hart­ford, Connecticut, who when shown through the

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author's extremely cluttered library, asked why Mr. Clemens found it necessary to have so many books untidily covering the floor, tables, and all other flat surfaces in his library. "Well you see," Clemens re­plied to his visitor, "it's so very difficult to borrow book-cases."12

The collector with the greatest number of books compared with the amount of space in which to put them was undoubtedly Sir Thomas Phillipps. His house at Middle Hill was not large, but there was a relentless contraction of living space as the collec­tions accumulated. On a trip to visit Sir Thomas in 1844, Frederic Madden noted in his diary that "the dining parlour is crowded with books and packages, and is kept locked by Sir Thos. until the hour of dinner arrives, and again after the dessert &c. is removed. The hall and passage are scarcely wide enough to admit two persons in consequence of the boxes, presses, &c., in them filled with MSS. and there is only one sitting room, in which the family assemble." Two years later there was a further de­velopment. "Sir [Thomas's] stock of books and MSS. still keeps increasing," Madden noted, "so that now he will not allow even the dining room to be used."13 Finding a particular book or manuscript at Middle Hall was a challenge, since Sir Thomas did all his own cataloguing and classification. Many, perhaps most, individual book collectors have devel­oped their own schemes for the arranging of their

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books. One of the most interesting of these idiosyn­cratic schemes is that of Alistair Cooke. His assem­blages of books on America covers an entire wall of the study of his New York apartment, "with books on New England in the upper right corner, Califor­nia down at the lower left," and Illinois towards the center. Thus the books on, say, the Rocky Moun­tains can be arranged in the physical vicinity of books on Colorado and Wyoming, a flexible ar­rangement which may defy standard classification schemes, but which works for Mr. Cooke: and more power to him. 14

One of my college classmates arranged his books in order of excellence, beginning with the best books in the best editions in the finest bindings, and pro­ceeding to a lunatic system of variables around the room to the most ephemeral and least physically at­tractive books in his library.

No person with an avocational or professional in­terest in books seems immune to the joys of develop­ing his or her own classification scheme. Paul Banks reports that on a recent trip to New Orleans, he visit­ed a bookshop which shelved Arnold Toynbee's Study of History in the Mythology section; while in the section on Skilled Arts and Crafts could be found a book entitled Sex After Sixty. Patricia Flavin was once in a bookshop which shelved a copy of The Voyages of Magellan under Yachting. And Robert Nikirk reminds me that, in touring Dr. Martin Bod-

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mer's great library in Geneva in the early 1970's, members of the Grolier Club discovered copies of Alice in 'Wonderland and Das Kapital shelved in close juxtaposition. These books were grouped to­gether, Dr. Bodmer explained, "because they are both fantasies."

The celebrated seventeenth-century English book collector Sir Robert Cotton also designed his own scheme for arranging his most valuable books and manuscripts. He had twelve bookcases specially con­structed, each of which was adorned on top by the bust of one of the first 12 Caesars. The shelfmark of each book in this collection, which included such interesting rarities as the only known manuscript of Beowulf, reflected this arrangement. Thus Sir Rob­ert's celebrated manuscript, the Lindisfarne Gos­pels, was originally catalogued (and may still be called for at the British Library, where it now rests) as Cotton MS. Nero D. IV, hecallSe it was once the fourth book in, on the fourth shelf down, in the bookcase with the bust of Nero on top. 15

Most collectors recognize that some sort of order­ing scheme, however lunatic, is necessary. Thomas Carlyle once said, "A library is not worth anything without a catalogue; it is a Polyphemus without any eye in his head."' 6 We know relatively little about the ways in which the ancients shelved their books, but we begin to find many inventories and cata­logues of books and manuscripts in the Renaissance,

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the English aspects of which have been studied by Sears Jayne in his Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance. Professor Jayne notes, however, that

The amount of information given [in an English Renaissance catalogue] varies widely from catalogue to catalogue and from entry to entry in the same catalogue. Time and human nature are always at work on a Renaissance cataloguer. He may begin with the noblest ambitions of pro­viding complete information about every book, but he usually gives up one dream after another as the length and tedium of the work begin to tell on him, until at the end he has abandoned press marks, aban­doned the donor's name, abandoned size, abandoned place and date. abandoned leg­ibility, abandoned the alphabet, abandon­ed all but a naked author and title.17

Perhaps it was the use of such catalogues which prompted Gabriel N au de, the librarian of Cardinal Mazarin, to set forth his own cataloguing principles in his celebrated Advice on Establishing a Library, translated by John Evelyn and first published in London in 1661. According to N aude, books are put into some sort of arrangement so that they can be serviceable as need arises:

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This, however, is impossible unless they be classified and arranged according to

subject matter, or in such other fashion as will facilitate their being found at specified places ... Without this order and arrange­ment a collection of books of whatever size, were it fifty thousand volumes, would no more merit the name of a library than an assembly of thirty thousand men the name of an army if they he not billeted in their several quarters under the orders of their officers, or a great heap of stones and building materials the name of a house large or small till they be properly put to­gether to make a finished structure.18

Thus speaks French logic; but it is not the French who are primarily associated with the art and science of cataloguing and classification, as Arthur L. Humphrey noted in 1897, in his book, The Pri­vate Library: What We Do Know/What We Don't Know/What We Ought to Know About Our Books:

Numerous elaborate plans of book clas­sification have been put forward, principal­ly by Americans, but in no way are they adaptable to the requirements of private libraries, and I doubt very much the possi­bility of comprehending them in such a way as to apply them in an intelligible manner even to public libraries.10

The ne plus ultra of American classification may be seen in two large, fat, red volumes entitled Li-

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brary of Congress Subject Headings, recent editions of which boast such splendidly lunatic headings (among many others) as:

banana research bat binding boots and shoes in art chickens in religion and folklore sewage: collected works sex: cause and determination

and tic: see also toe

An English contribution to the game is made by Derek Langridge in his recent book, An Approach to Classification for Students of Librarianship. Langridge begins his analysis of the subject by charting a day in the life of Everyman, as follows: Each morning, Everyman got up and

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went first to the wardrobe to decide on his outer clothing for the day. This was facilitated by the order of items on the rail. They were roughly in order of weight and size: heavy overcoats on the left, followed by lighter coats, raincoat, formal suits, waistcoats, sports jackets and jerkins.

Shirts were laid out on shelves at right and left of the wardrobe. They were clas­sified by no less than three different prin­ciples: formal or i11formal: thick or thin: and colour . . . His formal shirts were all

on the right hand shelves, informal ones on the left . . . On each side, the light shirts occupied the higher shelves, the heavy oc­cupied the lower. Within each of these three groups there were four colour divi­sions: red and yellow; green and brown; blue and grey; and white ... Meanwhile [Everyman's wife] prepared breakfast, aided by equally efficient organisation in the kitchen. Items of food were classified first according to their need for protection from air, heat and dust: milk, meat and eggs in the refrigerator; bread and bis­cuits in air-tight containers; packaged items in various cabinets ... 20

And so on. Man is a classifying and arranging animal, and no subject is beneath his organizing instincts. Take, for example, the instance of George Watson Cole. The cataloguer of the E. Dwight Church collection of Americana, later the first li­brarian of the Huntington Library in California, and a founder of the Bibliographical Society of America, you might think that he would have other ways of spending his time; but in 1935 he published privately a little book called Postcards: The World in Miniature: A Plan for Their Systematic Arrange­ment. In his introduction, Cole suggests:

The wise traveller on reaching a stop­ping-place will ... do well to make his

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first , isit a postcard shop, and there look over its views of the place he is in, from which he can select such objects as he may desire to see. Then and only then can he intelligently start out to behold its show­places and feei assured that in the end he will have seen all that are really worth his inspection.

Cole's postcard classification scheme, which ex­tends over nearly 11 pages, is detailed. He has a whole section on bridges and viaducts, for instance, and he devotes considerable space to the classifi­cation of farms and rural scenes, including arable, orchard, and pasture-lands; irrigating-dams, canals, and wells; and barns and farm implements.

Cole bequeathed his collection of 35,000 post­cards to the American Antiquarian Society, where, Georgia Bumgardner informs me, they are still to be found-but no longer arranged in Cole order.

No single· classification scheme for the arranging of books is ever likely to satisfy everybody-nor may former arrangements either of libraries or of individ­ual volumes prove satisfactory. John Ruskin was an assiduous collector of medieval illuminated manu­scripts, which he annotated copiously and on occa­sion broke up, framing some pages and giving others away to his friends and students. On 30 December 1853, he noted in his diary: "Cut some leaves from large missal"; on 1 January, he reported: "Put two

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pages of missal in frame"; and, two days later: "Cut missal up in evening-hard work." "Missals," Ruskin once wrote, are "for use, not for curiosities."

The forcible rearrangement of books is probably more common than we like to think. Thomas Jeffer­son used to prepare his own polyglot editions, prin­cipally of classical writers, by tearing apart (for ex­ample) the 1572 Geneva edition of Plutarch's Lives, printed in Greek and Latin, and combining it with a 1774 edition of John Dryden's English translation of Plutarch. This volume still survives: the copy of the Geneva edition Jefferson used in constructing it was formerly owned by William Byrd of West­over, whose autograph may be found on one of its title-pages. 22

Then there is Charles Darwin, the great natural­ist, who considered books as tools to be worked with; when they fell to pieces because of rough use, he held them together with metal clips. He would cut a heavy book in half to make it more convenient to hold, a habit shared by Dr. Hughlings Jackson, the founder of the science of neurology, who

had no compunction about tearing out any portion [of a book] which interested him, and would frequently send to a friend a few leaves tom out of a book dealing with any subject in which he knew the friend to be interested. His library was thus a collec­tion of mutilated books. On purchasing

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a novel at a railway bookstall, which he often did, his first act was to rip off the covers, then to tear the book in two, put­ting one half in one pocket and the other in the other. On one such occasion the clerk at the stall stared at the performance of this sacrilegious act with such obvious amazement that Jackson, observing him, remarked: ·You think I am mad, my boy, but it's the people who don't do this who are really mad."23

Perhaps the most elegant reorganization of books is that of Henry Morris, the Philadelphia printer, papermaker, and proprietor of the Bird & Bull Press. Morris takes old copies of Reader's Digest Condens­ed Books, removes the covers, reduces the con­tents to pulp, and then makes new paper, which he uses for his own projects.

Bibliographical fashions change: whereas present­day book collectors like their books exactly as they were issued, and view made-up copies of books with fastidious distaste, an earlier generation of book col­lectors more frequently wanted presentable-looking copies, aFJ.d expected their booksellers to provide them. Here is Henry Stevens of Vermont, writing in 1918 to William L. Clements, who had been pressur­ing him to hurry up with the binding of various edi­tions of De Bry's Voyages, which Clements had purchased from him en bloc:

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I don't know whether you have ever seen any De Bry in the original state in which it generally comes down to us [writes Stevens to Clements]. It is usually ill a very inferior and unattractive condi­tion. The paper is very soft and is generally more or less foxed or brown stained, so that cleaning and sizing are almost always ab­solutely necessary. Very few parts come without some defect in the plates, such as a bad impression, or a crooked imposition in the text, or torn or defective maps, &c. It is only by combining two or more copies, changing various leaves, and cleaning and sizing the whole that a good perfect copy can be obtained. 24

Any discussion of lunacy and the arrangement of books may logically include the rearrangement of other people's books on one's own shelves, or biblio­kleptomania. A memorable story about a book thief is that told by Flaubert and others about the Span­ish monk, Don Vincente, who took advantage of the political upheavals in Spain in the 1830's to

sack the libraries of several monasteries, in­cluding his own. Shedding his robes, he disappeared for a while and then re­emerged as a bookdealer in Barcelona. Don Vincente wanted to own what he thought was the only existing copy of the

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Furs e Ordinacions, printed in 1482 by Lamberto Palmont, the first Spanish print­er. Although Don Vincente bid everything he owned for the book in an auction, he was overbid by Augustino Paxtot. Shortly afterward Paxtot' s house was razed by fire and he perished in the flames. Don Vin­cente was indicted when the book was found in his possession. His lawyer, in try­ing to establish his innocence, found an­other copy of the book in Paris and used this evidence to show that Don Vincente's book was not necessarily Paxtot's. The de­fendant became raving mad and cried, 'Alas, my book is not unique: He was hanged shortly thereafter. 25

The theft of books is a problem which has plagued their owners for a very long time, and over the cen­turies there have been a superb variety of lunatic solutions to this problem. I once bought a copy of the one-volume edition of Isaac D'Israeli' s Curiosi­ties of Literature for $5 in Atlanta, Georgia. It was part of a collection mostly of leather-bound odd volumes which had been assembled for use as deco­ration in the lobby and bar of a new Atlanta hotel. In preparation for which, each book was about to have a one-inch hole drilled in its side, beginning at the top cover, and proceeding through the title page, down into the text, and past the index at the

22

end of the book, and finally through the back cover. Each one-inch hole was to be exactly four inches from the foot of the book. Iron rods would then be used to string the books together like beads, and fasten them permanently into the bookcases of the hotel lobby. As a deterrent to theft this method is hard to beat, and reading books thus arranged must be a real challenge. Looking into the partially ob­structed pages of octavos with the bolts still un­opened would be child's play by comparison. Close­ly allied to book rearrangement by theft surely is book-rearrangement by extra-illustration, or Gran­gerization. My favorite extra-illustrator is John M. Wing, celebrated as a benefactor of The Newberry Library in Chicago. Wing began work as a printer's devil, and, as Mr. Wells has told us, later

became a compositor in newspaper shops in Rome and Utica, New York, and even­tually [he] rose to proofreading and edi­torial writing. In 1866 he decided to go West and travelled as far as Chicago, where he rapidly made his fortune from two trade journals shrewdly calculated to meet local needs: The Landowner, a real­estate paper which prospered in the fren­zied days after the Chicago fire; and The Western Brewer, whose readers made up in substance what they lacked in number. He was able to retire at 43 and devote the

23

rest of his life to collecting and extra-illus­trating books, his greatest passion. 26

We are told that he attempted to leave his fortune to the University of Chicago, in order to endow a chair of extra-illustration; only when this plan failed did he consent to leave his collections to The New­berry Library, "together with a sufficient endow­ment to build and maintain a great collection on the history of the craft to which he owed his wealth."

Of all the lunatic schemes for the arrangement of books, perhaps the most compelling is that of an etiquette book of 1863, which decreed that

the perfect hostess will see to it that the works of male and female authors be prop­erly segregated on her book shelves. Their proximity, unless they happen to be mar­ried, should not be tolerated. 27

Such an arrangement would put the works of Elizabeth Barrett next to those of Robert Browning -but whom should we put on the other side of Miss Barrett? asks William S. Dix, the discoverer of this passage. The prospect of daisy chains thus formed is enchanting, and I leave my readers to speculate about this and all other aspects of lunacy and the arrangement of books.

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FOOTNOTES

1. Will Y. Darling, The Bankrupt Bookseller (Collected Volume: Edinburgh, 1947), p. 90.

2. I am indebted to Robert Nikirk for this story.

3. Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (New York, 1931), I, pp. 39, 164.

4. Ian MacLaren, Books and Bookmen (London, 1912), p. 39.

5. I am indebted to Paul Needham for this story.

6. Irving Browne, In the Track of the Bookworm (East Aurora, N.Y., 1897), p. 105.

7. I am indebted to my former student for this story.

8. I am indebted to Robert Nikirk for this story.

9. Jackson, II, p. 17.

10. A.N.L. Munby, Some Caricatures of Book-Collectors: An Essay (privately printed; London, 1948), pp. 25, 27.

11. Jackson, II, p. 7.

12. My worthless source for this story is a book in the "1001 Jokes for All Occasions" genre. Kenneth M. Sanderson, Associate Editor, Mark Twain Papers, University of Cal­ifornia at Berkeley, reports that he and his fellow staff­members have been unable to verify the story-but, says Sanderson, "It sounds like Twain."

13. A.N.L. Munby, Phillipps Studies No. 3: The Formation of The Phillipps Library Up to the Year 1840 (Cam­

bridge, 1954), p. 139.

14. The New York Times, 27 December 1976, C10.

15. Edward Edwards, Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (London, 1870), p. 132n. I am indebted to Ian Willison for checking the pressmark.

16. Arthur L. Humphreys. The Private Library: What We Do Know/What We Don't Know/What We Ought to Know About Our Books (New York, 1897), p. 81.

17. Sears Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renais­sance (Berkeley, 1956), p. 36-7.

18. Gabriel Naude, Advice on Establishing a Library, tr. John Eyelyn, introd. Archer Taylor (Berkeley, 1950), p. 63.

19. Humphreys, p. 90.

20. Derek Langridge, An Approach to Classification for Students of Librarianship (London, 1973), pp. 9-10.

21. James S. Dearden, "John Ruskin, the Collector, in The Library, 5th series 21 (June, 1966), p. 125.

22. Frederick R. Goff, "Freedom of Challenge," in Thomas Jefferson and the World of Books: A Symposium Held at the Library of Congress September 21, 1976 (Wash­ington, D.C., 1977), p. 13.

23. Jackson, II, pp. 117-8.

24. Margaret Maxwell, Shaping a Library: William L. Clem­ents as Collector (Amsterdam, 1973), p. 101.

25. Norman D. Weiner, "On Bibliomania," in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 35 (1966), p. 218.

26. Dictionary Catalogue of the History of Printing From the John M. Wing Foundation in The Newberry Library (Boston, 1961), I, Introduction.

27. Cited by William S. Dix in "Of the Arrangement of Books," in College & Research Libraries, 25 (March.

1964), p. 86.

-----------------·~·--------~---------

Ahout the Authol'

Terry Belanger was educated at Haverford College and

at Columbia University, where he received his PhD in

18th-century English literature in 1970. His doctoral work

was on the 18th-century London book trade, and he has

published extensively on this subject.

In 1972, he established the Book Arts Press at Columbia

as a bibliographical laboratory supporting a master's

program in rare book librarianship and antiquarian book­

selling. In 1983, he instituted an annual Rare Book School

( <www.rarebookschool.org> ), a collection of five-day

non-credit courses of interest to students of the history

of the book and related subjects. In 1992, Belanger moved

Rare Book School from Columbia to the University of

Virginia, where he is currently University Professor and

Honorary Curator of Special Collections.

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ISBN: 1·58456·099·1