Have a look at this splendid article in the NYT by Alberto Manguel about his 30,000 plus volume library. It's a wonderful song of praise for the book, and the joy of collecting a library. Manquel has an ancient barn-like house in the Loire Valley selected specifically because it was the perfect place to house his library.
I remember in the mid-nineties when we were living in Italy, Italo Calvino's library was so huge and so heavy that builders were called in to strengthen the floor of his elegant Milan apartment to accommodate the weight of his collection. We were living on a shoe string -- everything we owned had been packed away, and for the first time, all my books were at home in boxes (very much as they are now!). I was so jealous, wanting to feel that solid mass of words and stories holding up the wall of our little apartment. To make matters worse, it was very difficult for a foreigner to get a library card, so I was cut off from even the voyeur's pleasure of sharing a book that had been held and read by a stranger. In almost every house I have moved into over the years, the first task (after setting up loud music) is to release the books and arrange them in some pleasing fashion.
My mother once worked in the Rare Book Library of a big university library and I used to go there after school to visit her and some of the most amazing books stored in a climate controlled vault. There, I was allowed to open a first edition work of Isaac's Newton's mathematical theories and see where Newton had written his own marginal notes and corrections. And then there were gorgeous life sized plates of Audubon's bird engravings, the incredibly unique "Little Magazine" collection of small press devoted to poetry (and where the four issues of my parents' magazine "Hip Pocket Poems" were also kept), and the gorgeous renaissance Venetian books with their paintings of the canals which became visible only when one fanned the pages of the book.
I was also delighted to see at Bookplate Junkie a reference to John Fowles' huge library -- and the unique bookplate that graced many of his books. Here's another terrific article by James Fergusson in the Times Literary Supplement that discusses Fowles' unique collection of books and the art of bookplates. (I so want some one of these days!) Of his own collection Fowles said " “I collect [books], for reasons that would make most bibliophiles spit – because I want to read
them.”" Fergusson couldn't resist adding, "Bibliophiles now, however, collect Fowles’s books just because they
were Fowles’s."
Years ago, on Surlalune's discussion board, readers were asked to list the ten books they would want if marooned on a desert island. Of course none of us could conceive of just ten essential books. And as the lists grew (amid feverish justifications), I realized the only reason we might have been marooned on a desert island was because we couldn't get the all books into the life raft.
