-Walter Benjamin
I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with wood dust, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood—certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation—which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and matter-of-fact, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library—if I presented you with their history, or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that; what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship between a collector and his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contem- plates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collec- tor’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance the fate, which suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire books became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is nothing more than a hovering above the abyss. “The only exact knowledge there is,” said Anatole France, “is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books.”! And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.
Thus, the life of a
collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and
order.
Naturally, his existence
is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to
ownership (something about which we shall have more to say later}; also, to a
relationship to objects which does not empha-size their functional, utilitarian
value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the
stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the
locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are frozen as
the final thrill, the thrill of acqui- sition, passes over them. Everything
remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame,
the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region, the craftsmanship,
the former ownership—for a true collector, the whole background of an item adds
up to a magic encyclopedia- whose quintessence is the fate of his object. In
this circumscribed area, then, it may be surmised how the great
physiognomists—and collectors are the physiognomists of the world of
things—turn into interpreters of fate. One has only to watch a collector handle
the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be
seeing through them into their distant past, as though inspired. So much for
the magical side of the collector—his old-age image, I might call it—Habent sua
fata libelli, These words may have been intended as a general statement about
books.? So books like The Divine Comedy, Spinoza’s Ethics, and The Origin of
Species have their fates. A collector, however, interprets this Latin saying
differently. For him, not only books but also copies of books have their fates.
And in this sense, the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with him,
with his own collection. 1 a am not exaggerating when I say that to a true
collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike
element which, in collector, mingles with the element of old age. For children
can accom- plish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among
children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the
painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals—the
whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving
them names, To renew the old world—this is the collector’s deepest desire when
he is driven to acquire new things, and this is why a collector of older books
is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer of luxury
editions. How do books cross the threshold of a collection and become the
property of a collector? The history of their acquisition is the subject of the
following remarks.
Of all the ways of
acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy
method. At this point, many of you will remember with pleasure the large
library which Jean Paul’s poor little schoolmaster’ Wutz gradually acquired by
writing, himself, all the works whose titles interested him in book-fair
catalogues; after all, he could not afford to buy them.? Writers are really
people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are
dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. You, ladies
and gentlemen, may regard this as a whimsical definition of a writer. But
everything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical.—Of the
customary modes of acquisition, the one most appro- priate to a collector would
be the borrowing of a book and the subsequent failure to return it. The book
borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself an inveterate
collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed
treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday
world of legality as by his failure to read these books. If my experience may
serve as evidence, a man is more likely now and then to return a borrowed book
than to read it. And the nonreading of books, you will object, should be
characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news
at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the
world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine
who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you
have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t
suppose you eat off of your Sévres china every day?”
Incidentally, I have put
the right to such an attitude to the test. For years, for at its least the
first third of its existence, my library consisted of no more than two or three
shelves which increased only by inches each year. This was militant age, when no
book was allowed to enter it without the certification that [ had not zead it.
Thus, [ might never have acquired a library extensive enough to be worthy of
the name if there had not been the inflation. Suddenly the emphasis shifted;
books acquired real value, or, at any rate, were difficult to obtain. At least,
this is how it seemed in Switzer- land. At the eleventh hour I sent my first
major book orders from there and in this way was able to secure such
irreplaceable items as Der blaue Reiter and Bachofen’s Sage von Tanaquil, which
could still be obtained from the publishers at that time.—* Well (so you may
say), after exploring all these byways. we should finally reach the wide
highway of book acquisition— namely, the purchasing of books. This is indeed a
wide highway, but not a comfortable one. The purchasing done by a book
collector has very little in common with that done in a bookshop by a student
getting a textbook, a man of the world buying a present for his lady, or a
businessman intending to be while away his next train journey. I have made my
most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient. Property and possession
belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct;
their experience teaches them ‘that when they capture a strange city, the
smallest antique shop can a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key
position, How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I
undertook in pursuit of books!
Many of the most
important purchases, though, are not made on the premises of a dealer.
Catalogues play a far greater part, And even though the purchaser may be
thoroughly acquainted with the book ordered from a catalogue, the individual
copy always remains a surprise and the order always a bit of a gamble. There
are grievous disappointments, but also happy finds. I remember, for instance,
that I once ordered a book with colored illustrations for my old collection of
children’s books only because it contained fairy tales by Albert Ludwig Grimm
and was published at Grimma, Thuringia. Grimma was also the place of
publication of a book of my copy fables edited by the same Albert Ludwig Grimm.
With its sixteen illus- trations, of of this book of fables was the only extant
example of the early work of the great German book illustrator Lyser, who lived
in Ham- burg around the middle of the last century. Well, my reaction to the
conso- nance of the names had been correct, In this case, too, I discovered the
work Lyser—namely, Linas Marchenbuch, a book which has remained un- known to
his bibliographers and which deserves a more detailed reference than this first
one I am introducing here.
The acquisition of books
is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone. Not even both
factors together suffice for the estab- lishment of a real library, which is
always somewhat impenctrable and at the same time uniquely itself. Anyone who
buys from catalogues must have flair in addition to the qualities I have
mentioned, Dates, placenames, formats, previous owners, bindings, and the like:
all these details must tell him something—not as dry, isolated facts, but as a
harmonious whole. From the quality and intensity of this harmony, he must be
able to recognize whether a book is for him or not.—An auction requires yet
another set of qualities in a collector, To the reader of a catalogue, the book
itself must speak—or possibly its previous ownership, if the provenance of the
copy has been established. pay A man who wishes to participate at an auction
must equal attention to the book and. to his competitors, in addition to
keeping a cool enough head to avoid being carried away in the competition. It
frequently happens that someone gets stuck with a high purchase price because
he kept raising his bid—more to assert himself than to acquire the book. On the
other hand, one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he
rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a
wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned in the marketplace and
bought it to give it its freedom—the way the prince bought a beautiful slave
girl in the Thousand and One Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true
freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
To this day, Balzac’s
Peau de chagrin stands out from long rows of French volumes in my library as a
memento of my most exciting experience at an auction. This happened in 1915 at
the Rimann auction held by Emil Hirsch, one of the greatest of book experts and
most distinguished of dealers. The edition in question appeared in 1838 in
Paris, place de la Bourse. When I pick up my copy, [see not only its number in
the Rimann Collection, but even the label of the shop in which the first owner
bought the book more than ninety years ago, for one-eightieth of today’s price.
“Papeterie I, Flan- neau,” it says. A fine age, in which it was still possible
to buy such a de luxe edition at a stationery dealer’s! The steel engravings of
this hook were designed by the foremost French graphic artist and executed by
the foremost engravers. But I was going to tell you how I acquired this book. I
had gone to to it Emil Hirsch’s for an advance inspection and had handled forty
or fifty volumes; that particular volume had inspired in me the ardent desire
to hold on forever. The day of the auction came. As chance would have it, in
the by sequence of the auction this copy of La peau de chagrin was preceded a
complete set of its illustrations printed separately on India paper. The
bidders sat at a long table; diagonally across from me sat the man who was the
focus of all eyes at the first bid, the famous Munich collector Baron von
Simolin, He was greatly interested in this set, but he had rival bidders; in
short, there was a spirited contest which resulted in the highest bid of the
entire auction—far in excess of three thousand marks. No one seemed to have
expected such a high figure, and all those present were quite excited. Emil
Hirsch remained unconcerned, and whether he wanted to save time or was guided
by some other consideration, he proceeded to the next item, with no one really
paying attention. He called out the price, and with my heart pounding and with
the full realization that I was unable to compete with any of those big
collectors I bid a somewhat higher amount. Without arousing the bidders’
attention, the auctioneer went through the usual routine—“Do I hear more?” and
three bangs of his gavel, with an eternity seeming to separate each from the
next—and proceeded to add the auction- eer’s charge. For a student like me, the
sum was still considerable. What happened the following morning at the pawnshop
is no longer part of this story. I prefer to speak about another incident,
which I would like to call the negative of an auction. It occurred last year at
a Berlin auction. The books offered were a motley collection in both quality
and subject matter, and only a number of rare works on occultism and natural
philosophy were worthy of note. I bid for a number of them, but each time I
noticed a gentleman in the front row who seemed only to have waited for my bid
to counter with his own, evidently prepared to top any offer. After this had been
repeated several times, I gave up all hope of acquiring the book which I was most interested in that day. It was the
rare Fragmente in aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers [Posthumous Fragments
by a Young Physi- cist], which Johann Wilhelm Ritter had published in two
volumes at Heidel- berg 1810. This work has never been reprinted, but I have
always considered its preface, in which the author-editor tells the story of
his life in the guise of an obituary for a supposedly deceased unnamed
friend—with whom he is really identical—as the most important example of
personal prose in German Romanticism. Just as the item came up, I had an
illumi- nation. It was simple enough: since my bid was bound to give the item
to the other man, I must not bid at all. I controlled myself and remained
silent. What I had hoped for came about: no interest, no bid, and the book was
put aside. I deemed it wise to let several days go by; and when I appeared on
the premises after a week, 1 found the book in the secondhand depart- ment, and
profited from the lack of interest when I acquired it.
Once you have approached
the mountains of crates in order to mine the books from them and bring them to
the light of day—or, rather, of night— what memories crowd in upon you! Nothing
highlights the fascination of unpacking more clearly than the difficulty of
stopping this activity. I had started at noon, and it was midnight before I had
worked my way to the last crates. Now I put my hands on two volumes, bound in
faded boards, which—strictly speaking—do not belong in a bookcase at all: two
albums with paste-in pictures which my mother had glued in as a child and which
I inherited. They are the seeds of a collection of children’s books which is
growing steadily even today, though no longer in my garden.—There is no living
library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas.
They need not be paste-in albums or family albums, autograph books or
portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts. Some people become
attached to leaflets and prospectuses; others, to handwriting fac- similes or
typewritten copies of unobtainable books. And certainly peri- a odicals can form
the prismatic fringes of a library. But to get back to those albums: Actually,
inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For collector’s
attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility
toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense the attitude of an heir,
and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its
heritability. You should know that, in saying this, I fully realize that my
discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your
conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the
collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your
conviction or your distrust. But one thing should be noted: the phe- nomenon of
collecting loses its meaning when it loses its subject. Even though public
collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically
than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do when
know that night is coming for the type that I am discussing here ‘and have been
representing before you a bit ex officio, But, as Hegel put it, only it is dark
does the ow! of Minerva begin its flight.6 Only in extinction is the collector
comprehended.
Now I am on the last
half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than
the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the
cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence,
Basel, Paris; memories Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzig
Stockturm, where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Stissengut’s musty book
cellar in North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been
housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of
Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former
location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up
around me. O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! No one has
had less expected of him and no one has had a greater sense of well-being -
than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the
guise of Spitzweg’s “Bookworm.”” For inside him there are spirits, or at least
little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—and I mean a real
collector, a collector as he ought to be-——ownership is the most intimate
relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it
is is he only fitting. who lives in them. So I have erected before you one of
his dwellings, with books as the building stones; and now he is going to
disappear inside, as is only fitting.
Published in Die literarische Welt, July 1931. Gesammelte
Schriften, TV, 388-396. Trans- lated by Harry Zohn.
© Source: http://tems.umn.edu/pdf/Benjamin-3-11-Unpacking%20My%20Library.pdf
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