I’m not a bibliophile. Bibliophiles are obsessed with books; they live and breathe books.

One of my favorite books about bibliophiles is Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas [amz] (which was made into an unfortunate bad thriller [9th]) – it captures some of the flavor of the addiction, though my experience with bibliophiles is that they’re not the type of people to kill and steal books.

In Baltimore, when I was young, one of my dad’s friends was a bibliophile of a certain sort. He lived in one of Baltimore’s great stately homes and was a cantankerous, blunt-spoken, hard-assed old bastard. My grandfather thought him a snob but my father saw redeeming character in him (my father sees redeeming character in just about everyone; it’s his greatest trick) and we would visit periodically. For me, a visit to C——— P—-, where he lived, was special because I liked his dog, and the black and white marble squares of the huge front hall; I used to stomp around experimenting with chess end-games while the grown-ups talked. Also, they had a servant (who was descended from a line of their “servants” going back to before the civil war) who made these amazing little lemon butter cupcakes called “Cassie Cakes” – If they knew I was coming, there were always a few in the kitchen.

His library was where he lived, and his heart was. It was a typical pre-victorian mansion with a huge library of floor-to-ceiling shelves with brass rails, a gigantic desk; the whole bit. The books were beautiful, perfectly preserved – they looked new but it was just because they were perfectly preserved. And he had an amazing collection. I don’t mean he had a few good volumes, I mean he had: a museum in there. The story went that, around 1905 when he was a young lawyer, he had a meeting in London to carry over a draft and arrange the purchase of a cargo vessel of some size – what would be a $15 million-dollar transaction nowadays – and he took the Cunard over with enough time for delay, arriving in London with a day of leisure. He was a bibliophile, and had heard there was to be an auction of rare books at Sotheby’s that day – some Eastern European nobleman had died or was liquidating their parents’ book collection, and it was a major event. My father’s friend decided to attend, though he knew he wouldn’t be bidding, and neither would anyone else – as the story goes, a rare books curator from the British Museum was known to be attending the auction with a purse of money from HRH and nobody was going to bid seriously against The Crown and The Museum, and nobody expected to be able to win, anyway. All of the attendees were more or less there for a chance to see this amazing collection come and get gaveled through.

The bidding started and immediately things went wrong: nobody was bidding. The bibliophile tentatively put in a bid for something, and won it. Well, he had money; it was unexpected but he’d gotten the book lot for substantially below what it was worth. The next lot came up and – he won again. Suddenly, he realized that he was the only person actually bidding. As it happened he had plenty of money, in the form of a bank draft, in his pocket, so he bought up great chunks of the collection, arranged payment, and – puzzled as all get-out – went back to his hotel. The next day the word filtered around that what had happened is the unfortunate museum curator had been hit by a taxi, or something like that, crossing the street on the way to the auction and so the only person there with Real Money was the American lawyer.

I vaguely remember some of the books in that library. My father showed me the set of Diderot’s Encyclopedie with Voltaire’s hand-written notes in the margins – beautifully bound in red morocco leather and gilt. I remember that, because I was fascinated by the industrial processes that were illustrated, and the fencing. Being a grubby kid(tm) I did not touch the books, but I was allowed to ask for the pages to be turned and that was pretty good. The other books I remember was an edition of Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur, in three volumes, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, bound in white morocco leather with Beardsley-designed gilt hammered into the cover. There were medieval illuminated manuscripts. There were medieval medical texts. It was a museum, but it was the bibliophile’s house. When I got farther into high school and started working for a security company that specialized in burglar alarms and fire alarm systems, I did an audit of the security of the place, and it was pretty good; I was terrified that there might be a fire. Imagine a fire, and someone sprays water into that library. Unthinkable.

When the bibliophile’s heart finally gave out, the entire collection went to the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I suspect the curator of their rare books collection nearly had heart failure of his own; I have no idea how you transfer a semi-trailer load of rare books. And, that was that.

He willed my dad a few books including the copy of Mallory, which my dad handed on to me a few years ago. It’s actually quite a burden because I don’t have proper facilities to store rare books. My plan is to buy an affordable copy and place the original with some book museum; that’s been an ongoing process. In the meantime: mousies, stay back, or die!

You can see where the Monty Pythons got the inspiration for the scene where Sir Bors finds the castle of spankable damsels.

I’ve laid type (in high school dad and I refurbished an old letter-press) and it makes my heart hurt when I see things like this. Laying those blocks of type and getting the impression so beautiful and tight – this is some of the highest form of the printer’s art.