Bibliomania

The online bookshop www.flipkart.com (our own version of amazon.com), has had several casualties like me. Whoever I have introduced to this marvel has thanked me profusely but the spouses complain that I have created a serious financial imbalance in their private lives. The efficiency of flipkart is so impressive and the discounts so attractive that as soon as a book reaches me, I find myself ordering a new one from my endlessly long ‘Wishlist’. This means I end up buying one book every other day as I happen to receive one new book with the same frequency. My book-buying rate happens to be three times higher than my reading rate which possibly makes me more of a book-hoarder than a book-reader. If I had not picked up this habit, I would have more money in the bank but I would not be richer.

‘Are you a lawyer?’ ‘Do you sell books?’

‘So… you mean to say you have read all these books?’

While the first question is unique to Bombay where very few homes have book-collections unlike more cultured cities, the latter question is one that I encounter very often. Only someone who doesn’t share the passion of the bibliophile would dare to ask such a question because books are much more than just books. They exude a strange kind of positive energy that spreads a kind of tranquility that can impact any one. Kids refusing to go to bed fall quickly asleep in a room full of books and it can also provide a great backdrop for the drama of love and seduction. Live in a room surrounded by great books and realise how the wisdom of the ages seep into your body through the thin air. You do not even have to read them!

When we are collecting great books, we are collecting some kind of eternal happiness – a sort of guarantee in a life completely devoid of any other certainties. A person can surround him/herself with 6,000 books (and about a 1000 DVDs as in my case) and thenceforward have at least one place in the world where s/he can be happy! Borges once said that he always imagined that Paradise would be a kind of library – a labyrinthine one at that.

Anatole Broyard articulates it better than me: ‘The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.’ In other words, one has a specific personal relationship with each book in one’s collection. A private library is also a working tool and has got to do with a primitive sense of possession. I cannot find my peace-of-mind unless I wrap up the book in plastic, write out my name in the title page along with the date and place of its procurement and then read it with a red pen in my hand and a bookmark. That is also why I find it impossible to read a borrowed book and when I lend one of my own to someone, I feel like an anxious parent who waits at the balcony for a teenager child to come back home from a late night party.

So many hard emotions are experienced over the loss or procurement of books! Nazis burnt them in spectacular bonfires just as much as the Inquisition did five centuries earlier. And I too have lost half a dozen close friendships over books that were not returned and I certainly miss those books far more than the human beings. Gustave Flaubert wrote Bibliomania in 1836 when he was just 14 years old, his first published work. It is a slightly fictionalized version of a true story of Don Vicente, a Spanish monk who was literally willing to kill to possess a book he wanted for his collection. It still stands as a classic example of bibliomania taken to its extreme.

Our relationship with the electronic document is vastly different in its affective value though I find myself reading far more material online these days - particularly the ubiquitous wikipedia -than the physical book. With the increasing proliferation of the Kindle and the Sony Reader and the Google Library Project that promises to make available online every printed book in the history of humanity, I am quite convinced that we are the last generation of human beings on earth collecting books that may promote deforestation but reinforce our emotional bond with the world of ideas in all its physicality.