Gary Dexter

The body in the library

Jacques Bonnet is a distinguished French art historian and novelist who has amassed a private library of 40,000 volumes (around double the number contained in the average Waterstones).

Jacques Bonnet is a distinguished French art historian and novelist who has amassed a private library of 40,000 volumes (around double the number contained in the average Waterstones). Phantoms on the Bookshelves is Bonnet’s meditation on a life lived with so many books.

Particularly pressing is the matter of classification. ‘Should I put Norbert Elias’s What is Sociology? next to his more historical works?’ he worries. ‘Should Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire be next to his studies of sexuality and euertegism (gift-giving) in ancient Rome? Does Picasso count as French or Spanish? Modigliani as Italian or French? And what am I to do with Michelangelo?’

At this point one is tempted to answer the question in a rather crude manner, and in fact the book is not always easy for an Anglophone reader to take. This is partly because many of the books referred to are by untranslated French authors, but also because it sits in a recognisably Gallic tradition of works such as Marcel Bénabou’s Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books or Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read — witty, professorial, self-effacing, but concerned with problems that one suspects even the author doesn’t really care very much about. A better title might have been Crushed to Death by Bookshelves, since this was the fate of one of Bonnet’s heroes, Charles-Valentin Alkan, ‘the patron saint of demented book collectors’, who met his end in this manner in 1888.

Despite the fact that Phantoms on the Bookshelves is being published at a time when digitised books and the internet are threatening the future of libraries, Bonnet is too much of a bibliomane to be very interested, which makes one’s heart warm to him.

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