Bibliophilia, Bibliomania and Bookworms

Biblio-Style, How we live at home with books by Nina Freudenberger, with Sadie Stein, photographs by Shade Degges (2019, $35)

By Oliver B. Pollak. Ph.D

RICHMOND California – This striking coffee table book is a mix of Architectural Digest treatment visiting homes with gorgeous interiors, and crucial space dedicated to books, and brief philosophical blurbs about loving books. Thirty-two vignettes with lush photography reveal volumes owned by book collectors, authors and bookstore owners, and with a little help from a magnifying glass, the authors and titles on their shelves.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian native who, moved to Sweden, is the author of six autobiographical novels. The title, Min Kamp, “My Struggle.” According to Evan Hughes in the New Yorker Page Turner  “Why Name Your Book After Hitler’s?” (June 11, 2014), “bears no mark of anti-Semitism.” Knausgaard denies any malevolent or attention getting motives. His books are an investment in future writing. “I’m convinced everything can be useful for my writing, so I buy a lot of books randomly, about subjects I think one day can make it into a novel.”

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything is Illuminated (2002, and 2005 film) and contributing editor to the New American Haggadah (2012). The ambience for reading should include “Having a comfortable chair, good light – These things do put you into a state of mind to better absorb ideas.” A red upholstered armchair sits in front of the familiar sixteen volume blue bound Encyclopaedia Judaica.

Art Spiegelman, author of Maus (1991), and his spouse Françoise Mouly reconciled the dilemma of accumulation; “I often feel we are drowning in our books. How much more can we fit in? But how can we stop? This is what we do, how we live.” One shelf contained eighteen paperbacks by Philip Roth, two by Saul Bellow and four by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The book gives a shout out for four independent cookbook stores, which Karen and I have patronized over the last 40-years,  and  which deserve an amplified shout out.  Bonnie Slotnick, owner since 1997 of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks in New York relies on the fact that “People will always eat, and they’ll always read.” We have been pleased with New York’s Kitchen Arts & Letters (1983) co-owned by founding partner Nach Waxman and Matt Sartwell, London’s Books for Cooks in Notting Hill (1983), and San Francisco’s Omnivore Books owned by Celia Sack in Noe Valley (2008).

Sylvia Beach Whitman, the proprietor of the venerable Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris observed “So often with books, I feel as though they’re filled with the answers to questions: Questions about yourself, the world. So, I want to be able to find them when I need them.” Sylvia Beach, the owner of the original Shakespeare and Company in 1922 published James Joyce’s controversial Ulysses.

Emmanuel de Bayser, Berlin, Germany, owner of concept stores in Paris and Berlin stated, “Throw away a book never!” but that does not preclude sell or donate. He is adamant, “I would never read a book on a tablet —  Never, Never. I’m on my phone all the time, this is my break.”

The Mexico City home of artist Pedro Reyes and his wife designer Carla Fernandez has a two- story library. He confesses, “I probably buy two hundred to three hundred books a month on every trip. I come back with three suitcases of books.

In the closing scenes of “Let them all talk” (2020), starring Meryl Streep and Candace Bergen, the audience is treated to a breath-taking peek into a library in New York mansion. Compulsion, obsession, bibliophilia, bibliomania, the passion for the printed word and the refinement for housing them, combines collecting with using. The pride and passion of acquisition and ownership are pressed to find additional nooks and crannies for their tomes. Readers won’t be surprised to learn this lush international collaboration was printed in China.

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Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D., J.D., a professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and a lawyer, a member of the Institute for Historical Study, is a correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com