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U Section of the San Bernardino SUN April 15, 2007 
A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes 
Bibliomania - the Real Thing
When the going gets tough, I seek solace in books. I go back to underlined passages in old favorites looking for words of wisdom. And then I just sit amid my books - the books I've hoarded through the years and the books I check out from the library by armloads. Until I read "A Gentle Madness" by Nicholas A. Basbanes, I had no idea that the seemingly benign hobby of book collecting may frequently descend into madness and mental illness. "A Gentle Madness" is a book about "bibliophiles, bibliomanes, and the eternal passion for books." It tells the stories of famous, infamous and obscure bibliomanes and the book collections they built. "Bibliomania is an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the collecting of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged," Wikipedia tells us. "Bibliomania is not to be confused with bibliophilia, which is the legitimate love of books and is not considered a clinical psychological disorder. Other abnormal behaviors involving books include book-eating (bibliophagy), compulsive book-stealing (bibliokleptomania), etc." In "A Gentle Madness," Basbanes sets out to "show that however bizarre and zealous collectors have been through the ages, so much of what we know about history, literature and culture would be lost forever if not for the passion and dedication of these driven souls." The title of the book derives from something Benjamin Franklin Thomas had written about his grandfather, Isaiah Thomas. His grandfather, the younger Thomas wrote, was "touched early by the gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania." According to Basbanes, all of the great libraries we have today were built by people possessed by this gentle madness. Little is known about the personality of the man responsible for building the first library in the American Colonies, yet his name is known all over the world. In 1638, a dying Boston clergyman bequeathed his library to a college in a place near Boston, called Newtowne. In gratitude the college was named Harvard, after the clergyman's last name. Newtowne, where the college was located, was renamed Cambridge in honor of Cambridge, England, where the Rev. Harvard had been educated. It is common knowledge that Thomas Jefferson sold his valuable book collection to Congress after the Library of Congress burned in the 1814 fire set by the British. But what is not known is that Jefferson sold it for a pittance and that there was a great deal of opposition in the House of Representatives to the content of his library. Congressman Cyrus King of Massachusetts led the opposition. "It might be inferred from the character of the man who collected it, and from France, where the collection was made," said King, "that the library contained irreligious and immoral books ... in languages which many can not read, and most ought not." The most interesting story about book collectors is that of Stephen Carrie Blumberg - a contemporary bibliokleptomaniac extraordinaire. By the time Blumberg was tried and convicted in 1991, he had amassed a book collection including incunabula and other rarities worth $20 million. Blumberg might have continued to steal books while living on his trust fund to this day, if his friend Kenneth Rhodes had not negotiated with the FBI to turn him in for $56,000. While Blumberg was awaiting trial, a Mafia don called to ask him why he had wasted his talents on stealing books and not used them to steal gold and diamonds. "I never took the books to sell," Blumberg is to have answered. "The idea was to keep them." Bibliomania is not the exclusive domain of men. Many women became well known for their book collecting. One of the more intriguing female book collectors was Queen Christina of Sweden. She was consumed with the idea of building a national library, but took all her books with her to Rome upon abdicating in 1654. After her death in 1689, her vast library Bibliotheca Alessandrina went to the Vatican. According to "A Gentle Madness," bibliomania is even more widely spread today. There is comfort and reassurance in the knowledge that the world may never find itself without some part of the human record collected in some bibliomaniac's library somewhere in the oddest place imaginable. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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