Anne Fadiman is the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, and who once found herself poring over a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only thing in her apartment that she had not read at least twice. EX LIBRIS wittily recounts a lifelong obsession with books. Writing with humour and erudition she moves easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. 'One of the most delightful volumes to have come across my desk in a long while...witty, enchanting and supremely well-written' -- Robert McCrum, Observer
I loved EX LIBRIS. It’s a book about books, but what I like about this one is that Fadiman talks about so many different aspects of reading. EX LIBRIS is comprised of eighteen essays, each on a different aspect of reading; for example, there are essays on “marrying libraries,” or the process of integrating one’s library with one’s significant other; categorizing and organizing libraries; the joy of words; writing in books; etc. Fadiman’s writing reveals her as a lifelong, passionate lover of books; she describes growing up surrounded by books, and in doing so, she writes, “My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents’ tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closets. Their selves were on their shelves.” To me, this sentiment encapsulates so much of what I love about EX LIBRIS. It’s a book about loving books, but it’s also about how books shape people, and the power they have once they have infiltrated our lives.
One of my favourite essays in this collection is “The Odd Shelf,” because it introduced an idea to me I’d never considered before. “It has long been my belief that everyone’s library contains an Odd Shelf,” she writes. “On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. George Orwell’s Odd Shelf held a collection of bound sets of ladies’ magazines from the 1860s, which he liked to read in his bathtub. Philip Larkin had an especially capacious Odd Shelf crammed with pornography, with an emphasis on spanking. Vice Admiral James Stockdale, having heard that Frederick the Great had never embarked on a campaign without his copy of The Encheiridion, brought to Vietnam the complete works of Epictetus, whose Stoic philosophy was to sustain him through eight years as a prisoner of war. My own Odd Shelf holds sixty-four books about polar exploration: expedition narratives, journals, collections of photographs, works of natural history, and naval manuals.” Isn’t it fascinating to think about 1) your own Odd Shelf contains, and 2) what everyone else’s does? I had never thought about my own book collection in this way, and I’m not quite sure yet how I’d characterize my Odd Shelf, but it seems like a really fun way to get to know someone, or to think about other people’s libraries critically as an extension of their person.
