Su Blackwell, The Book of the Lost, 2011; courtesy Art Made from Books by Laura Heyenga published by Chronicle Books, 2013.

My own book collecting began in high school, at just about the time I was certain that literature would be my life—not an occupation but an existence. It’s been a back-aching, U-Hauling two decades because I’ve resided in a dozen homes across four different states. I’ve also inherited a book collection from a beloved mentor, a colossus that sits boxed and bulging in my grandparents’ basement in New Jersey—I can’t wedge any more books into our Boston home without inciting my spouse and children to mutiny. In the mid-’90s, when my grandparents lived near the Raritan River, I stored several hundred titles in a first-floor bedroom, and when the river swallowed half the town one year, all those books were swallowed, too. After the waters retreated, I laid the books out in the sun on the sidewalk, cataloging my losses in a kind of requiem.4 In 1941, Rose Macaulay wrote beautifully about losing her library, her whole apartment, in the Blitz—“a drift of loose, scorched pages fallen through three floors to street-level, and there lying sodden in a mass of wreckage smelling of mortality”—and I’ve never read that essay without blurred vision.

When a bibliophile reads a classic, he tends to remember most vividly those portions that might by chance speak to an ardor for books—he’s pleased to find some kinship with the greats—and so some of my most dominant memories of Rousseau’s Confessions or Boswell’s Life of Johnson or Waugh’s A Handful of Dust or Woolf’s Night and Day or Orwell’s Coming Up for Air happen to be those swaths of prose which confirm my own hunch that a life with books is more meaningful than a life without books. As a child reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I was spun around by that mention of Captain Nemo’s personal library aboard his vessel, all 12,000 tomes of it. The narrator, Pierre Aronnax, comments that Nemo must have “six or seven thousand volumes,” and Nemo replies, “Twelve thousand, M. Aronnax. These are the only ties which bind me to the earth.” If Nemo indeed owned 12,000 books, I knew, the way a beast knows the coming season, that I wanted 12,000, too.

One collects books for reasons that are, of course, acutely personal, but I have a memory of the afternoon when I was shown how others perceive the flexing brawn of a book collection. At 19 years old, in surrender from an unkillable Northeast winter, I moved to South Carolina, and one day a police officer arrived at my apartment to question me about cash that had been thieved from someone with whom I’d spent a night—she thought the thief was me and not, as it turned out, her roommate. There were prints on the box from which the cash had been stolen, and the officer asked if I’d be willing to go to the station to have my own prints taken. Of course I would, I said, and as I asked for driving directions, he squinted at the bookshelves. “All those books,” he said, and then asked the infamous cliché of a question, the question that occurs only to nonreaders: “You read all those books?” I told him that I’d read fewer than half—the truth was that I’d read fewer than half of half—and he said, “Well clearly the thief’s not you. No one smart enough to read all those books is dumb enough to steal cash from such a pretty gal.” And then he began walking his fingertips along the spines as if he’d just realized that the books might confer on him some magical capacity.5

He’d have been right about the capacity but wrong about the magic. A life with books is a life of pleasure, yes, but also a life of work. Not just the work of lugging their heft each time you move, but the work of reading them, the work of discernment, of accepting the loquacity of the world’s bliss and hurt and boredom, of welcoming both small and seismic shifts to your selfhood, of attempting to earn those intimations of insight that force the world briefly into focus. That’s the reason the cop was wrong in thinking that readers are smart by default: Dedicated readers are precisely those who understand the Socratic inkling that they aren’t smart enough, will never be smart enough—the wise are wise only insofar as they know that they know nothing. In other words: Someone with all the answers has no use for books. Anthony Burgess once suggested that “book” is an acronym for “Box Of Organized Knowledge,” and the collector is pantingly desperate for proximity to that knowledge—he wants to be buffeted, bracketed, bulletproofed by books. Leigh Hunt wrote of literally walling himself in with his collection: “I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables. ... When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to lean my head against them.”