"Have you read all these books?"

I

This morning I packed up two books to send off to their new owners. Sometimes the combination of book title and buyer fascinates me, and that was the case with one of these books: Nicolas Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art went to a woman named Faith Stewart-Gordon, English squared to double Scotch. In other cases I find the buyer's location oddly apt—or just odd—in combination with the book: I can imagine why a gentleman living on Bear Wallow Road in Huntly, Virginia might buy Life in an English Country House, but it was a man from Los Angeles who bought my anthology of New York poets, and why would a sociologist at Yale want my old copy of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel?

The other book I sold this morning was T. S. Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays, the hardback with the teal-green buckram cover so familiar to generations of English graduate students. Many of the books I send away have annotations and marginalia that reflect my thoughts when I first read them or slogged through them for a course or gleaned them for a critical article I was writing. But Eliot had only my bookplate inside the front cover, "Tucson, Oct 23, 1965" written on the flyleaf, and, in the table of contents, publication dates penciled in behind "Choruses from The Rock" and each of the Four Quartets.

I know that this discussion of selling my library is going to seem horrible to a certain kind of reader, like describing the dismembering of one's child. I know because I have been that sort of reader myself. But bear with me. I will reassure you by saying that I'm not selling all my books. But I have sold more than a thousand of them so far, and I don't intend to stop soon.

II

I love books. But there is more than one way to love them. Anne Fadiman makes a good distinction between kinds of booklovers in "Never Do That to a Book" (Ex Libris, 1998). "Courtly lovers" use bookmarks, never dog-ear pages, and don't put books down with pages splayed. "Carnal lovers" not only do these things but also write in books, use them for doorstops and desk props, and generally "love their books to pieces."

Fadiman's distinction points cleverly to the uniqueness of books as objects. Books present a philosophical oddity: unlike any other objects, they exist as individual artifacts but also have a transcendent being: a book is its pages, ink, glue and binding, but it is also its content, independent of any physical copy. Ray Bradbury portrays this dual nature of books in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. In the book's frightening picture of the future, a totalitarian government controls the populace through constant, mindless entertainment and strictly forbids any free play of ideas. Books, when found, are immediately burned (the title refers to the temperature required to ignite a book). But a group of subversives is fighting back; in Bradbury's story people become books, each person memorizing a favorite book because these booklovers know the physical copies will soon be confiscated and burnt by the regime.

One can love books in this transcendent sense, and I like to think of myself as a Bradburian booklover of the essence of books. Andrew Lang calls the other sort of love of books bibliomania, which he defines as loving them "for their own sake, for their paper, print, binding, and for their associations, as distinct from the love of literature" (Books and Bookmen, 1887). To love books in this way is to be obsessed with their most worldly aspect, and I know because for many years I had the mania, or to put it in coarser words, I was a bookrat.

For most of my adult life I collected books, as bookrats do. I have traded for books, bought them new in bookstores, ordered them from publishers and bookshops. In the old days—the sixties and seventies—a new English book from Blackwell's in Oxford, shipped surface mail to the States (which took about six weeks), was still a third cheaper than if bought here. Those new expatriate books were somehow more exotic, but every new book has its aura, its smell of scarcely-dry ink, its virgin feel of new binding that's never been stretched. Not that old books lack their sensual charms, being worn to the hand, with pages that turn easily and lie comfortably. The erotics of book-owning is a subject yet to be explored.

I have no idea how much I've spent on books over the forty-five years or so I've been buying them. I imagine the number is at least fifty thousand dollars, and it could be twice that. But a bookrat is liable to think of money spent for books as no more to be tallied and examined than the cost of a needed transfusion for an injured family member.

It's painful for a bookrat to let any book go. This retentiveness is as familiar to another bookrat as it is puzzling to one who is not. The bookrat has an answer when the booknaif asks, "Have you read all these books?" In fact, the bookrat has a whole series of retorts. "Yes [a small lie], and I may want to read them again." "Not all books are to be read [a rationalization]; some are just for reference or judicious sampling." "No, but I may want to read any one of them any day [the whole truth]." "I just feel more secure knowing they're there to go to [and nothing but the truth]." Anatole France's answer was "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sévres china every day?"

In his Philobiblon, written sometime in the first half of the fourteenth century, Richard de Bury uses Aristotelian logic to demonstrate that since wisdom is contained in books and wisdom ought to be prized above all things, we should all be lovers of books. For most bibliophiles, reason isn't in it: booklove is a passion. And yet it's hardly ever really promiscuous. I don't have stacks of science-fiction books as my daughter-in-law does, or the espionage thrillers that my younger son has shelves of, or out-of-print bird books such as my wife collects. What I have mirrors my taste, and this reflection may be another reason it becomes harder to get rid of books the more we have: a large collection of books is a portrait of its owner, and it is hard to part with a flattering image of ourselves. How could it not be flattering? It's made of books.

III

Milton's Areopagitica, written three hundred years before Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, also presents us with a metaphoric identity of books and people. But where Bradbury tells a story in which people can become books, Milton turns the metaphor around:

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

Killing a man is bad enough, but killing a book might just be worse. The liveliness of a book, the "potency of life" in it, consists not merely in its presence in one mind, but in its dispersion, its reproduction, "as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth" which "being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men." Books are vigorously productive to the extent that they circulate.

Surely the most bizarre use of the living book trope is the conversation Washington Irving's Geoffrey Crayon has with a "little tome" in the library of Westminster Abbey (The Sketch Book). "How much better you are off," Crayon says, "by being stored away in this ancient library." But the book will have none of it. "I was written for all the world, not for the bookworms of an abbey," says the book. "I was intended to circulate from hand to hand."

IV

My thinking has gradually changed from that of the bookrat's retentiveness to a different attitude about books. I still want some books around me, but where the promiscuous bibliophile wants books of any sort, at one point I realized that a lot of the books on my shelves were trash and should go. They were freeloaders taking advantage of my hospitality. There were art books that didn't describe their subjects or provide good pictures of them or present interesting opinions about them. There was bad poetry; there were worse novels. I began to think about culling.

Being forced to get rid of some books probably helped change my bookrat's feeling that all books are precious. Chronic book-retention syndrome has to give way to life-changes and moving days. When I married, my wife Katharine and I were both in English graduate programs, so there was much duplication among our books. But even getting rid of the duplicates was hard. Anne Fadiman has another wonderful essay entitled "Marrying Libraries," a title that will immediately evoke a flash of recognition from any pairs of bookrats who have ever had to decide whose annotated copy of Don Quixote or Giles Goat-Boy was going to be pitched. Marriage itself pales, Fadiman writes, beside "the more profound intimacy of library consolidation." But we did cull a lot of duplicates, and at the same time we managed to get rid of a few additional books on each side.

Twice we moved our books, along with the whole household: once from graduate school to New Orleans, where I taught for a few years, and then again to the west Kentucky town where we've been for thirty years. Each time we tried to cull books, and each time we thought we'd done a good job. But boxing the rest of the books, carrying the boxes, loading them in a van, unloading them, unpacking the boxes—all of this reminds the aching backowner/bookowner that there are still too many books.

My wife's library and mine have developed separate specialties and have redivided over the years; her guidebooks and works on natural history occupy their own rooms, while my books on painting and astronomy accumulate in my study. We both like mysteries, but rarely read the same authors, and my collection of mystery books gradually turned into a small research library. I also had a professional library of books on language and literature in my college office.

Then I had to switch offices. The book space in the new office was less than half that in the old; I had to do some drastic culling. I let my colleagues pick over the culls and discovered that giving away books to them was much easier than I had anticipated. So when my retirement neared I found it easier to face the prospect of another huge culling, since my home bookshelves could hardly accommodate a dozen more books, let alone the hundreds on my office shelves. This time I thought I'd try to sell some books.

V

I began in a big way: I would try to sell my 500 volumes of mystery and detective fiction all at once. These books were the primary source materials for the book I wrote on the appeal of mystery fiction, Murder Most Fair (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2000). Looking at eBay, I made the disheartening discovery that groups of books seemed to be practically worthless. I tried auctioning them on eBay nonetheless, but no one got even close to bidding my reserve price, which I thought ridiculously low.

I decided on another strategy: I had some email lists from those who had participated in mystery fiction panels with me, members of popular culture groups, and a nineteenth-century literature study group. I sent an email to everyone. I made it as attractive as I could, and I set the price ridiculously low. Most of the books were paperback reading copies, but about a hundred were hardbound, including some first editions and a nine-volume Oxford Sherlock Holmes in mint condition. The collection was very comprehensive, spanning almost all the titles in various lists of best mysteries such as H. R. F. Keating's Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books and the Howard Haycraft-Ellery Queen Definitive Library. Included was all the longer fiction and most of the collected shorter fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as well as most of the works by Manning Coles, Dorothy Sayers, G.K Chesterton, and Sara Paretsky. Significant English and American writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were there, as well as some writers from Australia, South America (Taibo, Vargas Llosa), the Far East (Natsuki), and Europe (Simenon, Arjouni, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and others). And because I was not sure the number of books would convey it, I was careful to specify that the collection amounted to twenty-eight shelf-feet of space.

I got one reply. Amazingly, though, that one respondent went ahead to buy the books. She was a graduate instructor at the University of Virginia, having just finished her Ph.D. there. She described herself as "a recent Ph.D., now budding mystery novelist," and she was excited about acquiring the books. She not only had an interest in mysteries; she was beginning to write mysteries herself. Her interest and her situation made it easier for me to part with the books. While I addressed cartons to her in North Garden, I was thinking of her reading my Poe stories "while residing near Charlottesville, Virginia," like the narrator of Poe's "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains." I mailed off the books in a dozen boxes. It was September, the beginning of my last year of teaching.

VI

I had been lucky to sell the mystery library so easily. I knew that the remaining books would have to be sold individually, and I discovered there were several ways to do this using the internet, which is far and away the most efficient way to sell books these days. One can become a dealer and lease advertising space on the net; these services assess a monthly charge according to the number of books one has listed. I didn't know at the time how many books I wanted to sell. What I needed was an internet service that would list as few or as many books as I wished, and one that did not charge until a book sold. That describes Amazon.com's mail-order book business called Amazon.com Marketplace.

Amazon runs the perfect American middleman scheme: they don't handle books, they don't house books, and they don't mail books. They just collect the money, take a hefty fifteen percent cut of it, take another cut out of the amount the buyer pays for mailing, and put the rest in your account. It's all done electronically. They list your books for two months, and if they have not sold by that time, they notify you and you may relist if you wish. It costs you nothing to list the books, and Amazon's commission is only subtracted if the books sell. You are responsible for mailing the books within two days of their sale.

They make it tremendously easy for you. All you do is find on the Amazon.com website a page headed "Sell an Item." There you can enter either a title or the book's ISBN number. Amazon tells you whether anyone else is selling the book and what the lowest price is; if you wish you can browse all the listings. You decide whether to try to get an average price for the book or to undercut everyone else. You are responsible for an accurate description of the book. The overall categories are new, used (with a number of subcategories), and collectible, also with subcategories. If a book is a first edition, bears an autograph, or is collectible for some other reason, you may list it for whatever price you wish; otherwise you may not charge more than Amazon's retail price for the book.

VII

I started to sell books on Amazon.com a month or so after I sold the mystery books. In the first month I sold only four books, but I didn't list many. Once my listings increased I began to sell books more often. By February I was selling a dozen books a month. By the summer I had 250 titles listed, and I settled into a routine of selling about twenty books a month.

I have sold books to buyers in every state in the Union, and some of my books have gone to Germany, to France and Italy and Spain and Norway and the Netherlands and England and Ireland and Brazil and Japan and South Korea. I've sold books to people in Boring, OR, Loveland, CO, Hernando, MS, Nevada, MO, and Grottoes, VA. I have repeat customers; one man looked at all the books I had for sale (one can view them on the Amazon website) and bought several books of Jorie Graham's poems. I infer from some of the addresses in Austin, Ithaca, Bloomington, Ann Arbor, Columbus and other college towns that college students are buying some of my books. Some college libraries also have bought them: last week I sent off a copy of Weldon Kees's novel Fall Quarter to the Sarah Lawrence College Library, and some time ago the Beeghly Library at Ohio Wesleyan bought a copy of Christopher Wood's Victorian Panorama. The National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, which the historian Stephen Ambrose had a hand in starting, bought the copy of Crazy Horse and Custer that Steve had autographed for me when we taught together at the University of New Orleans years ago.

Some of my books were priced low enough that they were bought by dealers, or perhaps they bought my books to fill orders for special customers, and the price didn't matter. But most, I believe, have been bought by people who are neither students nor librarians nor dealers, those whom Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson called common readers.

VIII

Francis Bacon wrote that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." My friend Bob Bourdette would add that some are to be thrown violently across the room (I watched him react that way to the cant of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which he read during its fifteen minutes of fame). I would add that some books are to be sold—after we have had them for a while, of course, and have read them several times over and know we won't be reading them again. Or perhaps not have read them and know we never will.

Books are artifacts, sometimes works of art, but they are also commodities. Given their dual nature, it is not surprising that Walter Benjamin, the author of the influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," should have things to say about the book's duality. And he does, in a very personal essay written in 1931 titled "Unpacking My Library." Benjamin begins as his own books, which had been crated up for several years in storage, are now half-unpacked in disarray around him, but will soon be shelved "in the mild boredom of order." Thus he starts with a contrast between disorder and order: libraries, or at least their catalogues and shelves, are orderly; books, full of revolutionary ideas that defy classification, are not. This tension between order and disorder characterizes the life of the collector as well, since he tries to capture books and to hold onto them as objects when their real life is not material. It is "a very mysterious relationship" between the collector and his books, and Benjamin's populist politics, he knows, are very much at odds with his love of collecting books.

Benjamin half mocks the notion of the collector sitting on a huge and valuable book-hoard (there is irony here, since his own "collection" was no more than 2,000 books), perhaps having inherited it ("inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring books"), and passing it on to heirs. This picture is an anachronism, he says. Moreover, he thinks the collecting urge is a kind of boyhood impulse. He knows that he is writing about the valuing of books for reasons—their association with places where he bought them, for instance, or their comparative value, especially when he acquired them for less than their market price—reasons that have nothing to do with the real value of books as instruments of democracy that decentralize knowledge, authority, and power. This real value of books, "their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness," depending on circulation and wide availability, is at odds with the collector's habit of hoarding and his valuing of rarity.

IX

"If a book can be bought, it can also be sold. A book that I once wanted I may want no longer." Since I can say these things with conviction, I must have ceased being a bookrat. I have not stopped appreciating copies of books as aesthetic objects or even as repositories of memory. But I can imagine a book moving from my possession and becoming the permanent possession of someone else. Well, I don't have to imagine it; it happens every other day.

A man in upstate New York has bought my Hughes edition of Milton. I look through it before packing it up and I find oddly few notations. I read almost every word in this book during a graduate course in Milton. There are a few underlinings in Paradise Lost, though none in Areopagitica. I ask myself what I feel at letting this book go. I recall that it wasn't a course I was passionate about, and yet I did good work in it, writing a paper on a manuscript question in Comus and another discussing the occasional rhyme in the blank-verse closet drama Samson Agonistes. The paper on Samson was published by Milton Quarterly and was one of my very first publications. The marginal notes in Samson are some of the very few annotations in the book. I haven't looked into this book in perhaps twenty years. What I feel is that this book is ready to go to its new owner.

A. R. Ammons's Collected Poems is going to a woman in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell. I imagine her reading "Corson's Inlet," with Ammons comparing the swerves and eddies of his lines to the "inlet's cutting edge." Is she interested in the descriptions of bayberry and reeds, the "black shoals of mussels," or perhaps the interplay of form and chaos, order and entropy in one day's observations of the inlet? Has she also ordered Robinson Jeffers, I wonder. A woman at the McDonald Observatory in Texas has bought Copper Canyon Press's anthology of poetry that marked their twenty-fifth year of publishing; I imagine her sitting at the control panel, reading poems on cold, clear winter nights while the big scope takes digital images of galaxy clusters a billion light years away. Sometimes I wonder whether I should tell her about the pharmacist in Biloxi who likes Wallace Stevens, or the man in New Jersey who bought those three books of Jorie Graham. But I won't, and I won't tell the woman at the law firm on Times Square who bought J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words that she may find Austin's philosophic theory of speech acts doesn't easily translate into effective closing arguments.

I know that these attempts to read the future of my books mean I'm trying to hang on. Some part of me still believes I should only acquire and never get rid of books. But most of me knows otherwise. My library when I began selling books was only a little bigger than Walter Benjamin's. Now it is considerably smaller. I now spend more time in the city library than I used to, and almost as much time in college libraries as I did before I retired. I am learning to love libraries again in the way I did before I was able to afford any book I wanted. I have open bookshelves. I have freedom. And I have all this money. What books shall I buy?