By
Edwin H. Carpenter Jr.
Some
of you were fortunate enough to receive in the mail a little over a year ago a catalogue
from the Caveat bookstore in San Francisco. Seeing that delightful jeu d'esprit
and reading Walter Klinefelter's little book on the Fortsas "bibliohoax"
led me to look into the history of imaginary libraries, and I found that they
have a respectable lineage, stretching from Rabelais to Rosenbach.
Before
tracing the line of descent, I might mention that an imaginary library may
consist of imaginary books by imaginary authors, of imaginary books by real
authors, or of real books by real authors in imaginary editions. The second
category - fictitious works of genuine writers - is the most common, because it
is the best vehicle for satire; and it must be admitted that most imaginary
libraries were created for satirical purposes rather than for bibliographical
amusement.
It
was principally as a chance to poke fun at some contemporary scholastics that
in the narrative of Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais included the
Library of St. Victor, supposedly located in Paris. This was, as far as I can
ascertain, the first imaginary library, and it proved to be the ancestor of a
distinguished family. The catalogue of books appears in the first edition of 1533,
and in later editions it is sometimes expanded or contracted. The names of the
authors are usually puns or garbled versions of the names of contemporary or
slightly earlier authors, and the titles poke fun at their writings or
inclinations; some of the titles satirize ecclesiastical and educational
affairs.
Examples
are entry No. 11, "The Appearance of Saint Gertrude before a nun of Poissy
who was great with child"; No.25, Tartaretus' "De modo cacandi,
" which we might translate, On the method of defecating; and No.53,
Jabolemus' "De cosmographia purgatorii." Because of the elaborate
puns and the by-now obscure references, translators of Rabelais have
experienced some difficulty with this chapter, and usually resort to
translating the spirit rather than the substance. If you want to study this
library further, you will find a detailed edition of the catalogue, with all
the references explained, by Paul Lacroix, "le bibliophile Jacob";
this work also contains an essay on imaginary libraries by Gustave Brunet, from
which most of my material is drawn, though he concentrates on French examples
and rather slights the English, German, and Italian ones.
An Italian
imaginary library is recorded from Venice in 1551, and a second French example
in 1578. Another Italian one was printed in Paris in 1588, with the title of Lettere
facete... de Vicenzo Belando... Two
of his titles may be taken as typical of the early followers of Rabelais:
Calfurnio grummando dottor, "Epitome de use et origine
escrementorum," and Scapella de val fregnatica, " ...de modo
deflorandi virgines." I don't imagine that I need to translate those for
you.
In 1590 one
Johann Fischan published in Germany a Catalogus catalogorum ..., which
was a paraphrase of Rabelais' Library of St. Victor.
In the 1590's,
during the reign of Henri IV of France, the imaginary library became a vehicle
of political satire, and several examples are recorded from the end of the 16th
and the beginning of the 17th century. Typical of these may be cited the Extrait
de I'inventaire qui s'est trouve dans les coffres de M. le chevalier de Guise...,
published in 1615. Samples of the type of titles are: "The Life of Charles
the Simple, with a treatise on the value of ignorance, composed by M. de
Souvray, for the instruction of the King" (M, de Souvray being the tutor
of Louis XIII) and "Mathematical demonstration by which the author proves,
on the evidence of his stomach, that there exists a vacuum in nature."
This genre of
literature had meantime spread to England, apparently being introduced by no
less a person than John Donne, who had read his Rabelais, Although the work was
not published until 1650, students of his writings consider that it was between
1605 and 1610 that Donne composed his Courtier's Library, which was
written in Latin, the original title being Catalogus librorum aulicorum
incomparabilium et non vendibilium. It contains political, religious, and
literary satire. Sample titles are: No.8, "The Judaeo-Christian
Pythagoras, proving the numbers 99 and 66 to be identical if you hold the leaf
upside down, by the super-seraphical John Picus" [i.e., Pico della
Mirandola]; No.13, Martin Luther, "On shortening the Lord's
Prayer"; and No, 18, St. Bonaventura, "On removing the particle 'not'
from the Ten Commandments and attaching it to the Apostles' Creed." There
is a good modern edition, with translation and annotations, published by the
Nonesuch Press in 1930.
The imaginary
library was often used for political satire in England during the Civil War,
examples being recorded from 1651, 1653, 1659, and 1660, They were mostly
anti-parliamentary; apparently the Roundheads did not take to that form of
jest. A good sample is the Bibliotheca Parliamenti of 1653, attributed
to Sir John Birkenhead. This library numbered among its books "Theopoeia,
a discourse shewing to us mortalls, that Cromwel may be reckoned amongst the
gods, since he hath put off all humanity," and "The Art of
multiplying, proving it lawfull for one man to entice away another mans
wife," by Henry Hills, Printer to the Army - though perhaps it is
ungracious in this company to reflect on the morals of printers.
In 1653 Sir
Thomas Urquhart published his translation of Rabelais, the first in English. It
was apparently only shortly after this that Sir Thomas Browne wrote his Musaeum
claustrum, although it was not printed until 1683. This library leans
heavily to the classics, one of its chief treasures being Seneca's
"Epistles to St. Paul."
The book-list
as a vehicle of political satire continued to be used throughout the century in
France and Low Countries, one notable specimen being an attack on William III
of Orange, in 1690, called Bibliotheque du roi Guillemot. Also, in 1682
the form was pressed into the service of pornography by the Abbe Duprat in his Venus
dans le cloitre, which was often reprinted. The U. C. L. A. library has a
copy of this, but they keep it locked up. About the end of the 17th century it
became common in French comedies to refer to imaginary books and plays.
Throughout the
18th century imaginary libraries continue to occur in France as weapons of
political, social, or philosophical attack, including two or three from the
period of the Revolution. One mid-century fictitious catalogue lists an
interesting volume, "The Reasoning power of women," a blank book. Two
variant forms of the imaginary library occur in the second half of the 18th
century in France: in 1768 M. de Coqueley's perfectly genuine book Monsieur
Cassandre listed in the back titles of other works of the same author in
press, but they are only buffoonery; and in 1783 Merard de Saint-Just published
what purported to be a catalogue of his library, listing 521 titles, all
genuine works, but in imaginary editions.
Before I come
to the most elaborate hoax library, I would like to tell you about two
imaginary libraries that had actual physical existence, and have been described
by visitors. These came into being when an ingenious individual used fake
bindings to cover a door which broke up the rows of shelves in his library; one
example dates from the 18th century and one from the 19th.Turgot,
the French statesman and economist, lived in Limoges from 1761 to 1774, and the
library shelves of his house there were interrupted by a door. He had the line of
the shelves continued across the panels, and fastened false book spines on
them. In some cases bibliographical data form part of the joke - for example,
the "Complete law code of an intelligent nation" is a very thin volume.
In the next century the same trick was done by Charles Dickens in his home at
Gad's Hill, where he lived from 1854 to 1870. His bindings displayed 63 titles,
including Volumes 1 to 19 of Hansard's "Guide to refreshing sleep,"
Shelley's "Oysters," General Tom Thumb's "Modem warfare,"
in two volumes, Socrates on wedlock, and a ten volume "Catalogue of
statues to the Duke of Wellington." Turgot's library is described by
Latour in Memoires d'un bibliophile, and Dickens' by Charles Rubens in a
privately printed pamphlet of which the Clark Library has a copy.
The nineteenth
century was not given to the use of non-existent libraries as satire, and the
examples that we find are prepared by and for bibliophiles. The major example
of the century, and probably of all time, is the Fortsas sale catalogue.
Probably you are familiar with the story .In the summer of 1840, most of the
principal collectors and dealers of Europe received through the mail a
catalogue of the forthcoming auction of the small but very rich library of an
eccentric collector, the late Comte de Fortsas, who had lived in Binche, a
small town in Belgium. There were only 52 titles, but each was unique, for the
Count would not have in his library a book which someone else possessed, or had
even described in a bibliography. Each book was a succulent morsel on some
aspect of the history, folklore, culture, or antiquities of the Low Countries,
each being a previously unrecorded imprint, edition, or tide. Bids were
received by mail at the office of the printer of the catalogue, who had offered
to execute commissions, and on the day of the sale booklovers turned up at
Binche from all over western Europe, some of them furtively. The director of
the Belgian national library had secured a special grant with which to make
purchases at the sale, which was to be held in the office of the notary who was
handling the estate.
But there was
no notary, no sale, no library, no late Count - the whole thing was a hoax,
which some of the "customers" had already guessed. In fact, one of
them extended the jest by writing for the newspapers an account of the sale,
describing the bidding and giving the purchasers and prices. The perpetrator of
this slightly cruel joke was Renier-Hubert-Ghislain Chalon, though apparently
he had some help from others. The original catalogue, which was issued in 132
copies, two being on vellum, soon became quite a collector's item itself, and
there have been various editions and reprints. The whole story of the sale, a
translation of the catalogue, and a bibliographical description of its various
editions will be found in a little book by Walter Klinefelter, called The Fortsas
bibliohoax, published by the Press of the Woolly Whale in 1942.
Another 19th
century French creation was the library of M. Sigismond, which suffers a sorry
fate in the story of "The Sigismond inheritance," by Octave Uzanne,
which was published in French in 1894 and in English in 1933. The chef
d'oeuvre, no doubt, of this collection was an "Apocalypse" printed in
Strasbourg by Gutenberg in 1438, with a signed and dated colophon, and a
digression narrating the establishment of the press. Unfortunately this fine
collection was destroyed, but you can read about the struggle between a
bibliophile and a biblioclast for its possession in Volume I of the Dolphin.
Probably it is
not quite fair to include the Sigismond library, since the catalogue has not
come down to us. So far, I have mentioned only lists of books; if I were to
branch out into fictional libraries in general, you could each add a good many
examples. One has to think no farther than the works of Anatole France, wherein
he finds the excellent library of M. d'Esparvieu, which was responsible for the
revolt of the angels - and surely there must have been hundreds of desirable
items in the library of Sylvestre Bonnard. A similar collection was that of Jean
Vechel; I hope you are all familiar with this hero of Bonnardot's Mirror of
a Parisian bibliophile, translated by Koch. To take only one instance from
American literature, there is the University Library in The Widening stain, a
mystery story by Morris Bishop. This institution housed the Wilmerding
Collection of Railroad Timetables, as well as the Founder's erotica in the
vault.
To include
single imaginary works would make the study almost limitless, so let us return
to our catalogues of libraries and sales that never were.
In 1924 there
was a burlesque sale catalogue published in Munich, but I have not been able to
locate a copy. This brings us to last year, which was indeed a fruitful one,
showing that the family descended from Rabelais is still vigorous, though the
family occupation has changed from satire to bibliographical fun. On the first
of April appeared the Caveat catalogue, of which I made mention at the
beginning of this talk; it is a delightful whimsey fathered by our friend
Francis Farquhar. It goes a step beyond its predecessors by reproducing some of
the items, such as the titlepage of the Ashendene Press edition of Aurelia
Henry Reinhardt's To Hell with Dante. It is not recorded that anyone
travelled to San Francisco to buy the books, but at least one person wrote to
the non-existent address for a copy of the catalogue. [I was informed this
evening that some orders were received by mail.]
In the recent
volume of essays presented To Doctor R, Julian Wolff describes for us
the wonderful library to be found at 221B Baker Street, formed, of course, by
Sherlock Holmes. It is of singular value since it includes all of Holmes'
scrapbooks and many of his manuscripts. There are also his own published works,
such as "Upon the distinction between the ashes of various tobaccos,"
a large octavo in cloth, privately printed for the author in London in 1879.
This work is not in the Arents collection. Another rarity in the library is a
previously unrecorded first edition: "A Study in Scarlet" by John H.
Watson, octavo, wrappers, Reading, the Prescott Press, 1886. As the cataloguer
points out, "The existence of this edition was first called to public
attention by Mr. Thomas J. Wise in a personal letter to a friend."
And so we see
that even an imaginary library is apt to house a forgery.