Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader Book

Like many a Goodreader, no doubt, I have a thing for books about books. In this particular case, there's a chapter in the book about books about books. (It might be tempting someday to write a book about such books about books about books, but let's not get silly, or meta-silly for that matter.) Anyway, Fadiman's essays are as elegant and well-written as my introduction is awkward and inane. She's the kind of bookworm friend we'd all 'like' to the stratosphere here on this site.

Fadiman is the daughter of renowned literary critic, Clifton Fadiman, and former author and WWII correspondent for Time Magazine, Annalee Jacoby Fadiman. She had a very bibliocentric upbringing, as you might imagine. As a kid she was allowed to build a playhouse out of her dad's 22-volume set of Trollope books. You might say she was to the omnibus manor born. She grew to love sesquipedalians (a great self-descriptive word meaning 'long words') like everyone else in her family, and shared an obsession for editing grammatical flubs with her "captious, carping, pettifogging" relations.

Her essays cover a variety of topics that are bound to interest booklovers. She begins with a personal story of how she and her husband, after five years of marriage and a child, "were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation." The challenge was how to decide between her "French-garden" approach (ordered and well-tended) and his "English-garden" style (abundant but more haphazard). In other essays we learn her thoughts on:

* Classifications of book people into those who keep their volumes as pristine as possible out of respect ("courtly lovers") and those who might dog-ear pages and delight in marginalia ("carnal lovers")

* The joys of reading out loud

* The art of the inscription (with great examples among literary giants)

* The pleasure of buying 19 pounds worth of used books (as opposed to fungible new copies from big box stores)

* How, to the reading obsessed, even a roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla Owner's Manual will do

This is a small appetizer of a book, but one full of literary flavor. While it's not what I'd call LOL funny, it is amusing in a clever and scholarly way. Fadiman writes very well, too -- never a word wrong, never a cacophonous beat. I'm tempted to buy a bookplate that says "Ex Libris Steve" to print inside its cover. Oh wait, an ex libris of ex libris books is too much like the twaddle in my intro. I can't be seen as a one-shtick pony even though I am.