Do you have this affliction?
Cupiditas librorum
Umberto Eco, Name of the Rose:
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors
Now, compare this:
There is something unique about books… books give utter delight: they talk with us, ask advice and are bound to us by a lively and witty intimacy, and do not just insinuate themselves alone on their readers but present the names of others, and each one creates the longing for another.
From Petrarch, To Giovanni dell’Incisa, charging him to search for manuscripts.1
I was reading the latter passage last week, and it brought to mind the former one. This idea of books in conversation among themselves, which I am sure I have referenced several times before. It’s the great conversation, and you are invited. But once you get into it, you realise that it never ends, books are endlessly referential to other books. We never stop talking, us human creatures, and books let us speak across time and space.
Hence Petrarch’s disease2:
one insatiable desire possesses me, which I have so far not been able or willing to rein in… I cannot have a sufficiency of books.
Petrarch speaks in particular of how he finds mention of one author in another, and it evokes in him the desire to read that author in turn. In Cicero, for instance, he hears of Terence, and conceives the desire of his works. So too, with us (if we are similarly afflicted): we read one book, and it makes mention of another, and then we are lead on in our appetites.
Petrarch’s age is a very different one to ours though. For when Petrarch hears of an author from the classical world, he has no idea whether that book now exists and if so, where. Hence his many letters such as this one exhorting his friends to go looking for books, to search the archives and the libraries and the monasteries, to find books. And yet even in our age, some books are hard to track down. I have had that experience myself. ISBNs only started in the 1960s. Books from the middle of the last century can be difficult, if not impossible to find. I have one associate who’s been trying, in vain, to liberate a mid 20th century book for Russian learners, of which perhaps one copy still exists in a library, who are unwilling to let anyone have scans/pictures of it except at a princely extortion.
Do I love books? Yes. Do I have an unhealthy appetite for them? Yes.
But let's let Petrarch have the last word on it:
for I beguile myself into thinking that desire of honorable things cannot be dishonorable.3
I feel academically negligent not to provide a source text, and a reference. singulare quiddam in libris est… libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate iunguntur, neque solum se se lectoribus quisque suis insinuat, sed et aliorum nomen ingerit et alter alterius desiderium facit.
Texts from Francesco Petrarca, Selected Letters, 1. Translations by Elaine Fantham. ITRL 76. HUP 2017.
una inexplebilis cupiditas me tenet, quam frenare hactenus nec potui certe nec volui… libris satiari nequeo.
michi enim interblandior honestarum rerum non inhonestam esse cupidinem.