Monday, November 14, 2005
(2:25 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Book Collecting as Sickness
Inexplicably, this story turned up on the top section of the New York Times website:Rushing to evacuate her home as a forest fire lapped at the edges of this high-desert town in May 2000, Kathryn Gursky took with her just one book, a British edition of "The World of Pooh," by A. A. Milne, bought when she and her husband were vacationing in Dorset some 11 years earlier.[...]From the looks of the picture, her collection includes some of the "old style" Penguin editions, the ones that the solid black spine with a little strip of (apparently randomly chosen) color on the top, together with a pale yellow background for the front and back covers. Ms. Gursky has already been through a lot -- hopefully she can handle it emotionally when the spines start breaking and pages begin to fall out.
Thousands of scorched tree trunks still range up the hillside across the street from Ms. Gursky's new home here, but inside the house, her library is well on the way to recovery. In September, Ms. Gursky received a birthday gift from her husband that earned her the envy of her book-loving friends: the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000.
Penguin Classics, the paperback volumes with the familiar black spine and the orange and black penguin logo, are known to generations of former students who struggled through Dickens and dozed through Henry James in school. While plenty of competitors also sell collections of classics, including Random House (Modern Library, Everyman's Library and Bantam Classics), Oxford University Press (World Classics), the Library of America and Barnes & Noble, arguably none is as instantly recognizable or as renowned as the Penguin Classics.
"It's hard to think of a rival," said Harold Bloom, the author, professor and literary critic who extolled his love of literature in "The Western Canon" and "How to Read and Why." "The Penguin collection has enormous range and comprehensiveness."
Not since Penguin started the collection in 1946, however, has anyone been able to easily compile or purchase a complete set of the books, which range from ancient Greek poetry to the novels of Thomas Pynchon and include the complete works of Shakespeare, four translations of the "Iliad," 20 volumes each of the works of Henry James and Dickens.[...]
Ms. Gursky's collection arrived in mid-September packed in 25 boxes, shrink-wrapped on a pallet and weighing nearly 700 pounds. Since then, Ms. Gursky has spent countless hours unpacking, shelving, categorizing, alphabetizing and rearranging the books. Oh, yes - and reading; she said she had completed more than 30 of the books in the last eight weeks. Even at that rather remarkable pace, it would take her about six years to make her way through the entire collection.
Speaking of poorly bound books, one of my professors assigned a Verso book for class, and of course my copy already feels like it's about to fall apart -- but he had a much older copy, back before publishers started doing those fancy "flat" non-glossy covers (so probably early '90s), and it looked completely fine, even though he had assigned it for many different classes throughout the years. So perhaps Verso, too, is sharing in the much-bemoaned decline in quality of British academic presses.
This has been a shit and garbage post.
