Welcome to Litsy!

I love books about books - this is a fascinating, anecdotal wander through histories of collectors, libraries and ideas.

As early as 1806 the traveller John Lambert noticed... [NYC] bookshops were 'numerous' and that a lot of people seemed to be reading in coffee shops. Two early characters were Emanuel Conegliano, one of Mozart's librettists, who ran a specialist Italian bookstore so compendious that Columbia University bought [it and] ...William Gowans, parts of whose shop, with its piles of books up to ten feet high, had to be navigated with sperm-oil lamps.

Martha Nussbaum argued... Western concern with cleanliness is ' a refusal to... be contaminated by a potent reminder of one's own mortality and animality'.

.....The Finnish philosopher Olli Lagerspetz takes comfort from the idea that hygiene can be suspect:

As a sometimes negligent householder... I am naturally soothed by the idea that exaggerated cleanliness is not next to godliness but to fascism and xenophobia.

Mark O'Connell of the New Yorker likes the idea that 'a nicely sharpened HB' can be so powerful, and is funny about it:

"I tend to slot mine behind my right ear, carpenter style; I like to think this lends a somewhat rough-and-ready aspect to my appearance as I sit reading Middlemarch on the bus home.

This way of collecting books for their look, rather than content, is a perennial cul-de-sac of collecting, observed by Seneca of scroll collectors in Roman times: 'Many use books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining room! [Some] get their pleasure merely from bindings and labels.'

Image Abbey Library of St. Gallen via https://www.1000libraries.com/post/2025-top-10-most-beautiful-libraries-in-the-w...

I listened to the audiobook, and I loved it. I love the character and quirk he brings to antiquarian book selling. Like the categories of customers—Smaug, Vampire, Book Runner, Cryptid, Spindleman, Ancient, and Suited Gentlemen. Very funny and lively take on it.

[Robert, Count de Montesquiou] realized that German idea of making your life a work of art: a gesamtkunstwerk.

...he made his upstairs flat over-looking the Seine into 'the mirror of my soul', exotically furnished with japonisme and books. Many of us look around our dwelling and see...a series of shabby compromises, half-loved inherited junk, broken things, lingering IKEA tat ...and does anyone, hand-on-heart, have the curtains they really want?

...a Mexican, Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95).... Her grandfather loved books, and in his house she taught herself to read and write Latin before she was five. Greek followed soon afterwards and as an adolescent she learned Aztec... she collected books and continued to educate herself....

Reading, she argued, should be a habit shared among women... 'we can perfectly well philosophize whilst cooking dinner'.

... the great Persian scholar al-Sahib ibn Abbad (d. 995). The Emir of Persia offered him the plum job of running the empire's most important province, Khorasan, but he declined on the grounds that it would take 400 camels to move his personal library.

...he encouraged the establishment of state libraries in Qom, Isfahan and Tehran, the latter containing 200,000 books.

#5JoysFriday @DebinHawaii
1️⃣Spent the most fun weekend with my family celebrating my nephew turning 13 and my niece turning 9 2️⃣ October Baseball! Go Bluejays!! ⚾️💙 3️⃣ Silent Bookclub with my bestie last night 4️⃣ Coffee and Wine ☕️🍷 5️⃣ It‘s FRIDAY!!