Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris,” published in 1998, is a book I’ve bought a dozen or more copies of over the years to dispense among friends who are as passionate as I am about reading. It’s a series of 18 short personal essays about the author’s love of books. Fadiman is charming, witty, and the most erudite of authors. A warning, though: almost every other page contains a word you may never have seen before, which can be a problem if you’re the type of reader who must look such words up as they appear, thus interrupting smooth sailing through a chapter.
I’m not that type of reader. Instead, I make a list of the unknown words and the pages they appear on and look them up later. Thus it went for “ichor,” “concatenation,” “seracs,” “antipodal,” “soidisant,” “embonpoint,” “lucubrations,” and dozens of others. My appreciation for the content of these essays was not disturbed. (I do bother to interrupt my reading for footnotes, by the way, but Fadiman confines footnotes to one chapter. And I must admit that my brother, a word genius, Scrabble champion, and once an editor at Houghton Mifflin, knew the meaning of half the words above.)
The essays consider many aspects of bibliolatry: the ups and downs of combining books, as Fadiman and her husband finally did years after they had lived with their two separate libraries that contained many duplicates; proper inscription etiquette; the satisfactions of compulsive proofreading—something my friend Myn and I can attest to; new books versus secondhand books; and instructions on how to treat your books. In this latter chapter, the essay begins:
When I was eleven and my brother was thirteen, our parents took us to Europe. At the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of his literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next afternoon, he returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark the page, and the following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its cover: SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK.
In a chapter on sonnets, Fadiman writes:
I recently read that William Kunstler, the radical defense attorney, has written sonnets for more than fifty years. A divine afflatus apparently descended on him after the arrest of O. J. Simpson, provoking a verse called “When the Cheering Stopped.” This work consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, incorporating allusions to the Heisman Trophy and Hertz Rent-a-Car, and ends with the prosodically unimpeachable couplet “He’s learned the cruelest lesson of them all— / Celebrity does not prevent a fall.”
It’s tempting to use lines from every chapter to fill this review, but I will try to resist. I must assure you, though, that Fadiman is an extraordinarily graceful writer and her pages are delightfully humorous and informative. In her chapter “Words on a Flyleaf,” we learn the difference between a presentation and an inscription copy. In “You Are There,” the discussion is of reading books that illuminate your travel to foreign places. “The His’er Problem” deals with a writer’s struggle to remain gender neutral. “The use of gender-neutral terms like flight attendant, firefighter, and police officer seems to me an unambiguous step forward,” she writes. This book was written before the use of plural pronouns became an answer to the problem. I believe she would not approve.
“Eternal Ink” is an essay about writing instruments, from quills to computers. “The Literary Glutton” is a treatise on food. There’s an essay on the pleasures of reading catalogues when you’ve run out of books, another on reading aloud, one on used bookstores and, finally, an essay on recommendations of books about books.
You might know Anne Fadiman for the medical-anthropological, fascinating and eminently readable “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures,” published in 1997. A new book of her essays, “Frog,” is just out.
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of “West Marin Review,” author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader who lives in Point Reyes Station.