posted on 10 Jul 2020

Bibliomania by Gustav Flaubert

At the end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, a strange malady seemed to grip some intellectuals, philosophers and collectors of Europe – bibliomania. The irrational desire to own books at any cost and for their own sake led to some quite remarkable and well-documented, high-profile crimes that wouldn’t seem to be out of place in the most melodramatic of television detective dramas.

One such case was that of the Spanish monk, Don Vincente. Max Sander, writing in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology tells the sad story accessibly and in detail. In short it’s the story of man obsessed with the book as object rather than for its contents and the lengths he will go to in order to possess the object of desire. The fact that the story as a whole provides a rather classical narrative of the fall from grace to perdition and eventually to death probably adds weight to the suspicion that some of this story is apocryphal and should be viewed perhaps more as a morality tale than a true tale of bibliomania.

However, there’s no doubting that Don Vincente went to the gallows in 1836 and his story had enough glamour to make it into the pages of a Paris newspaper where it became the inspiration for the first published story by a writer destined to become one of Europe’s greats – Gustav Flaubert, then just aged 15.

In this longish short story, Flaubert essentially rehashes the skeleton of the Don Vincente incident, drawing out the moral threads more explicitly and perhaps over-labouring the irony of a man who kills to own a unique book only to discover that the only defence that can be mounted to save him from the gallows involves proving that the book isn’t in fact unique. This proves to be a paradox which drives the central character to the very edge of insanity.

It is, of course, extraordinary to find a 15 year old capable of writing to this pretty elevated standard but, to be honest, that was only part of my interest in this book. In keeping with the themes I have already set out, I actually wanted the book less for the story it tells and more because of the edition it comes in.

Published by the Rodale Press in 1954 in their ‘Miniature Book’ book series, the pages are illustrated by the very wonderful Arthur Wragg, some of whose other books I have reviewed elsewhere on this site. Wragg, a Socialist and a Christian seems to have been the go-to man when it comes to doom and mania – he has a especially good line in haunted expressions, supernatural flames and skeletal hands reaching out of the void.

As a work of fiction it is a curio and I guess book collectors like me and fans of Flaubert will want copies for the content but I think a much wider audience will be able to appreciate Arthur Wragg’s illustration and the very fine job Rodale Press made of putting this together. I’ve no idea what happened to the publisher who was, I think, a subsidiary of an American publishing house but I’ll be keeping my eyes open for any others from their Miniatures Series to see if they keep up this same level of production values.

It’s not too hard to find copies of this book on the second hand market and they aren’t too expensive either. I’d advise you to get one, even if it’s just for the illustrations.

 

Terry Potter

July 2020

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