posted on 23 Oct 2022

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

The eighteen short essays that make up this collection are not just entertaining diversions for bibliophiles but something closer to a confessional by the author. Fadiman manages to take us into her married life, her childhood and her family - all of them entwined with her love for books and reading. As an essayist and journalist, Fadiman has won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award but here the essays focus a lot more on the domestic and - for many readers like her - the familiar.

The collection kicks off by telling us how the author and her new husband dealt with the thorny issue of how best to merge libraries - where copies were duplicated, which copy would be kept and why? But it is, perhaps, those essays which introduce her family that are the most diverting because they give us a window into the kind of intellectual environment that created a dedicated book lover and literary aficionado.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times in 1998 when the book was first published, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted:

‘…..her family "viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament."

She and her older brother would vie to see who could find the longest words; she writes that he won "with paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde," the word for "a smelly chemical that we used to sing to the tune of 'The Irish Washerwoman.' "

With their parents, both writers, they used to compete with the contestants on the old weekly television program "G.E. College Bowl," a quiz show in which two teams of four students, each representing a different college, competed for scholarship money…..

The four of them, "compulsive proofreaders," loved to catch people's mistakes in print. "I know what you may be thinking," she writes: "What an obnoxious family! What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging little busybodies!" But she's really just being polite here in the same way as when she berates herself for once proofreading a paperback edition of Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" and sending her list of misprints to the author, who surely must have been grateful.’

In ‘Never Do That To A Book’, Fadiman discusses the very different ideas people have towards the care of their books - from those who do all they can to preserve the in a pristine condition to those who - horror of horror - tear out each page as they read the book to reduce the size and weight of what they have to hold in their hands.

I also have to admit I’m hugely conflicted about the practice of putting an inscription on the free front flyleaf. There are times when I find it charming - usually when it’s old, in fountain pen ink and immaculate copperplate - and other times when I can only see it as a defacing of a beautiful object. Sometimes when I pick up a secondhand book and see some inane, jocular inscription scrawled in biro, my heart just sinks and I can only see it as vandalism. But, as Fadiman herself makes clear - it all depends on who is dedicating the book to whom.

I’d be surprised if anyone who loves books about books hasn’t already discovered this charming little bedside companion but for those of you who might not have thought the ruminations of a bibliophile could ever interest you, I’d urge you to put your doubts aside and take a look at these. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

The book is available second hand in hardback and new in paperback for well under £10 - so you won’t be taking too much of a risk.

 

 

Terry Potter

October 2022