Book Madness by Denise Gigante;

Author:Denise Gigante;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300248487
Publisher: Yale University Press

A Biblical Bibliomaniac

Like others in our story, George Livermore spent all his savings on books and all his spare time reading. Bibliomania was the occupational hazard of the bibliographer, and he was a willing victim of the disease. At age fourteen, having graduated from the Cambridgeport Academy, he entered his family’s dry goods business. One day at work an elderly client warned him that it was “a bad sign for a merchant to read in his counting-room,” shaming but not deterring him from his bookish habits. By his late twenties, Livermore had a library of two hundred “good books,” which, had the book disease not gripped him, he might have considered a respectable collection. But with the exacting eye of a bibliomaniac, he could see only its gaps and deficiencies. “On one thing I am determined,” he vowed, “to buy no more trash; what works I do have shall be of good editions. I love literature too well and prize books too highly to have a good author in a mean dress.”96 Honoring that vow, he built a library that by midcentury contained “the best editions of the best authors.”97

One of the books he read in his counting house while a merchant’s apprentice was The Merchant of Venice. He decided “that an author who could write like that was worth owning entire,” and in his visits to the Boston auction houses after hours began shopping for Shakespeare. One day an illustrated edition caught his eye. It cost twenty times what he was used to paying for books, but he saved his pennies until he had three dollars and then took the bus across the river to Boston. “I was not disappointed,” he recounts:

After waiting an hour, the auctioneer put up a copy of Shakespeare. The bidding began at $2.50, and advanced 5¢ till it reached $2.90, when it was knocked down, and the name of the purchaser was called for. I had bid $2.90, but another bidder gave his name. I claimed the book, as I had fairly made the bid; and I called out to the auctioneer that I had bid $2.90 too. “Ah,” said he, “if you bid $2.92, the book is yours, as you are the highest bidder.” I had not disposition to quibble about his pun, but gladly paid $2.92, and hurried home with my big book under my arm, a prouder and happier boy than I had ever been before.

Like Elia, he marked the passages that impressed him and noted their page numbers on a front flyleaf. Eventually, feeling that he should own an annotated edition, he traded in his copy. “Many a time have I regretted this,” he confessed. “I would, if I could, have bought it back, and given for it its weight in gold.”98 He is hardly the only bibliophile to regret trading in an irreplaceable copy of a book, one with handwritten notes, for one whose notes were as exchangeable as any commodity.

Livermore then entered the wool trading business with his

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