Bibliomania and the Folly of Reading

Abstract

��� Antiquity was a relaxed period in terms of reading. With only a few texts around, there was a small number of well-known authors, and one knew them well or even by heart. It was paradise compared to our modern world of millions of new releases each year and the burden of all the historic books, with never enough time to take notice, let alone to read them all. But as every reader of Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading orotherworksonthistopicwillknow,thecomplaintovertoomanybooks and too little time is as old as the history of the written book or even the book-scroll. 1 Literacy once promised to save time, but the opposite happened. In hisEpistulae ad LuciliumSeneca gives the dietetic advice to read less instead of reading everything and to choose carefully: ‘Illud autem vide, ne ista lectio auctorum multorum et omnis generis voluminum habeat aliquid vagum et instabile. [...] Distringit librorum multitudo. Itaque cum legere non possis, quantum habueris, satis est habere, quantum legas.’ 2 This is the problem which is at stake here–but there are solutions to it. The bibliomaniac or book fool, as he is named since Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1492), breaks Seneca’s rule of Satis est habere, quantum legas. He possesses more books than he is able to read–as all of us do–and often he doesn’t read them at all, since shopping, collecting and possessing are already too demanding and time-consuming; hopefully this is not true for any of us. The book fool unifies many key aspects related to reading, print culture, and scholarship. He stands for the distinction between using vs. collecting booksorreadingvs.notreadingatall.Allbibliomaniacshavetremendous libraries, yet they don’t use them. At least not in a philologically accepted way: by exact, intense, and attentive reading and writing about the reading. The bibliomaniac is the counterpart of the scholar; he is the