Bibliophiles, Murderous Bookmen, and Mad Librarians by Robert Richmond Ellis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bibliophiles, Murderous Bookmen, and Mad Librarians by Robert Richmond Ellis Xabier Granja Ibarreche Ellis, Robert Richmond. Bibliophiles, Murderous Bookmen, and Mad Librarians. U of Toronto P, 2022. 320 pp. ISBN: 978-1487542368. This monograph explores the love of books as objects of desire and texts to be read from the point of view of a variety of Spanish authors. The cases analyzed throughout the volume emphasize a heightened awareness of a book's perceived impermanence. They present its physical manifestation and the text it contains as a tangible matter and an intangible spirit that are intertwined and experienced in rich and surprising ways. Robert Richmond Ellis engages with bibliophilia throughout Spanish history: from early modern strains that envisioned books as either a means to achieve personal fulfillment or to cultivate regional and national identities, to the early twentieth century tendency to form bibliographies, archives, and libraries. Ellis's book is structured around five sections which interweave perspectives that contrast bibliophilia (the love of books) and bibliomania (preoccupation with their acquisition and possession). This analytical range allows the author to explore the source materials from a variety of interpretive standpoints: a sociological lens to elucidate society's general attitudes towards books, a gendered division that painted women as biblioclasts (book destroyers), and a homosocial dynamic [End Page 153] that led some bibliophiles to the heteroerotic possession of books. In essence, Ellis presents the romantic bibliophile as a representative member of the old order of the aristocracy, a compiler of cultural knowledge that bolsters the creation of libraries as sources of a newly constructed national identity. The monograph also approaches more recent chronologies: it contends with the effects of the Industrial Revolution on book production, some bibliophiles' disdain for mass-production, the unforeseen consequences to bibliophilic practices that arose from historical events such as the Spanish Civil War, the potential of books as preservers of various representations of sexual minorities, and industry-wide shifts towards digital publication —which preserves texts but not their traditional physical containers. The first chapter explores a fictional tale of bibliomania about a murderous bookman in Barcelona, Fra Vicents, a monk turned bookseller who kills to procure rare, priceless editions of books. The story was published in Gazette as if it were real, driving conservatives and liberals to engage in contradictory sociopolitical debates about its popularity. Both Flaubert and Sartre entered this intellectual dialogue, but it was not until Miquel i Planas set his sights on it, as Ellis contends, that greater sociohistorical context was achieved. Planas was a promoter of the Catalan language due to his belief that "literature is what gives value to a language in the eyes of the world" (61). Ellis analyzes Planas's visual designs and illustrations, interprets them as his attempt to assert that the original story is in fact fictional, and emphasizes the intercultural exchange between Catalonia, France, and Spain his motifs inherently represent. The second chapter is centered on five individuals who embraced bibliophilia as a project for both personal fulfillment and national self-affirmation to "render a more living archive of the Spanish experience" (93). First, Ellis delves into Bartolomé José Gallardo's nostalgia for the books he lost, as an allegory of how the nation's heritage was crushed in military conflicts. Then he explores father and son Vicente and Pedro Salvá's outspoken criticism of the Church, royal absolutism, and the inquisition, as well as the troubles their stances caused them. Dionisio Hidalgo's criticism of Spain's lack of a methodically developed bibliography is also explored as evidence of the unfortunate "European perception of Spain as culturally deficient" (122); followed by Azorín's representations of Spanish intellectuals' crisis as they transitioned to modernity. The third chapter analyzes book-focused narratives by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Manuel Rivas, and Juan Goytisolo that portray how humans become nonentities when stripped off of the ability to know their past. Where Francoism violently erased aspects of multiple Spanish cultural identities, Ruis Zafón sought to include, inscribe, and preserve them. Similarly, Rivas saw how the Galician collective memory was endangered and recreated it, not only to reconstitute it but also to create a living Galician present. Goytisolo...