Benjamin's simple rule for buying books

"No book was allowed to enter it [my collection], without the certification that I had not read it.”

Walter Benjamin in 1937

On Collecting Books

In a short essay titled Unpacking my Library (1931), Walter Benjamin writes that when he first began collecting books he had a strict rule: He could only buy books when he’d finished the ones he had and they were only to be put on the shelf when he’d read them cover to cover. He quips that this was the “militant” stage of his collection. Everything had to be in its right place. Order prevailed over chaos.

In his own words:

For years, for at least the first third of its existence, my library consisted of no more than two to three shelves which increased only by inches each year. This was its militant age, when no book was allowed to enter it, without the certification that I had not read it.

It’s a nice idea. Keep a tidy and small collection of the books you’ve already read. This way you don’t buy more books than you can read. It’s simple, neat, organized.

And yet…

Walter Benjamin writes that he soon began to break his own rule. First the rise of inflation forced him to buy books before they become prohibitively expensive. Then he began to encounter increasingly desirable volumes on his travels. He rhetorically asks himself “How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books?”

In this sense, Benjamin’s portrait of his own collecting-style is also a gentle satire of the collector as a man beset by an insatiable appetite for acquiring more books. In a mock-exultant style he writes, “Oh bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!” only to then jokingly compare himself and other collectors to the protagonist in Spitzweg’s comedic painting “The Bookworm” (1850), in which we see a man trying to read four books at once, one of them tucked between his legs.

“Unpacking my Library” is a wonderfully imaginative description of Benjamin’s own passion for collecting books. He writes that the true collector imagines that by buying an old book he is saving it from oblivion, and that by adding it to his library he is setting it free.

As Benjamin puts it, “to a book collector […] the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelf.” It’s a riff on the Latin phrase habent sua fata libelli (every book has its fate). Benjamin is joking that, like a man struck by love, so too does the collector tell himself that he “must” buy the book, as fate has clearly brought the two of them together for a reason.

For Benjamin, the relationship a collector has to his books was therefore always one of love. He writes that loving books is “the most intimate relationship one can have to objects,” which is to say Benjamin’s life was lived through books. In this sense his essay is also a tragic foreshadowing. Having abandoned all of his books save for his own mansucript, he was held back and killed trying to cross the French-Spanish border into exile during World War II. As Heine famously wrote, “where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”

Benjamin believed that books were a way of life. As he put it, “[it is not] that they come alive in him (the reader), it is he who lives in them.” Walter Benjamin lived in and through his collection, what he referred to as “a magic encyclopedia.”

It is a beautiful reminder that we don’t just collect books to read them, but to sourround ourselves with them. And in so doing, we place ourselves in the company of those who came before us, bringing them — in a sense — back to life. As Benjamin put it, a collection of books is like “a wide highway,” and when we “read him” and “place him” on shelves of our own, we encounter him once more, and together we travel down that road into the unkown.

Julian

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