Unpacking My Library

"I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am," Walter Benjamin declares at the opening of his essay, "Unpacking My Library." He's standing among the packing crates that have held his books for two years. A failed marriage, the inability to land an academic position, the uncertain life as a freelance writer, and political instability meant Benjamin led a peripatetic life, so reacquainting himself with his books must have been an immense relief and a great pleasure. The order in chaos quality of the collection, the way fate and the passions play themselves out in the private library, had special meaning for Benjamin. He even points out that people have gone crazy, or were reduced to a life of crime, when deprived of their books.

We moved into our new house three weeks ago, but it was only yesterday that I finally unearthed my copy of Illuminations, in which "Unpacking My Library" appears. I'd been looking for it since we arrived. With a new house comes a new arrangement for books. Once the last box has been unloaded from the truck, finding a place for my books is the first decision I have to make in every domicile I've ever moved into. This weekend I set up a triple front of bookcases in the living room (another triple set will go in the finished basement). For the first time in years I've felt settled enough to arrange them in order: literature chronologically from the top, the Greeks to late modernism, followed by literary criticism, film studies, and a row of philosophy ending in a special section on Walter Benjamin. The bottom shelves house contemporary novels in hard cover, primarily to stabilize the bookcases. The historical sweep of my collection, I can now see, is like a sine wave, with certain periods well represented, and others still to be retrieved by the act of purchasing books. "To renew the old word--that is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things," Benjamin writes. He tells the story of the lengths he went to so he could procure an 1810 edition of the memoir of a physicist told in the form of an obituary of a supposedly deceased friend. The strange book is "the most important sample of personal prose of German Romanticism," according to Benjamin. An entire epoch of intellectual history dwells in the autobiography of an obscure German scientist. In a sense book collecting is a way of writing one's own obituary in the form of an collection of dead authors--but it's an obituary that fends off death, rather than hastening it. 

Benjamin lingers over the act of unpacking his library. At the conclusion of his essay he's working past midnight going through the crates. Each book reminds him of the place in which he bought it. The entire geography of his life is laid out before him, from his childhood in Berlin to Paris, where he made his final home. Tyler Cowen claims that we buy books in order to enhance our sense of self, but reading Benjamin on collecting we realize only dilettantes buy books to shore up their egos.  For Benjamin the serious book collector lives the "disreputable" but glorious life behind "the mask of Spitzweg's 'Bookworm,''' because the inside the bookworm

there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for the collector . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.