A book for the bibliophile, and other essays by Anne Fadiman

In 1998 Anne Fadiman published Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.  The book is a compilation of essays she authored for Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, and each of the eighteen chapters is an unabashed paean to the written word. There are chapters on marrying libraries, the joy of unusual words (see below), the composition of personal libraries, annotating and writing in books, dedicatory inscriptions in books, reading in unusual or famous places, reflexive proofreading of the everyday world, and plagiarism.

I won't undertake a proper review - just a couple excerpts:

“My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.”

Words from the chapter "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" - monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozeical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcalde, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodemon, goetic, opopanax.

Other new words for me: interlarding, soidisant, bibliolatrous, nonesuch, postulant slomped, villanelle, bibliopegic, bibliobibacity, and enchiridion.

Reposted from 2016 to give a shout-out and recommendation for Anne Fadiman's newest book:

At Large and At Small is Anne Fadiman's collection of a dozen essays (Wunderkammers and other collections of natural objects, why Charles Lamb's sister murdered their mother, home-made ice cream, circadian rhythms, Procrustes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, coffee, etc etc).  I have previously blogged King Philip come out, for God's Sake, and Lewis Carroll's math puzzle from this book.  I'll also excerpt here this thoughtful observation by Swann in Remembrance of Things Past:

"... even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them."

Also a new word for me:  fluffer.  In her thoroughly enjoyable essay "Moving" she explains that when you put a house up for sale, the realtor may hire a "fluffer" to tidy things up ("One fluffer ordered his client to remove a Georgia O'Keeffee painting from the ewall and hide it under the bed.  The colors were wrong.")  More interesting than that incident was the origin of the term: ("Fluffer is a term borrowed from pornographic filmmaking; he or she gets the male star ready for the camera.")  You learn something every day.

Fadiman is a gifted essayist.  Here is an excerpt from her preface to the book, about the art of the essay:

 “The familiar essayist didn't speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense.” 

At Large and At Small is now entered in my "Books Read 2023" list with a 4+ rating (only the second one so far this year, after A.B. Guthrie's The Way West).