IGLI Clinical Files: The Unspeakable in Bibliophilia — Inaugural Study and Call for Witnesses

Special Zoobibliological Surveillance Service — General Inspectorate of the Printed Book (IGLI)

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Doctor Fulbert de Cuirac, sworn veterinarian of printed entities, expert to the Bureau of Abnormal Manifestations of the Book, seconded for disorders of proprietary adhesion and heraldico-bibliological rejection phenomena, assisted in the keeping of the register by Miss Berthe Lépine, archivist of unavowable cases.

Preamble: why the IGLI, for the first time, turns its stethoscope. Since its foundation the IGLI had auscultated only the book. We recorded the fevers of the copy, the reddening of the page, the rejections of the ex-libris, the À rebours astray by a century. The patient, always, was made of paper; the observer, always, of flesh.

Now it has come to us (and the Bureau of Abnormal Manifestations has deliberated on it gravely) that a second entity deserved surveillance: the one who holds the book. The bibliophile himself. For if the book has its pathologies, its owner has more secret ones still, and less treated. We group these pathologies under a single nosological entity, the unspeakable (l’indicible), designated in IGLI nomenclature by the term bibliophilic taciturnity (taciturnitas bibliophilica): the whole of the behaviours that every amateur practises, that no amateur avows, and whose collective silence makes it, to this day, the best-shared and worst-documented disease of our discipline.

The IGLI therefore opens its first register of zoobibliology applied to the human subject. The present file sets out its protocol, describes the inaugural case, and issues, at the foot of the article, a call for witnesses from which we expect much.

Study protocol. Working definition. Held to be unspeakable is any bibliophilic act that the subject performs regularly, that he knows to be widespread, and that he would nonetheless conceal from his spouse, his bookseller, his confessor and, cardinal symptom, from himself.

The unspeakable is distinguished from simple mania in that it is accompanied by shame; and from vice in that it is harmless to others. It is a benign affection as to the body, severe as to self-esteem.

Method. Collection of voluntary confessions, anonymised, classified by syndrome. The subject is not judged; he is recorded. The IGLI recalls that no testimony will be passed on to heirs, auctioneers or insurers.

Inaugural case: founding subject of the register, Mr. Hugues O. So as not to ask of others what he would refuse to deliver himself, the founder of the present register has made himself its first subject. Initials kept at his express request: H. O. Anamnesis established by self-declaration, cross-checked by examination of his shelves.

Observation no. 1: tropism for the nineteenth-century binding. The subject confesses a marked, exclusive, almost tender preference for nineteenth-century morocco. Where the doctrine of good taste commands reverence for the great bindings of the classical centuries, subject H. O. avows that he prefers the nineteenth-century morocco, of an age that purists judge decadent.

Diagnosis. An aesthetic tropism, assumed but socially costly. The subject knows his preference to be a minority one; he maintains it; he blushes slightly at it when speaking aloud, and proudly in silence. A chronic affection, without gravity, contagious by frequenting the stalls.

Observation no. 2: monomaniacal polyexemplarity (Bovary form). The subject declares that he holds several first editions of the same title, namely Madame Bovary (Michel Lévy frères, two volumes, 1857). Not one, which would be a collection; not two, which would be prudence; but several, which falls (the IGLI notes it without condemning it) under monomaniacal polyexemplarity, the characteristic Bovary form.

Mechanism observed. Each copy is justified separately: this one for its binding, that one for its freshness, this third because it was there and one does not leave Bovary to somebody else. The subject cannot add up his justifications without blushing, nor subtract them without suffering. Typical symptom: he knows the exact number of his copies and will not say it.

Diagnosis. Affective accumulation disguised as bibliographic rigour. Prognosis guarded: the Bovary form readily extends to a second title, then a third.

Observation no. 3: growing acquisitive inhibition. The most recent symptom, and the most painful. The subject, formerly a resolute buyer, declares that he finds it harder and harder to buy. The basket fills and is not validated. The bid is prepared and is not placed. The hand rises over the catalogue and falls back.

Discussion. The IGLI distinguishes here three aetiologies, often intertwined. The first, pecuniary: the shelves are full, the purse less so. The second, subtler, which we name melancholy satiety of the advanced collector: by dint of choosing well, the subject no longer finds anything that surpasses what he owns, and purchase, once a feast, becomes arbitration, then renunciation. The third, finally, exogenous, which we class under the heading of circumstantial disaffection (taedium mercatus): here it is not the subject who falters, but the milieu that drives him away. Disgust at the experts’ estimates, ever more confident and seldom more accurate, turns the eye from the catalogue at the precise moment when the hand should be raised; the swelling of buyer’s fees adds to each hammer price a second, dissuasive hammer price; time is lacking to push open the doors of booksellers; salons and fairs weary; and the practice, little by little, goes digital, until the amateur buys only on screen, and so less and less. A collective aetiology disguised as an individual symptom: the subject believes himself cured of desire when he is merely discouraged by circumstances. A paradoxical form in every case, where the illness cures itself of its own symptom, and the subject complains of it, which proves he is not cured.

Plate of the IGLI: Map of the seats of the unspeakable (taciturnitas bibliophilica). Period engraving, nomenclature reassigned. Classmark IGLI/SSSZ/IND/01.

Ancillary observations (declared at the end of the interview, in a lower voice). The subject conceded, under the seal of the register: that he sometimes sniffs the spine of a volume before opening it; that he has bought books he has not read and has no intention of reading; and that he once, perhaps twice, rounded down the price of an acquisition when asked at home. The IGLI records without comment. These three facts constitute, by themselves, the universal foundation of the unspeakable.

Outline of a nosography. From this first case the IGLI draws a provisional grid of the syndromes of the unspeakable, to be completed by testimonies.

Polyexemplarity syndrome: holding the same title in several states, and keeping the count quiet.

Acquisitive inhibition: wanting, being able, and not concluding.

Shameful tropism: openly loving what good taste barely tolerates.

Bibliophilic olfaction: smelling before reading.

Unread acquisition: owning the text, ignoring its content.

Conjugal price minoration: the delicate art of rounding down.

Call for witnesses. The IGLI solicits the cooperation of the community. Every subject is invited to declare himself, anonymously, by answering in a comment, or by discreet channel (a sealed note slipped between two shelves, a confidence whispered to a sworn bookseller, or that email written at midnight which is sent only at the third attempt), the questionnaire below. One rule only: lie only by half, which is already a great deal.

1. How many copies of the same title do you own, and to how many would you admit in public?

2. When did you last give up a purchase you desired, and why did you forgive yourself?

3. Do you smell your books? At what precise moment?

4. Which volume in your library have you never read, and would you defend it tooth and nail?

5. Have you ever rounded down? (This question will not be kept. That is false, but it will put you at ease.)

6. What symptom, mania or small unavowable rite has the IGLI omitted from this grid? Describe it without shame: you may be the inaugural case of a syndrome that has no name yet, and that could bear yours.

The answers will feed the second file, in which the IGLI hopes to establish that the unspeakable is not an individual fault, but the normal, and secretly happy, state of the bibliophile species.

Provisional diagnosis and recommendation. Subject H. O. suffers from no grave affection. He suffers, like all of us, from bibliophilia at the stage where it ceases to be spoken. The IGLI prescribes neither withdrawal nor cure: shame is here the only side effect, and sharing the only remedy. Let everyone confess, and nobody will blush alone any more.

Final recommendation: go on buying with measure, smelling with discretion, and counting one’s Bovarys in a low voice.

Document classified: restricted circulation — Guilde IGLI. Reproduction inadvisable on gummed paper without necessity.

Filing classmark: IGLI/SSSZ/IND/01 — The unspeakable, inaugural case and call for witnesses.

By Doctor Fulbert de Cuirac, sworn veterinarian of printed entities, for the Guilde des Bibliopolicés; register kept by Miss Berthe Lépine.

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The Sacrificed Books of The Ninth Gate: Inquiry into Polanski’s Cursed Book

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By an adept, in the manner of Lucas Corso, surveyor of the bibliophilic margins.

Some years ago I was told about a man in Toulon who owned Latin leaves of the seventeenth century whose provenance was murky. Not murky in the way ordinary bibliophiles mean it: no dubious trimming of the margins, no ill-judged restoration. Murky because these leaves, he said, came from a book that had been taken apart on purpose to make another book, one that had never existed. I noted the name, filed the information under things to check, and then forgot it. Until the other evening, when I watched Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate again.

The film, released in 1999, adapts Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas. It tells of the quest of a rare-book broker, a trade I know well, commissioned to authenticate one of the three known copies of a book called De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, On the Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, supposedly printed in Venice in 1666 by one Aristide Torchia, and said to have been co-signed by the Devil himself. Torchia, burned by the Inquisition, was supposed to have left three copies identical except for nine engravings which, compared with one another, would yield the keys to invoking Lucifer. The book does not exist, of course. Pérez-Reverte invented it for his novel. Polanski had it manufactured for his film. And this is where the bibliophilic story starts to get interesting.

Three false books, two real ones sacrificed. The production designer of The Ninth Gate is Dean Tavoularis, the man behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bonnie & Clyde. Oscar, 1975. A man of that stature has a team of prop makers, and the film’s head prop master is called Gilbert Pieri. Pieri had to make three hero copies of the Ninth Gate: the Balkan, the Fargas and the Kessler. Three distinct bindings, nine engravings per volume and, a decisive detail, a Latin text inside that had to look real under the camera, in close-up, open on Johnny Depp’s knees.

Pieri did not print that text. He did what any bibliophile will recognise as heresy: he bought two authentic old Latin books, one of more than five hundred pages, the other of more than eight hundred, and he took them apart. Some twenty leaves from the two volumes were combined, reinserted into the custom-made bindings, and duplicated to serve the three copies needed for the film. The detail is known to specialist collectors, who tell it to one another on forums devoted to film props. Some claim to own original pages from these two books, torn out during production and given to members of the crew. One of them eventually identified the source book by typing a Latin phrase from the film into Google: it was a Latin theological and Catholic work of 1588, from which the production had merely removed a few words to give the illusion of a coded text.

Some twenty leaves of a book of 1588, dismembered to appear in a Polanski film: this should make any lover of old paper tremble. Two real books were immolated on the pretext of making a third, rarer still, since it does not exist.

Then there are the nine engravings. They are, in Pérez-Reverte’s novel as in the film, the central element: each copy contains nine, but three of them differ from one volume to the next, and comparing the eighteen images reveals the secret. These engravings, too, have a bibliophilic history worth attention.

Here is a rare particularity: the engravings already existed in Pérez-Reverte’s novel, where they bear the initials AT and LCF; those in the film take up their formal language. The formal language of these engravings, as everyone knows, draws ostensibly on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the allegorical romance printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499 and attributed to Francesco Colonna. It is, as everyone knows, one of the most prestigious incunabula ever printed, famous for its one hundred and seventy-two anonymous woodcuts, themselves the object of five centuries of speculation about their author. A copy can be consulted online on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (bpt6k587910); those who want to see what a perfect copy costs today will remember that a Poliphilo in a fine binding has passed four hundred thousand euros at public sale, and that Jean Grolier alone owned five copies.

To make his cursed book, then, Pérez-Reverte had the formal language of the rarest and most mysterious book of Western printing adapted. It is a choice of great elegance: a seventeenth-century fake imitating a real book of the late fifteenth. The film’s engravings were drawn, engraved and printed like real copperplate prints, nine for each copy, twenty-seven prints in all, not counting the variants that Polanski had redrawn. Those prints exist somewhere, framed at Polanski’s or at Pieri’s, or scattered among the members of the crew.

As for official sales, the record is poorer than for The Name of the Rose. Neither Christie’s, nor Sotheby’s, nor Bonhams, nor Heritage, nor Propstore has seen a hero copy of the Ninth Gate go through. The three bindings made by Pieri are, to my knowledge, still in private collections; one belongs to the collection of a certain “balkan.press”, a discreet figure who runs a specialist website devoted to the object.

But the parallel market is teeming. More than forty official replicas of the book are listed online, sold for between five hundred and twelve hundred dollars depending on quality. A whole tinkerer’s literature circulates, with manufacturing tutorials, reconstructed typefaces, tracings of the nine engravings and of the tenth (the one called the “true ninth gate”, inscribed LCF). The Ninth Gate is probably the most copied prop book in the history of cinema.

And then there are the leaves. Those from the two sacrificed books. They circulate quietly, sometimes on eBay, more often in private transactions between collectors. The bibliophilic status of these objects is staggering: they are at once fragments of real old books (the Latin theological work of 1588), film props deposited by the production, and relics of the shoot co-signed Polanski. Three provenances for a single leaf: for the collector, an object to the third degree.

I do not know whether the man from Toulon really has Latin leaves that passed through the shooting of The Ninth Gate. I did not bother to go and see. But the idea that real old books were destroyed (consumed is the right word) to make a fictional book whose market value reaches several hundred euros today in replica, and incalculably more as a hero copy, should give us pause.

Polanski and his team inverted the bibliophilic equation. Where the usual market pays for the old manuscript and despises the modern copy, their film does the opposite: it buys and destroys a theological book of 1588 to make a modern fake that resells for more than the pages it is woven from. The cursed book has done its work. The real work has dissolved into the matter of the fake. And the leaves now in circulation are, as in the film, fragments that must be compared with one another to guess where they come from.

Burned books vanish, but those that are shut away always end up coming back.

Guild shelfmark: GBO-C/2 — Le Livre Démembré [The Dismembered Book]

Document classified: restricted circulation — Bureau of Litigious Props.