Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère, this morning I placed Roberto Calasso’s Cómo ordenar una biblioteca, published by Anagrama, in your mailbox. In the vast geography of the human intellect, certain peaks are reached by the winding path of detours and digressions. Here, rather than a catalog for bibliophile maniacs, Calasso offers a metaphysics of presence and absence, of chaos and form. The act of classifying volumes is not merely pragmatic; it becomes “a highly metaphysical subject.” In this sentence, he sums up his vision: to conceive of the library as a reflection of the human spirit, as an extension of thought.
The impossibility of perfect order is presented with the clarity of an axiom: “Perfect order is impossible, simply because entropy exists. But without order, it is not possible to live.” Thus, the reader—that inhabitant of the page—must find their own balance between structure and drift. The ideal library, in the manner of Aby Warburg, operates under a secret law: “when you look for a particular book, you end up taking the one next to it, which will prove even more useful than the one you were looking for.” An intelligence that anticipates its own future needs is, in effect, that which writes, classifies, and eventually remembers.
Calasso—that editor who treated his books as if they were delicate Venetian mirrors—chose to cover his volumes in parchment, deliberately complicating his life by making the writing on the spine illegible. Not out of caprice, but out of aesthetic conviction: what matters is what endures. Against sterile fetishism, he proposes a lived reading. “All reading leaves a mark, even if no visible sign remains on the page.” There is no true reader without underlining, without appropriation. The first edition, for Calasso, is not a rare object but an extension of the act of authorship: where paper, typography, and format constitute the material expression of a stylistic will. Let us listen, hypocrite lecteur:
“The first edition of a book is not a secondary part of a work. It is an aid to understanding it. Physical aid: tactile and, above all, visual. Irreplaceable. The bibliophile who does not even dare to cut the pages of a first edition so as not to damage its integrity is the opposite of the true reader. Fetishism, to be healthy, involves use, contact. As Kraus wrote, ‘there is no being more unhappy under the sun than the fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe and is forced to content himself with a whole woman’. The truth is that it would be best to read all books in their first edition. Not because they are more unique or valuable, but because they are the result of a combination of elements—imposed on the author or suggested by him, or simply given in that way—that become part of the work, like the stamp of time on the pages..”
And if the library is an organism, then the bookseller becomes its gardener, critic, and sentinel. In a world plagued by a “mishmash of merchandise,” where the e-book is just another read among many, the bookstore must resist the warehouse format and be a refuge. A place where, when looking at a catalog, one discovers not only what one was looking for, but also what one did not know one needed.
Arranging books by author—rather than by genre or marketing—is a political and spiritual act. Nabokov and his lessons, Bayle and his dictionary, Plato and his apocrypha: all together, as in a conversation interrupted by centuries. The bookseller who knows how to guide us through this territory is something of an alchemist, distinguishing the ephemeral from the essential with a sense that cannot be taught, only cultivated.
Rather than yearning for a bookish past, this book is a lucid and serene defense of a way of being in the world: with attention, with slowness…
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After leaving the book in your mailbox—wrapped in brown paper with a note that said “caution: contains a theory of the soul”—I headed to the small café on Dauphine Street, where eccentric readers sometimes drop in like sparrows on a rooftop. There was Bartleby Dupin, a retired bookbinder and expert in medieval literature from the Italian Alps.
He asked me what I thought of Calasso. I replied that he was one of those authors who write to be collected, underlined, and eventually inherited. That reading him was like opening an atlas whose maps change shape every time you reread them. Bartleby drank his coffee without sugar, with that slowness that only those who have read Robert Musil can afford.
Then he said, in an almost ceremonial tone: “And how do you organize them?” I didn’t know how to answer. I simply took a 1987 Adelphi catalog out of my bag, underlined with Virginia Woolf’s purple ink. He exchanged it for a notebook where he had copied, by hand, the indexes of all the books he had no intention of reading.
Like all meaningful literary transactions, there were no closing words. Just the feeling—light but definitive—that one can build one’s life around books, as long as one knows how to let them go at the right moment.
