Every collection is a form of delirium. A cumulative but essentially structural practice, it organizes the world according to a private, secret logic that cannot be reduced to the useful. A Wunderkammer—a cabinet of curiosities—does not merely bring together forms (books in this case), but also welcomes vestiges, fragments saved from oblivion.
Like the amber of naturalists, each specimen that inhabits it preserves a moment frozen in time: a dedication, a signature, a smell, a typographical error, a dried flower, an old library card. In these presences, the inaudible biography of each object unfolds. More than an archive, the Wunderkammer constitutes a realm of symbolic resonances.
Walter Benjamin, in a short treatise, recalled that the collector’s objects, rather than remaining in linear time, fold like rice paper. Each volume, upon entering the cabinet, loses its public biography and becomes part of a private lineage; it no longer appears simply as an edition, but as “this” copy, with “these” stains, ‘this’ bookplate, “this” poorly cut fold that no other possesses. Each imperfection, each feature of the paper and binding, composes a palimpsest of past lives and secret journeys, where the collector becomes its faithful guardian. What the collector seeks lies beyond possession, as he finds his purpose in rewriting time through his objects.
Rather than referring to a genre, Prose from the Wunderkammer approaches an existential temperature. It shapes the form that literary criticism takes when it is contaminated by the fever of the object; when the erudite gaze is insufficient and it is necessary to write with the fingers, with the fingertips that feel the spine or the cover, with the sense of smell that detects the acidity of the paper. There is no desire here to catalog or educate. Instead, there is a desire for proximity. Prose, like dust, sticks.
Mario Praz, who devoted his life to this emotional proximity to collectible forms, called his museum residence “the house of life.” He knew that every cabinet, deep down, represents an animated mausoleum; a stage where ancient objects have not died: they await their reader, their visitor, their physical reader, that is, the one who gives them a second existence. More than a place of study, for Praz, the library acted as a companion. In it, books do not appear as sources, they impose themselves as presences. Each bookshelf becomes a theater of shadows.
It is not about reading books, it is about reading copies. It involves entering that ambiguous zone where the text meets its material support, and where all reading also becomes archaeology, an excavation between layers of printed meaning. This series of writings seeks more than to summarize content and editorial contexts. They aim to gravitate around certain rare books, first editions, and early printings that inhabit a real cabinet—two wooden cabinets 180 centimeters high and 52 wide—and another imaginary one, formed by emotional ties, stylistic acoustics, and memorable accidents.
An encyclopedic reader and editorial demiurge, Roberto Calasso argued that a truly read book silently reorganizes an entire library. And that every act of reading contains, in miniature, a cosmology. Prose from the Wunderkammer takes up this idea and expands it; instead of reading isolated books, it inserts them into constellations, into micro-universes where Joyce can brush against Baudelaire, or where a handwritten letter from Ezra Pound slips between two volumes of Proust. The collection, like the myth, links together, creates elective affinities and—in a Lezamian manner—“concurrent coincidences.”
For Cyril Connolly, “the only unforgivable sin in literature is boredom.” But he knew that true boredom comes from a lack of context, not from excess. Hence his recommendation to surround oneself not only with books, but also with their margins, their collateral voices, their rumors. In this sense, every well-assembled collection constitutes a form of deferred conversation; authors who never met, volumes that gaze at each other from different shelves, contrasting translations, quotations that travel from one spine to another like wandering moths.
Prose from the Wunderkammer also represents a form of resistance to the speed of the present: it proposes the slowness of enjoyment, the whimsy of discovery. Here, one reads while walking through a museum without a map, letting oneself be carried away by what whispers or speaks within the pages. The order in these display cases is sustained by the resonances that the books encompass. Each volume forms a threshold.
A library represents an autobiography in the form of a bookshelf, wrote Alberto Manguel. The Wunderkammer follows in the wake of that statement. An autobiography of the collector-reader, surpassing that of the reader alone, it seeks to embody rather than merely know. These texts are born—more than from a desire to understand—from a desire to preserve the intimate history of each object-book.
Let the prose fantasize, if the books so desire.
Cover image: Saint Jerome in His Study, by Antonello da Messina (c. 1475). National Gallery, London.
