In the spring of 1998, Rolling Stones fans in Germany were disappointed to hear that the band had been forced to cancel a string of gigs. Keith Richards, the ne plus ultra of rock’s wild men, had damaged a rib in a tumble from a ladder while trying to retrieve a book from one of the higher shelves in his Connecticut library. Hide that smirk: it could just be true. Keef, it turns out, has not one but two extensive libraries — on either side of the Atlantic — and even went as far as applying the Dewey Decimal System to bring his sprawling collections into some kind of order. An addictive personality by any measure, Richards clearly has the book-collecting bug — and bibliomania, as Stuart Kells’s entertaining history cautions, can be a cruel mistress.
Actually, what’s on offer in The Library is something looser than a history. It’s more an anthology of library lore, a rogues’ gallery of shady bookrunners and venal bibliophiles. Here we meet Henry Folger, the oil millionaire, who in the early 20th century hoovered up every Shakespeare folio on the market and kept them wrapped in brown paper and scattered in bank vaults around the US.
Or Poggio Bracciolini, the Renaissance scholar who toured the monasteries of the early 15th century like an unscrupulous antiques dealer, sucking his teeth and offering to take their early manuscripts off their hands for a fraction of their value. (One imagines his well-rehearsed patter: ‘Cicero? Such a shame: a pagan. Not much call for this sort of thing nowadays. Tell you what I’ll do…’)
Or Count Guglielmo Libri, born in Florence in 1803, a prodigious book thief who, in an appointment which proved to be spectacularly misjudged, was given the role of secretary of the commission to catalogue all manuscripts in French libraries.
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