A friend of mine called Jo used to be a great traveller. She worked, saved and packed. She travelled on local transport and stayed in cheap hotels so she could wander longer. Her routes often took her far from the tourist throng. Once, on a remote island in the Far East, Jo discovered she’d run out of anything to read. She began to suffer book starvation. One evening as she idled listless along a beach she happened upon a sheaf of pages, torn from a little-known thriller next to indents in the sand left by a deck chair. They were of the first 20 pages of a book. Jo devoured them.
The following day she returned at the same hour, to discover a further score of sequent discarded pages. By day three she could contain herself no longer and made it her business to arrive early in the afternoon. There she found a woman engaged in reading. As she finished each page, she ripped it out and tossed it onto the floor. Jo stood, watched and spoke. “Why are you doing that?” she croaked. The mouth behind the sunglasses spoke. “I don’t want them any more,” drawled the Ripper. “I’ve finished them.”
It was a method she had devised for minimising luggage. She could fit into her rucksack either one chubby paperback or three tee-shirts, four pairs of knickers and a banana. So she casually banished unnecessary things like pages she had read.
Until I read Phantoms on the Bookshelves this story of barbarity towards books appalled me: this woman, I dismissed as a vandal philistine. Now I can see she had a point. This book is a painfully funny cautionary tale about the inherent lunacy and inevitable problems caused by not getting rid of books; of the endless torture of collecting them; of how once they are gathered together in your possession they will make demands and burden you with responsibilities. Instantly they require somewhere to live, and despatch you onto a carpentry course to provide them with shelving. Then they have to be in order, or they will hide from you, sometimes forever.
So how do you order them? Jacques Bonnet agonises in excruciating, and desperately comic, detail over the myriad tortures that can be involved in this seemingly simple decision. What is your method to be? Order in which they were read? Size? Colour? Subject? Publisher? Language? Genre? Alphabetically? Frequency of consultation?
Worse, each of these options has its subsections. Language, for example. Bonnet is led to bemoan the break-up of the Soviet Union because it involves him in reclassification into, for example, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian. Previously they could be assimilated into the Soviets. The so-called liberation has proved massively inconvenient, something callously overlooked at the time.
And if you think organising by subject is straightforward, you’re wrong. It’s an entirely subjective decision where you place even the world’s best selling book: the Bible. Is it history, philosophy, fiction, lifestyle, self-help or theology? And what do you do with uniform editions? Do you keep them together as a body or allocate them into sections? Neither do the painful alternatives stop at the strictly logical. M Bonnet has ferreted out a Victorian library rule that, on grounds of decency, forbids a book by a female author rubbing jackets with one by a man. And he cautions against placing books next to each other whose authors despised each other. It is apparently “unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by Garcia Lorca, whom the Argentine writer once described as a ‘professional Andalusian.” The torment is endless.
M Bonnet’s spellbinding logic turns reason on its head. He explains at one point that there are fictional and non-fictional characters on his shelves. The non-fictional ones are the characters in the books, and the fictional ones, their authors. This is because we know the imagined characters: we have met them; they are real. But the authors are ill-defined unknown individuals who may not have existed. People like Shakespeare who, although thousands of books can be collected about him, about whom we actually know almost precisely nothing. He’s not real, like Falstaff.
At certain points the book itself becomes a useless appendage to the discussion. Books cease to matter: the point becomes how they should be classified once they have insinuated their way into your possession.
There are helpful tips on how to preserve your books from the four main threats to their existence – rats, worms, dust and borrowers. Ever thorough, he also cites examples of library destruction by burning, political extremism, bombing and divorce. He makes you pity the owners of great libraries you envied before settling down with this endlessly amusing man. And what about the title? Why are they phantoms on the bookshelves? Because in M Bonnet’s native France, a fantôme is the slip of paper you put onto a shelf to mark where a book has been removed. So the final paradox is that this is, eventually, a book about books that aren’t there.
It’s a splendid work that deserves a place on your shelf and is guaranteed to leave any book lover with a smile on their face. Which is more than can be said for Jo’s story. It concludes with the bitch in the shades flying out the day before she read, and therefore left, the last chapter.
