Free Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet

of the few indispensable books I would take to a desert island. I am not of course alone in this. Raymond Queneau once edited a book consisting of nothing but booklists,
Pour une bibliothèque idéale
(The ideal library), in which about sixty individuals, writers and others, named their favorite books. Those consulted were arranged alphabetically, from Raymond Abellio to Edmond Vermeil, by way of Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, Georges Dumézil, Michel Leiris and Jean Rostand; the book ended with the hundred most mentioned titles. Well, I conscientiously put a line through the ones I had read (I can’t remember when I did this), marking with a star those that were in my personal pantheon. There are nine titles there which appear not to have been read at all: the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes (read since);
Discourse on Method
by Descartes; theplays of Marivaux, Tacitus’s
Annals
and
Histories
, Marx’s
Das Kapital
, Voltaire’s
Correspondence
; the
Thousand and One Nights
; and
The Dark Night of the Soul
by St John of the Cross. I’m not sure I will ever get round to reading these.
    Henry Miller ended
The Books in My Life
(I read this in the French edition,
Livres de ma vie
, published by Gallimard, 1957) with a list of “books read”—though how can one be sure? On the list of “books I still intend to read,” he lists exactly thirty-four, which is not a great many for a man who was only sixty-six at the time, but then he does add a dozen authors whose complete works he means to read: Jean-Paul Richter, Novalis, Croce, Toynbee, Léon Bloy, and so on, which gave him more scope. Finally came a list of “friends whom I acquired through books” (there are 117 of these, accompanied by the name of the town and country where they were living at the time).
    Talk about lists and you think of collections. I am really neither a collector nor a bibliophile, but I do have one pathological habit: I hate having incomplete series. The itch starts if I happen to have acquired a few books in a certain collection: let’s say the Cahiers de l’Herne, starting with a one-volume reprint of titles by Céline in 1972; the photographic albums accompanying Pléiade editions, which I have collected since I bought the one on Apollinaire published in 1971; a few books from “A la promenade” (Stock, 1927 for the first series and 1946 for the second, edited by Marcel Arland), a foray suggested to me by André Mauge, the delicious translator into French of the works of Primo Levi; theseries
Peintres vus par eux-mêmes et leurs contemporains
(Painters as seen by themselves and their contemporaries) published by Pierre Cailler; and there are others. Then what happens is that I feel impelled to buy more from the collection, until there remain only a few titles to make the series complete. But the search for these titles can take years and raise false hopes (a book appears in a second-hand catalog, but when you chase it up, it has just been sold). In some rare cases, you draw a complete blank. After fruitless attempts over the years to obtain volume one of the
Van Gogh
in the Pierre Cailler series, since I already owned volume two, it turned out that it had never existed! The opposite is more likely; so the second volume of George Painter’s biography of Chateaubriand—of which the first,
Les orages désirés
(
The Longed-for Tempests
), was published by Gallimard in a translation by Suzanne Nétillard, in 1979—never appeared either, but that was not particularly regretted. The first volume was no more than a redundant paraphrase of Chateaubriand’s
Mémoires d’outre-tombe (The Memoirs of Chateaubriand
) and must have failed to sell many copies, so the publisher was not inclined to take it any further.
    The weirdest thing that can happen is that at the end of this kind of long search, a few weeks after finally tracking down the volume you were