Charles Nodier (depicted above from the Panthéon Charivarique) was one of the most interesting writers during the period of French Romanticism, but is not well known to English readers. The essay and the story that I have provided here are treasured by those that know them, but are not, with the exception of a French text of Le Bibliomane, available on the internet. Yet, amongst those readers who are interested in books, the two pieces have a kind of legendary status, the collector's disease described in its most essential and virulent form.

The essay The Book Lover I first encountered many years ago in a scene that could have come from Nodier. My sister worked for a time as a secretary in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and got to know Philip Hofer, a retired and very wealthy collector of great reputation. I went down to Cambridge to visit her, and she arranged for me to meet Mr Hofer, who gave me a breath-taking tour of the inner recesses of the library and some of the extraordinary things hidden away in the office that Harvard had provided him in the Houghton stacks. One of the most exciting things was being able to handle the Geffrey Whitney manuscript of the Choice of Emblemes, presented to the Earl of Leicester -- very different from the printed text. During my visit Mr Hofer, a most delightful gentleman, advised me to give up on academic work and go immediately into business because, as he explained, if you have a lot of money, you can do things that academics can only dream about. I think he felt he was getting somewhere with me because, on the way out, he gave me a small pile of pamphlets on collecting, typography, and illustrated books -- all commissioned by him or written by him, and all beautifully printed. One of these was a translation of Nodier's L'Amateur de livres by Barbara Sessions, done expressly for Mr Hofer as The Book Collector, and first published for him in 1951 by the Stinehour Press. I never followed Mr Hofer's advice -- and I subsequently learned that as an academic you get to do things that businessmen can only dream about! But I did continue my interest in Nodier.

I have reread Nodier's portrait of the book lover every couple of years since. It has never ceased to amuse me, especially the scene in which the narrator goes to visit the library of M. Boulard with its towering heaps of books which threaten to come crashing down, a scene which I try to reproduce in my own office, to the terror of visiting students and colleagues. I also pressed on with Nodier and read some of his other articles -- there is an interesting series on the alphabet -- and many articles on the history of books, libraries, and collecting. Most of this stuff is hidden away in the periodical literature of his time. L'Amateur de livres was published in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes in 1841 but never became part of the regular reprinted corpus.

Nodier had two intellectual passions in his life, insects and books. He was born in Besançon in 1780. His first work was a Dissertation sur l'usage des antennes dans les insectes (1798) and his earliest employment was as a librarian and cataloguer. In 1824 he was named the librarian of the comte d'Artois thus becoming head of the Arsenal in Paris. He soon transformed the library into a notable salon and intellectual meeting place. He published constantly -- essays, fiction, poetry, plays. In 1833 he was elected to the Académie française. A year later he founded the Bulletin du Bibliophile. He died in Paris in 1844.

In addition to writing about book-collecting, Nodier was himself a collector of note. He was forced on several occasions to sell off parts of his library (there is a rueful reference to this in L'Amateur de livres), and the extant catalogues show that by his own categories he was a bibliophile as opposed to the bibliomaniac or the "bouquiniste". The early part of the 19th century was a great age of collecting, with huge quantities of books suddenly released into the market because of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and a great cultural prestige was given to those who collected on the grand scale. The obsessive collecting is well described in the English writings of Thomas Dibdin. The scale of collectors such as Richard Heber or Sir Thomas Phillipps has not been matched since. It is hard in a short description to convey the grotesque excess in those heady days of book-collecting, but one may recommend two works, the study of Phillipps by A.N.L. Munby (the one-volume version has a sharper narrative) and a wonderfully entertaining article on Heber by my late colleague George Story ("Heber the Magnificient: A Portrait of a Bibliophile," Bulletin of the Humanities Association of Canada 32 [1961] 6-15). Nodier was restrained compared with many of his contemporaries, though he knew them well, and his essays and his fiction take us far into that extraordinary world.

Nodier's literary works, mainly short and highly fantastic, were published in a collected edition in twelve volumes. They have been read eagerly by other writers from Nerval to the surrealists. It was in his fiction that I came across Le Bibliomane. This mock eulogy first appeared in Les Cent-et-un, a collection edited by Ladvocat in 1831, and is now regularly reprinted as one of his literary works, for instance in the collection of stories put together by Pierre-Georges Castex in 1961 and still in print as a Garnier Classique. Also recommended is Le roi de Bohème et ses sept chateaux, an exuberant and ironic work whose original 1830 printing with the illustrations of Tony Johannot is one of the classics of self-reflexive book design. This novel, whose title and premiss come directly from Tristram Shandy, has never been turned into English.

The two works you have here I translated during a sabbatical year in Montpellier as a light-hearted experiment to improve my French, following the principle sero, sed non serius -- it's late, but not that late. I read French regularly in my work but have never before tried to translate anything. The text for Le Bibliomane is that in the Castex edition, and that for L'Amateur de livres comes from the collection of texts edited by Jean-Luc Steinmetz ([Bordeaux], Le Castor Astral, 1993), who provides helpful annotations, and whom you should thank for some of the notes here. Steinmetz also includes two other essays, a short essay De la Monomanie réflective and the longer Bibliographie des fous. For anyone who wants a really good English version of L'Amateur de livres I recommend the work of Barbara Sessions, if you can find it. I didn't see it for sale the last time I was at the Houghton. I am proud of the fact that I completed my translation without her work nearby, but hers is the one you really want, though I am grateful for my friend John Hare for checking my work over and protecting you from an embarrassing number of howlers, now fixed. I would love someday to be able to translate the challenging Le Roi de Bohème et ses sept chateaux. I tried to convince John to take it up, but he has remained curiously resistant.