Ex Libris

Anne Fadiman (1953 -), the author of “Ex-Libris,” belongs to a renowned literary family. Her father Clifton Fadiman was an American writer, editor and television personality, known for his erudition and breadth of knowledge. Her mother Annalee Jacoby Fadiman was a war correspondent during WW2 and later worked as a scriptwriter. Not surprisingly, the author and her brother grew up in a highly intellectual environment, which she describes as Fadiman U (short for University)! For good measure, Anne is married to writer George Colt – and their pet dog is named Typo!This book is a compilation of eighteen essays originally published in her column “Common Reader” in “Civilization,” the magazine of the Library of Congress. These essays are about literary topics such as merging libraries, proofreading and plagiarism, but they are surprisingly enjoyable. In addition to a deep passion for the topics she writes about, Fadiman has a delightful sense of humour, as the following excerpts will show.In the first chapter the author recalls that five years into their marriage “our libraries had remained separate, mine mostly at the north end of our loft, his at the south.” They decided to merge their libraries, with mutually agreed rules, but “…by far the hardest task came toward the end of the week, when we sorted through our duplicates and decided whose to keep. I realized that we had both been hoarding redundant copies of our favorite books ‘just in case’ we ever split up.”“When I was growing up,” the author says in the next chapter, “not only did my family walk around sprouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water, as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity with the largest possible aspergill.”In the subsequent chapter, she talks about her fondness for books about polar exploration. “Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure… When the corpses of some of Franklin’s officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials such as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield.’”In ‘Nothing New Under the Sun’ there are as many as 38 footnotes in a chapter which is just 8 pages long. “The more I’ve read about plagiarism,” remarks the author, “the more I’ve come to think that literature is one big recycling bin.”This is a book which will be truly relished by the un-common reader who might share the author’s obsession with the sequence in which her books are arranged on her shelves, her compulsive proofreading habit or her devotion what she calls ‘You-Are-There Reading’, meaning the practice of reading books in the places they describe!

Don't be fooled by the title, the author is no common reader. Daughter of well known American author, editor and radio and TV personality Clifton Fadiman and screen writer and world war II journalist Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, it is but natural that Anne Fadiman grew up breathing books and words. One of the most delightful books that I have read in the recent past, this is 'a collection of 18 essays written over a period of four years.'When you have a father who has written books like 'Wally the Wordworm', 'Reading I've liked', and edited the likes of 'The World Treasury of Children's Literature', 'The World of the Short Story:A Twentieth Century Collection' and so on, how can one not fall in love with books? And the cherry on the pie is getting married to another bibliophile, and together accumulating books,'on our shelves and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa and on top our refrigerator'Each essay is about one aspect of books, reading, authors, even writing instruments, these are things that we usually think about in a normal manner,taken for granted as part of your routine life. But when someone starts talking about it, each of these seem to have a life of its own. The first chapter, 'Marrying Libraries' is about how two libraries stand apart trying to retain their individuality, slowly start merging together while trying to keep at least their demeanors different, at last to find one day that they cannot distinguish where one ended and the other began. Just like any other marriage, isn't it?The hunger for new words - the more difficult, the better - comes out in the next chapter 'The Joy of Sesquipedalians'. The joy of what, you ask? Then wait for others like adapertile, agathodemon, opopanax and retromingent. I'd rather not spoil the joy by telling you what it is all about.She then continues with the 'Odd Shelf' - where books on subjects totaly unrelated to the others that you normally have, tend to gravitate towards - 'Sonnets' and then "Never Do That to a Book'. In this chapter she classifies love of books as 'courtly' where'A book's self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content'and 'carnal' where'a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel.'The musings continue with 'True Womanhood,' where she talks about a book that was inherited from her great grandmother, 'The Mirror of True Womanhood:A Book of Instruction for Women in the World.' The author, one Reverend Bernard O'Reilly, seems to have been reborn in bits all over the world, the thoughts on how a woman should live hasn't changed much over the years, for this was the bootomline:'Woman's entire existence, in order to be a source of happiness to others as well as to herself, must be one of self-sacrifice.''Words on a Flyleaf' is about the inscriptions that you add to a book that is gifted, and 'You are There' about the absolute thrill of reading a book in a place that the book talks about. 'The His'er Problem' is about the cryptic word 'Ms.' that refuses to divulge whether you are single or married, rightly so I would say. Why should you know that about a woman when a man is a universal 'Mr.' ? Its also about how the word 'man', is universally considered to be about the human race in general, but how those authors has almost always have a 'man' in mind when they write about it.'r/ Inset a Carrot e/' is about her family of compulsive editors who'can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo'In 'Eternal Ink', the author reminisces about and romanticizes the ink pen and its royal ancestor the feather and compares it to their insipid off spring, the computer. As she rightly says,'' When you've seen one pixel, you've seen it all'I can hear my friends chuckling or even laughing out aloud when I say my favorite essay is 'The Literary Glutton.' How can I not jut like, but absolutely adore an author who says,' When I read about food, sometimes a single word is enough to detonate a a chain reaction of associative memories. I am like the shoe fetishist who, in order to become aroused, no longer needs to see the object of his desire; merely glimpsing the phrase "spectator pump, size 6 1/2" is sufficient''Nothing New Under the Sun' is a tongue in cheek array of observations on how it is impossible to have anything original in literature. Almost each sentence in this chapter has a reference attached to it. You nod your head vigorously as you read how a compulsive reader will settle for even a catalog that is lying around if she can't get hold of a book, in 'The Catalogical Imperative''My Ancestral Castles' is about how strong parental influence is in matters literary as it is in other matters in life. She bares her parents to us in these words,'My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closets. Their selves were on their shelves.''Sharing the Mayhem' recollects the joys and perils of reading aloud and 'The P.M.'s Empire of Books' is about the science of storing books. You have to read it to believe the exact measurements and structure of a library book case to hold eighteen to twenty thousand books. All it needs is a space of twenty by forty feet. You don't trust Anne Fadiman? So, what if I say the proponent of this theory is'that Gladstone: four times British Prime Minister, grand old man of the Liberal Party, scholar, financier, theologian, orator,humanitarian, and thorn in the side of Benjamin Disraeli''Secondhand Prose' takes the reader through those quaint and not so quaint shops where you find unkempt desks, dusty shelves that are almost on the verge of breaking down and if you are lucky as the author, you may find about 300,000 used books and also walk out with nineteen pounds of books in your hand. As she says,'Now you know why I married my husband. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen time as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.'As if all this was not enough, she adds a final chapter of 'Recommended Reading,' references of more books about books.Anne Fadiman has transformed something that could easily have been dull, bland and high brow into a dish that is so delicious that you want to devour it at once and also savor it bit by bit.I felt totally inadequate and deliriously happy at the same time, never thought that would be possible. Impossible is nothing, you see :)Verdict: If you are the kind of reader who romances, loves and lusts books, apart from breathing them, you just cannot miss this one.

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What not to love about this cute little book!! This is a book about the love of books, so any one who loves reading and books will absolutely love every sentence of this book. Being a bookworm, I could relate to it so much. I've become an admirer of the author Anne Fadiman and will definitely read all her other books. She's an absolute pleasure to read - hilarious, witty, passionate reader and writer! The way she writes will make you understand how much she loves words and literature!!

I feel like Santa Claus rushing this book into fellow word lovers hands. I was laughing so much my husband stole the book from me before I finished it. Was fun to repeat a short story and laugh together

Una libro de ensayos sobre el acto de leer y la importancia de los libros en nuestra vida en el que me he sentido completamente identificada. Divertido, irónico, ácido...

Ex Libris by Anne FadimanAnne Fadiman comes from a famous literary family, and these short pieces reflect her background well. Her light-hearted reflections on books, and the part they play in the lives of those who love reading, offer insights into her family and other people that can be of interest to all bibliophiles.This book of essays is like a box of delicious chocolates with different centres, not to be devoured in one greedy session, but tasted slowly, one by one, with appreciation.Margaret Blair

You can always tell an obsessive/Compulsive reader and collector of books, they like nothing more than a book about books! And this should reside on the "odd shelf" amongst a number of others of its type all worthy of your time. This little book is sheer delight to the likes of you and I who would rather buy a book than probably almost anything else. I found myself between these pages, and in or between the definitions Ms Fadiman records. My parents were not quite as bookish at this stage, although they both claimed an obsession with reading in their youth, and we had books in the house; so as soon as I was able to earn pocket money it was straight up to the secondhand bookshop that resided in the less fashionable part of the high street to spend hours pouring over the possibilities to take up residence in my diaphanous bag home. The touch and smell were intoxicating and I would even put up with the grumpy storekeeper (and often they are old grouches - I often wonder if it is because they resent having to part with their finds!) in order to indulge my passion. A Christmas without a pile of oblong festively-wrapped parcels (my mother often felt I needed something more practical in my stocking!) was always a disappointment. Fortunately, it was also a rarity if everyone else was to have a good time! Also, perhaps not surprisingly my siblings followed in my footsteps into bookishness, and although we have many overlaps of taste, we tend to collect in different areas, so increasing the family horde.I live on the first floor of a small London flat, and my friends are always surprised not to find that I have, involuntarily, moved to the ground floor (hopefully when the current tenants are away!). It is a compulsion to possess both the physical book and the intellectual content of a book which is obviously why so often they are called friends. Ms Fadiman captures this in her essays. She also captures how like fragrance a book is, picking it up it is sometimes more evocative than a photograph of the time it was read, where it was bought or by whom it was gifted. I will certainly be gifting this volume to one or two over the coming festive season.I always loved the description that I heard Umberto Eco make in a documentary once, when he said that at night when he left his library, he often had a sense of all the books whispering to each other behind his back. It is a wonderful analogy of what goes on in any readers mind.

A contemporary essayist from a scholarly family, a wife and mother and university professor, Anne Fadiman has written a few books that are a must for VERY stimulating reading. Ex Libris is a favorite of mine - all about books and language (hobbies of all her family) - a favorite chapter is "Inset a Carrot" - fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious, as is a lot of her musing about people's use and misuse of language. I've not read a more engaging non-fiction author!