The Paradise of the Library: James Salter on Jacques Bonnet’s 40,000 volume personal library, and his new book “Phantoms on the Bookshelves”: http://nyr.kr/Pqz8oc
A tide is coming in and the kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years, of being washed away. The physical possession of a book may become of little significance. Access to it will be what matters, and when the book is closed, so to speak, it will disappear into the cyber. It will be like the genie—summonable but unreal. Bonnet’s private library, however, comprised of more than forty thousand volumes, is utterly real.
