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40,000 books. Bonnet has 40,000 books in his personal library. At one point he had bookshelves in his bathroom, so he couldn't use the shower and could only run the bath with the window open. He also had bookshelves in his kitchen, so no cooking with strong flavours could be done either. I've been

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looking at my 1300 or so books thinking to myself I'm staring into the face of a possible obsession, but 40,000?!? I suddenly feel quite well-adjusted.

I loved this book; it hit just the right note of chatty and philosophical, with so many quotable bits I just stopped trying to keep track - I'd have ended up reproducing the book itself. Unlike Books: A Memoir this is entirely about the books: collecting, reading, organising; what Bonnet says about himself might amount to 2 sentences in total if you threw in a few articles and punctuation.

My only, only niggle is the result of my own reading inadequacies: he drops a lot of titles into the text (of course), and most of them are ones I've never heard of and seem to be only available in French. This is entirely understandable, because Bonnet is French and this book was originally written and published in French. So I was left in a few places skimming over French titles that meant little to me; c'est la vie.

Speaking of this being a translation, I can't speak with any authority, but I thought this was an excellent translation insomuch as I felt like the author's personality came through perfectly; the narrative felt smooth and natural and Reynolds took pains at the beginning to explain how French titles would be translated to English based on whether or not an English translation of the book was ever published. A bibliography is also included at the back of books mentioned in the text.

This one is for the book collectors out there; those who love physical books and find tranquility in standing in a room surrounded by them. For you, this is a book worth reading (and owning, of course!).

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I love books and I love books on books which is what propelled me to buy PHANTOMS ON THE BOOKSHELVES but it turned out to be not so interesting. It is as if the author wrote it for himself rather than an audience.

An enjoyable enough read, but a bit of a trifle. Reads like he's simply trying to justify his own collection to someone, maybe himself, I don't know, rather than speaking to a larger audience.

Finally, someone gets me! Someone understands why there are so many books in my house! Someone else is a bibliophile! A gentle book written by someone who reads and buys books for many of the same reasons I do. He is much more erudite, I operate on a much more plebian level, but our thinking about

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books is much the same. We are not collectors, not really, we just have collected a lot of books. He explains so others can see how this came to be. How you can end up with more books than you will ever read -- but you might read them -- so you have to have them on hand. An enjoyable visit with someone who seems to be a pleasure to be around. We could talk books all night....

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I enjoyed the earlier chapters more than the latter ones in this short work. He touches on many important themes, but I was left with the emotional residue that he develops very few of them -- the difference between a collector's library, and a working library, for example, or the belief that the

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library "is undeniably the reflection, the twin image of its master." Equally provocative, but similarly undeveloped, is his suggestion that the experience of the "divine" so often associated with libraries, may be grounded in the way in which they permit us to transcend space and time. I would have appreciated more meat on the bones of these ideas.

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A delightful memoir of book collecting and reading by a bibliomaniac.

Makes my gazillion books look 'easy to manage' (ha)
Has some great quotes:
“After owning books, almost the next best thing is talking about them.” – Charles Nodier
“There is no better reason for not reading a book than having it.” – Anthony Burgess
Refers to problems of dealing with (yes),

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organizing (yes), finding (YES) your books amongst the nearly dangerous stacks, etc.
Who knows, I may have moved, if it weren't for my collection of unusual & hard-to-find books. . . . .
Read beside the computer, so I could transcribe some of the quotes - sure to be looking for them again later. And made notes of some of the books referred to (although most are NOT my style)
Then - this phantom book became elusive . . . as I discovered I'd returned it to the book slot in MI, rather than in IL.
Now will probably look for "The Paper House" - Dominquez

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This book about books is translated from the French. The (French) author's bookish musings is generally good reading, but of all the titles he mentioned, I added just one to my TBR list. That would be The Paper House or The House of Paper (both are English-title versions of the same book) by Carlos

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Maria Dominguez.

I liked Bonnet's thoughts on art history books and exhibition catalogs. This guy has 40,000 books in his personal library; I would have loved to have pictures included of his library in this book.

Not my favorite book about books, but I liked this small volume.

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A bit more scholarly than my usual bibliophilic reads, but well worth it. Though I felt like an ignorant American at times what with all the French books that sailed past me unknown, a lot of this book about books and libraries is accessible and a fun read.

This is a short and enjoyable discussion about the mental affliction known alternately as bibliomania or bibliophilia. Bonnet covers a lot of ground, including collecting books, reading books, and building personal libraries, as well as dealing with the mental afflictions associated with each of

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these behaviors. I enjoyed seeing that I am not alone in some of these afflictions. Take, for example, the compulsion to collect every book in a series after having collected one or two volumes. This compulsion is what led me to complete the Westvaco American Classics series. I've also been known to sell or give away a book, only to -- sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally -- re-collect the book at a future point. This book is clearly slanted toward European books (the author is French), but it doesn't take away from the ability to see oneself in the experiences of other booklovers.

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A short sort of love letter to collecting books, but on a personal level. Many such books, think those by Basbanes, are about rich collectors buying rare books (like Shakespeare folios, or Gutenberg Bibles, etc.), or about institutional, particularly academic, libraries. Here is a book by someone

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who acquires books for work or personal reasons, and tries to read them or at least use them. Thus he often echoes my reasons for acquiring books: to read, for reference, to remind you of a place, to collect a certain author or genre or series. How books are sorted or loaned out or bought, et cetera. The author is a Frenchman, so lots of references to French authors, but lots of English language works an authors make an appearance too. And, the author seems to be a tad bit richer than me, but not too much. An interesting book with some deep insights here and there. A long quotation from page 98 as an appetizer:

The library protects us from external enemies, filters the noise of the world, tempers the cold winds around us – but also gives us the feeling of being all-powerful. For the library makes our puny human capabilities fade into insignificance: it concentrates time and space. It contains on its shelves all the strata of the past. The centuries that have gone before us are there. ("[Writing is] great, very great, in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space" Abraham Lincoln.) The past haunts libraries, not only in documents bearing witness to past ages, but through scholarly works, literary reconstructions and images of all kinds. But my library is also a concentrate of space. Every region on earth is represented there somewhere, the continents with all their landscapes, their climates and their ways of life. Even imaginary countries like Swift's Lilliput, Musil's Cacania, Buzatti's Desert of the Tartars, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Or places little known to humans but explored by authors – Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Dante's Inferno, or Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyages to the Moon and the Sun. I can be transported there in an instant, change my mind immediately, or even find myself in two places at once. All this has something divine about it – which is perhaps why when we talk about libraries, we so easily think in religious terms.

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Erudite and lovely. So many books and authors I haven't heard of. Wow. Now have to add to my list ;-)