Monsieur Nostalgie tells you about Charles Des Guerrois (1817-1916), the greatest Trojan bibliophile, who left two texts for posterity The Bookseller follow up of A History of Books which had not yet been published. Épure, the publishing and university presses of Reims, addresses this gap in its Cultures et Temporalités collection.
Bibliophilia is a childhood illness that is caught no one knows how. After a high fever? Following a vision, in the window of an old bookstore, one Nativity evening? On our eleventh birthday, when a well-meaning aunt gives you the Musketeers in a reddened edition and, unwittingly, spreads the virus in your fragile mind?
If reading remains this unpunished vice, the vital, energizing and financially dangerous need to accumulate volumes struggles to find rational explanations. There is no logic in this frenzy which clutters the apartments and drains your accounts. Eminent neurologists have looked into the subject, the avid collector chained to his libraries, abandoning family and friends to sustain himself with new acquisitions, abandoning his savings and his mental health, is a pathological case where there is an inner conflict between the object as such and its content. From this friction, an addiction is born. It is not a question of culture, of knowledge, of erudition, we would rather be on the side of gluttony. Is gluttony a cardinal sin? Those who are prone to these bulimic attacks, find all the tricks to buy, always store and even more, they run the risk of being buried under paper, do not even have enough space to eat or sleep, ‘print will have their skin. When it comes to bibliophily, we are all fans of the great work of Charles Des Guerrois, Trojan horse of literature and benefactor of his city. In their foreword, Olivier Justafré and Jean-Louis Haquette tell us a little more about this strange zig.
Also read, from the same author: For uninhibited cinema!
« An insatiable reader, Charles Des Guerrois was also the author of more than 120 books and articles. He had such a love for the Book that he bequeathed the 45,732 volumes making up his precious collection to the library of his city, Troyes. » they tell us. We are faced with a madman, someone possessed of the Book, a dissident who mocks earthly foods. Existence is only worth living if it is full of books, if the human being remains in contact with this object, sometimes furry, sometimes focused on adventure. Tired of war, Des Guerrois collects, compiles, scaffolds, barricades himself, invents and reinvents himself through contact with paper. It is something epidermal, intimate, inexplicable at a time when dematerialization is wreaking havoc, an Odyssey which teaches us that certain Men, outside of contingencies, have pushed the love of the Book to the point of ” unreason.” This Des Guerrois is starting to please us, with his jokes and his lack of bad faith. He doesn’t have sad passion. In this little text entitled The Bookseller which is his paper double, he evokes the destiny of a bibliomaniac (from the age of three, four years at most) and the emotional release that books gave him. What is the definition of the word “Bouquineur”, little used these days?
Also read: The bookseller’s box
-We know book sellers, but do book sellers come from a fantastic land? In their notes, our researchers who act as smugglers tell us that “ the term which gives its title to the short story is not chosen at random by the author. It is defined by the Great Universal Dictionary of the 19th century by Pierre Larousse as “lovers of old books”. In the discourse on bibliophily, from Paul Lacroix to Nodier in particular, it refers to a type of collector with modest means, who frequents second-hand bookstalls and second-hand dealers more than auction rooms. “. This book reader is you, it’s us, the onlooker who can’t resist the cover of a folio or a pocket book. It is not the price that makes the collector, it is rather the irrepressible impulse, the thirst for reading. Des Guerrois shows us the trajectory when balance was still possible: “ He bought a little and read a lot, without counting. There was no need to suffer and he was not suffering “. Except that books are poison, the fatal spiral would unfold his immutable destiny, driven by his wife who would do without dresses and a cozy interior, who would light his “dangerous flame”; as if pushed by a celestial, unstoppable mechanism, the book reader became insatiable: “ From then on he no longer measured resources by acquisitions: he bought, always bought; his big reason, his big excuse in his own eyes (it’s the one that all bibliomaniacs put forward) was this: “I won’t find this book “. Fear of missing out. A History of Books completes this booklet which should not be put into everyone’s hands, because these bibliophilic tales are addictive.
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