No homo, man: Is book collecting so gay?

A January essay by the English writer Lorraine Berry- from The Guardian newspaper- has come my way. In "Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying," she makes an interesting- and new to me- point in social history:

The obsessive pursuit of books did not take place apart from the wider culture, however. Recent studies have revealed tensions between a nascent republican Britain and these bibliomaniacs. Even Thomas De Quincey, author of the addiction memoir Confessions of an English Opium Eater, described the literary addicts he had observed at the Roxburghe auction as irrational, and governed by “caprice” and “feelings” rather than reason. De Quincey uses the term pretium affectionus – “fancy price” – to describe how prices were decided, transforming the book collector into a dandy ruled by his emotions.  

While it may be too early to speak of a “gay” subculture, Robinson writes of the “uncanny queerness of the stereotypical representation of 19th-century bibliophiles”. Men who collected books were often portrayed as effeminate. In 1834, the British literary magazine the Athenaeum published an anonymous attack implying that one of the prominent members of Dibdin’s club was homosexual.  

Dibdin’s language, which has been noted for its sensuality, is full of double entendres and descriptions of book collecting in sexualised language; from his Bibliographical Decameron, some characteristic dialogue:  

“Can you indulge us with a sip of this cream?”
“Fortunately it is in my power to gratify you with a pretty good taste of it.” 

As Robinson told me: “Dibdin’s mock-heroic discourse about books and collectors contains language that is hard to read as anything other than sexual innuendo. The sexiness of this stuff is quite surprising, actually – to the point where it can’t really be called innuendo. These facets of the subculture suggest the possibility that men who might today identify as gay or queer were drawn to collecting.”

Is book collecting a uniquely gay thing, or is/was it just another conflation of male aestheticism = effeminacy = deviance?

It's an interesting topic to explore. If we know the notion was a Victorian construct, how long did it last? Does it still persist?

The 2012 essay collection, Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan UK), includes a fascinating chapter, ‘Books in my Hands – Books in my Heart – Books in my Brain’: Bibliomania, the Male Body, and Sensory Erotics in Late-Victorian Literature,” by Victoria Mills. She makes provocative claims about dandy-aesthete book collectors in fiction by Wilde, Huysmans, and Gissing in a refreshingly phenomenological take on the conventional habit of reading queer desire as mental sublimation. Late Victorian clutter, when associated with single men, seems to have become "rooted in medico-scientific debates about heredity, degeneration, and the fitness of the male body." 

In a 2014 precis of a Mills lecture, Cambridge University editors expanded the idea:

In a presentation on the Erotics of Late Nineteenth-Century Book Collecting, Mills will explore through the literature of that period the obsessive nature of men’s desire for books, not simply to read but to have and to hold. “Book collecting was one of the most popular of the acquisitive hobbies in the 19th century.The craze for book collecting in the first two decades is documented in Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania or Book Madness of 1809. Towards the end of the century, many of the libraries of great English houses were sold off, giving bibliophiles ample opportunity to expand their collections, and a second phase of impassioned book collecting began,” she said. 

“This was the era of the ‘book beautiful’ with private presses producing lavishly illustrated and bound books, the first editions of which were highly popular with collectors. But what emerges from my research into late-Victorian bibliomania is that books were desirable not just for their visual appearance but also for their tactile qualities. I suggest that book collecting was an activity based as much on touch as on sight and collectors frequently mention the thrills and pleasures they experienced through physical contact.” 

Sensory responses to books as objects to possess and to handle are well documented in the literature that surrounds the craze for book collecting in Britain and France at the end of the 19th century. In his Book-Hunter in Paris (1893), French publisher and journalist Octave Uzanne tells us that “the mere physical pleasure  … to turn over the pages of a book long coveted, to handle an unexpected find, to fondle a binding, to dust the edges, are exquisite joys in which the hand shares with the eye”. 

Gender is deeply embedded in the relationship between people and things. Book collecting was (and to some extent still is) a predominantly male world. The spaces of late-19th century book collecting – the private library, club, book shop and book stall – were spaces in which men socialised with other men in their pursuit of, and interaction with, books. 

In Victorian literature, Mills traces two contrasting categories of male bibliophile: the velvet-clad dandy aesthetes in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and the fusty bachelor book collectors who feature in works by lesser-known authors, such as American humourist Eugene Field and English novelist George Gissing, two authors who were also book collectors. 

In Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde describes how Dorian “…procured from Paris no less than nine copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies over a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control”. Collecting books plays an important role in masculine self-fashioning – like the putting on of clothes, the binding of books is a means by which Dorian Gray constructs his dandy identity. Wilde himself made a point of distributing his books, with their stunning illustrations, with his own hand. “Touched by him, the books retained traces of his corporeal presence and his gifting of them suggests a notion of inheritance and transmission based on bodily connection,” said Mills. 

Much writing on bibliomania focuses on its negative aspects. Obsessive collecting was seen as a symptom of disease – a kind of mania to be treated as an unfortunate affliction. “Across the 19th century, literary depictions of book collecting are riddled with the language of disease,” said Mills. Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania is tag-lined as an account of the ‘history, symptoms, and cure of the fatal disease’. The editor William Carew Hazlitt charts his own bibliomania as a growing addiction; the title of his memoir Confessions of a Collector (1897) echoes Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821). 

Such accounts depict the book collector as a pitiable fellow, eaten up with his obsession and oblivious to his outward appearance.  In Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs (1904), Nathan Haskell Dole, President of the Bibliophile Society, pokes fun at the crazed book lover in this cruel little ditty: “Victim of a frenzied passion./He is lean and lank and crusty;/Naught he cares for dress or fashion/And his rusty coat smells musty.” 

The association between collecting and disease gathered strength in the late-19th century with the publication of medico-scientific texts about what we now call hoarding.  Max Nordau, a physician, author and social critic, wrote a book titled Degeneration (1895) in which he attacked so-called degenerate art produced by decadents and aesthetes such as Wilde and Joris Karl-Huysmans, whose book À Rebours (Against Nature) (1888) also depicts the activities of an obsessive collector. 

Nordau’s Degeneration associated collecting with perversity and immortality: “… the present rage for collecting, the piling up, in dwellings, of aimless bric-a-brac … appears to us in a completely new light when we know that Magnan [a French psychiatrist] has established an irresistible desire among degenerates to accumulate useless trifles …” 

Mills is interested in the striking plurality of these representations of book collectors: on one hand book collecting is connected with unbridled and corrupting consumption, on the other it is constructed as a wholesome and worthwhile activity. And she is keen to explore more positive interpretations of the phenomenon of book-love. Following Wilde’s trial and conviction for gross indecency in 1895, affectionate physical contact between men was increasingly associated with perversion and degenerative behaviour. 

Book collecting, Mills argues, allowed for the expression of sexually marginalised masculine identities – a means by which men could connect physically and without aggression with other men. “Bibliophiles touch the binding, the skin of the book, but also – by imaginative extrapolation – the skin of other men. The possibility of tenderness between men is suggested through the handling of books,” she said.  

Bibliophiles record many examples of their desire to stroke and caress their books . Eugene Field, for example, addresses one of his favourites books thus: “Come, let me take thee from thy shelf and hold thee lovingly in my hands and press thee tenderly to this aged and slow-pulsing heart of mine.”  He also talks reverently of his books “which have felt the caressing pressure of [other] hands”. Andrew Lang, a Scottish author and bibliophile, describes an erotic charge that emanates from touching books that belonged to other men: “our fingers are faintly thrilled, as we touch these books, with the far-off contact of the hands of kings and cardinals, scholars…” (Books and Bookmen, 1892).

Mills suggests that the history of book collecting can be written as a history of intimacy as ideas about literary heritage, and the collecting, giving and bequeathing of books, become closely associated with an eroticised history of male tenderness.

Other scholars have considered the theme this century; early entries include Marvin J. Taylor's  2000 The anatomy of bibliography: book collecting, bibliography and male homosocial discourse ("Sedgwick notes at least one distinctly homosexual stereotype in England from as early as the seventeenth century: ‘the cluster of associations about this role . . . include effeminacy, connoisseurship, high religion, and an interest in Catholic Europe’ (my emphasis)"; and Camille and Rifkin's Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly (2002). Michael Hatt also explored the topic in The Book Beautiful: Reading, Vision, and the Homosexual Imagination in Late Victorian Britain (2010).

The notion was rendered visual- and clear- in a string of World War II-era movies.

There is no mistaking who and what Waldo Lydecker is when police detective Mark MacPherson (Dana Andrews) walks through the dandyish broadcaster's bibelot-filled apartment, summoned by the Great Man to his luxurious bath in this linked clip opening 1944 movie version of Vera Caspary's 1942 novel, Laura. 

Second Sight Cinema sets the scene:

The screen lightens to reveal Waldo’s living room, his art collection prominently displayed. The clock that is one of the film’s central images and that figures so prominently in the plot is shown at the back of the frame, its top cut off by a glass shelf displaying Waldo’s glass collection, but we do not yet know the significance of the clock, so we see it only as another piece in Waldo’s extensive art collection.“A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York. For with Laura’s horrible death, I was alone. [dramatic pause] I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her, and I had just begun to write Laura’s story when another of those detectives came to see me. I had him wait. I could watch him through the half open door. [the clock chimes; McPherson walks to it to look it over] I noted that his attention was fixed upon my clock. There was only one other in existence, and that was in Laura’s apartment, in the very room where she was murdered.”

McPherson isn’t the only one interested in that clock, or rather its twin in Laura’s apartment. Next time you see Laura, notice that Waldo keeps showing up at the Laura’s apartment trying to retrieve the clock, which he claims he only loaned Laura. He drops in several times a day, hoping either to get the clock out when McPherson isn’t there or to blackmail the detective into letting him have it back. Waldo is very clever, so in each visit he assesses the current situation with McPherson and his investigation, and Waldo only brings up taking back the clock back if he thinks it’s safe to do so in that moment, that it won’t arouse McPherson’s suspicions.

Just after Waldo’s opening narration, we finally get our first glimpse of him. He is soaking in the bathtub of his “lavish” bathroom (Waldo’s term, of course; it is roughly the size of my New York apartment). There he sits on this blazing Sunday, up to his chest in tepid water, writing on a desktop. He is middle-aged, thin, pasty, sunken-chested, graying, with a face that is not handsome but memorable, theatrical, and easy to caricature, and a voice vibrant with malice, curiosity, and disdain. He entertains McPherson from the tub the same way LBJ held conferences from the toilet, to assert his dominance, and then rises from it without embarrassment, giving McPherson the Full Waldo. We know this because we hear the splash of Waldo’s getting up in the tub, and a brief smirk crosses McPherson’s impassive face. Waldo’s second purpose here is to graphically demonstrate to the detective that he has nothing to hide.  

Laura expanded the landscape of film noir into the upper class, and Preminger shows the moral rot beneath the well-maintained veneer with clear, understated references to decadence and corruption...

No one missed the point in 1946 either, when Sam Spade, the detective in The Big Sleep, walked into Geiger's Books undercover:




Nor did viewers- though there were not that many the movie did poorly- of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 seemingly one-take thriller, Rope. Based on the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play, the motifs were all there: two stylish young men sharing a taste for fine things and a Manhattan apartment. Hitchcock's "MacGuffin"- the device settling the action in motion- was the acquisition, by one of the pair, of a well-known book collector's library. The connections with homoerotic desire, addiction, greed, transgrssive behavior, intellectual pretensions, and violence all slotted neatly into place:




In a review of the closeted American capitalist Malcolm Forbes' book about his vast collections, Ruuman Allam suggests gay liberation may have erased- or at least, limited- the sublimation of LGBT life into artistic pursuits:

Gay men are adept at recognizing one another, and I can’t help seeing Forbes’s particular sort of connoisseurship as a tell. Forbes was born during Woodrow Wilson’s administration; men and women of that generation had yet to evolve to the “not that there’s anything wrong with that” attitude. After Forbes’s death, Michelangelo Signorile reported on his closeted life in the now-­shuttered Out­Week magazine. Leaving aside the question of what he was or would have called himself, Forbes’s discriminating eye, his exacting and exhausting taste, strikes me as distinctively gay. 

Men like Forbes — history’s bachelor uncles/best pals/trusted advisers — were for centuries on the cutting edge of taste. They were always the ones who cared about bias cuts, cloisonné, Murano glass — whatever. They lived lives circumscribed by social convention and exerted influence mostly in determining the absolute standard of high style. Cold comfort, for the love of stuff can’t replace love itself. 

Today, this “gay” taste no longer has so much to do with actual gayness. Whether speaking of actual gay men like Yves Saint Laurent or urbane straight men like Michael Bloomberg — who bankrolls brilliant interior designers — calling the pursuit of aesthetic purity “gay” is an act of reclamation. Lots of rich men and women like fast cars, but it’s a gay sensibility that appreciates the car as an object of beauty as well as a marvel of engineering — I think of the noted (straight) collector Ralph Lauren. Gayness should have never been cause for shame, and now, in the culture’s more rarefied corners, it can be cause for celebration. Many tastemakers (in fashion, art, interior design) are still gay men — but their gayness is not a secret and may even burnish their credentials. I’m unable to think of a more suitable adjective to describe the sensibility that would invest, as Forbes did, in Eugene Kupjack’s exquisite miniature of Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom at Monticello (scale: one inch to one foot).

Wayne Koestennaum's famous book, The Queen's Throat (1993)- theorizing that opera is a "gay" art form, comes to mind for making the same point of a different artistic medium.

What do you think, readers? I'd love to know your thoughts, as well as your tips for more material in the field.