The Gentleman’s Library A Nowaday Redux

In late 2008 I was offered a position for which I later realized I was not qualified. Since I needed a job, and since no background or credit check was required, and since it paid nineteen dollars an hour and was as close to a dream job as I could imagine, I took it. The task: compile a list of the 1,500 most important works of literature, catalog them, buy them, and install them in my new employer’s private library, a tastefully converted attic space lined with empty, dedicated shelves in an old Austin house not far from the University of Texas. JB, my employer, a man of some means, explained that he wished to retire early from medicine, a job of some means, and have immediately at hand all the literature that matters. The Victorians would have classified this a gentleman’s library; that’s to say, a large number of books, ideally first editions in fine or original bindings, collected according to some principle or subject (genre-definers, Shelley and his circle, horae, really big books, unica, whatever), shelved eccentrically in a charming, crepuscular space, then read, one after another, at leisure, until boredom or death ends the endeavor.

JB—late forties, smart, mysterious, inquisitive, enthusiastic, a gentleman—seems unlikely to yield to death or boredom, and so in a couple of decades he will surely be among the most diversely well read persons in town. That his library will have been compiled by one of the most ill read persons in town is a humiliating personal irony I’ve withal suffered alone.

The thing is, I hadn’t known of my steep deficiency when I started the job. I thought I’d read selectively and widely. After all, I’d finished the Hergé corpus as a boy, devoured a respectable portion of the world’s prison-escape literature as an adolescent, read the sci-fi impresario Jack Vance’s thinner books in high school, devoured the free galley proofs and advanced readers that were the only perks of my many bookstore jobs, and, during the long summer of 1995, when the greedy, infantine federation of professional baseball players and their owners fucked everybody out of a regular season, I read Ulysses, a long, novel-like work composed by an unstable Irishman, only two words of which I remember, the first and last: Stately and Yes; the rest of the book was a kind of summer-long literary blackout.

The breadth of my reading, combined with my bookselling and book-restoration experience, would, I thought, surely be enough to compile a list unassailable in scope and selectivity. At our first meeting, I told JB I’d have it ready for him in a week...