Library follows the destiny of the builder

On the stairs of the University, dozens of street-vendors offer thousands of books. You can find first issues, the first volume of a trilogy, old books, expensive, cheap, written by giants of universal literature or by illustrious whippersnappers. Each book belonged to someone once, has a personal history of how it came to be bought, read and sold for pennies. Romania had bookshops before the Revolution. Rare books were sold even then on the “cultural black market.” It was difficult but not impossible to buy a copy of “Logic and metaphysic” by Nae Ionescu or the “Philosophical reconstruction” of Mircea Florian. If you were persistent, insistent and inspired trust, you could even get A.C. Cuza’s “Nationalism In art” or Octavian Goga’s “Scolding must,” books that were forbidden by the communists. You knew they came from personal libraries but you didn’t experience the feeling you were robbing someone like it happens now when culture is sold by the metre. After the Revolution, the book-commerce took an explosive turn. It’s like people wanted to get rid of their history and sold everything. The reasons are many and various but the meanings are still unclear. The financial reasons are easy to understand – people are poor and want to eat. The books are the last to be sold. By a quirk of fate, the third generation of a book-lover displays no interest at all in books and sells the collection to the first comer. To some, books are a way to keep the family fed. A few novels buy bread for a week. In the garden of the Romanian Literature Museum an old man comes from time to time. He approaches you, apologises for the inconvenience he might create and tells you he has books for sale. He takes them out of a shaggy bag and, with trembling hands shows them to you: “Les lois sociales, esquisse d’une sociologie” by G. Tarde (Paris, 1899), “L’évolution et l’origine des especes” by Th. Huxley (Paris, 1892), “Psychologie expérimentale” by Henri Pieron (Paris, 1927). The books are in mint condition. You can see they belonged to a connoisseur. Some tell their sad little stories stenciled on the first page: “To my dear Vladi on January 1st, 1929.” The old man apologises again, he is ready to lower the prices for if he fails to sell today, he will not eat. He takes the books out of his deceased uncle’s library. He has been living off that library for some time now. He is lucky his uncle had a large library. He will be able to feed on it for at least a few years. In some cases, the new owners of the books are handpicked. Learning that my son is studying Japanese, a friend took him to see an old lady who had an impressive library. The woman set him to a table and brought him hundreds of volumes: sophisticated and useful Japanese dictionaries (there was even one which translated between Japanese and Latin), books about shogi (Japanese chess), a study by Atsushi Naono that teaches Romanian through Japanese, even a Japanese traffic code. The library included Chinese, Arab, German dictionaries, some accompanied by audio tapes that were never removed from the wrapping they were sold in. All these belonged to the woman’s son. How did he manage to gather such expensive and rare books, what he learned from them, what sacrifices he made to buy them, what happened to him – we will never know. The woman said only that her son is no longer in Romania. Other than that she refused to speak. She offered books, not her son’s history. “Take what you want and as many as you please – I’ll throw away the rest!”

Books have their own destinies. A library follows the fate of the collector. It retains for a while the image of the owner – his frustrations, tastes, and passions and then, when it changes owner, it will take some of his personality.