The Private Library

Penned in Prison for The Private Library

Here's an interesting idea for a private library: collect nothing but titles that have been penned by prisoners.

If you think such a book collection might contain mostly accounts of prison life, think again ... some of the world's greatest, as well as some of the most influential, literature ever written was penned by prisoners.

Among such titles are Fernand Braudel's magisterial The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (the first draft of which was written without access to books or notes while Braudel was a German prisoner-of-war in World War II); Cervantes' Don Quixote (begun while the author was locked up in debtor's prison); Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos (written while the author was imprisoned by Italian partisans during World  War II); and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (written while the author was under arrest on false charges of treason):

  

A focus on such books would net you novels such as Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers (written while Genet was imprisoned for theft), John Cleland's Fanny Hill: or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (another product of debtor's prison) and the Marquis de Sade's Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (the notorious libertine, famed more for his subject matter than the quality of his writing, was imprisoned in the Bastille when he wrote the first draft).   But such a focus also would net you what are perhaps the most famous poetic lines ever penned in prison: Stone walls do not a prison make; / Nor iron bars a cage; / Minds innocent and quiet take / That for an hermitage ("To Althea, from Prison" by Richard Lovelace): 

  

One of the most infamous titles of all time, Hitler's Mein Kampf, was written while its author was serving time in Munich's Landsberg Castle for his role in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.  That compilation of all things Arthurian, Le Morte d'Arthur, was supposedly penned while Sir Thomas Malory was imprisoned for theft, thuggery and (possibly) rape.  Arguably the greatest of all medieval Western European travel accounts, The Travels of Marco Polo, was dictated to a scribe while the famed traveler was a prisoner of war in Genoa:

  

A private library built around books penned by prisoners might see the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait (which includes the full text of King's Letter from Birmingham City Jail) next to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison (written while the distinguished theologian was imprisoned for plotting to assassinate Hitler) next to Antonio Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks (the famous Marxist theorist, imprisoned by Italian Fascists during World War II, died six days after his release from captivity):

  

Of course, all this is but the tip of a very large literary iceberg.  So much has been published by imprisoned authors that one could easily specialize if one so desired.  

Instead of focusing on great or influential literature penned by prisoners, you might choose instead to focus on memoirs of prison life.  So-called Death Row biographies, written by prisoners awaiting a visit from the Grim Reaper (or written by folks trying to get these prisoners released, or by those who work with such prisoners), suggest one possible area of specialization:

  

Another possible area of specialization is memoirs of life spent in foreign prisons:

  

Something to collect next time you think you are having a really bad day....

Licensed to Print at The Private Library

When book collectors move from one book collecting arena to another, it's not uncommon for them to have to learn a few new words.  

Someone who has collected, for example, mostly steampunk or bizarro fiction (quite recent genres) may have little familiarity with the terminology used to describe herringbone or papier-mâché bindings.   Collectors of bookbindings may have little familiarity with the terminology of manuscript collecting.

Imprimatur, a term frequently encountered in auction and bookseller catalogs, is one term that can be confusing to collectors new to the field of antiquarian books (the example below is on a title that was printed in Denmark in 1767):

In its widest vernacular sense, imprimatur simply means license to print (the Latin translates into English as let it be printed).  Such licensing is recorded at least as early as 1485, and the requirement for such licensing is one reason many early printed books sport false imprints.

The term does not apply (as "newbies" sometimes mistakenly believe) only to books that have been approved by ecclesiastical authorities.  Secular authorities (governmental entities, as well as government-approved private organizations) have long held authority to determine what can and cannot be printed.

In the case of ecclesiastical imprimaturs, such licensing is in fact the last, not the first, step in a review process that has nothing at all to do with whether or not an ecclesiastical authority agrees with "the contents, opinions or statements expressed."  

In Catholicism, infamous among some book collectors for its now extinct Index Librorum Prohibitorum, this review process is covered by several articles of Canon Law.  The title below, published in 1953 by Random House, graphically depicts the required sequence of approvals:

Imprimaturs are common in books published during the 16th-17th centuries, where they frequently are found printed on a separate license leaf (the example below is from a title held by the University of Missouri):

But imprimaturs have continued to be sought, and issued, to the present day.  (As we pointed out in a recent post, the review process required for imprimaturs has sometimes led to bisquing.)

In keeping with our more modern times, imprimaturs are issued nowadays for, among other "publications," iPhone applications....

Novels of Officialdom at The Private Library

Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters....

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  

Bureaucrats.  They get no respect.

From Wú Jìngzǐ's Rúlínwàishǐ to Balzac's Les Employés, from Kafka's The Trial (above left) to Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide, bureaucrats traditionally have fared rather badly in novels.  Faceless ... often nameless ... usually mediocre.

China's recent spate of bestselling novels about bureaucrats seems unlikely to improve the situation. These novels, known in China as officialdom novels, frequently portray Chinese bureaucrats as breeding hub[s] of corruption, feeding readers' curiosity about how party elites snatch wealth by underhand[ed] means.  One popular author of such novels, Wang Xiaofang, has gone so far as to suggest that

[t]he lives of civil servants ... are like those living in a gigantic castle, following prescribed rules; all citizens are equal under the law -- but not everybody is a citizen.

  

The Orwellian tinge of some of these novels notwithstanding, they are enormously popular in the world's most populous nation.  One hundred and eighteen (118) such novels were published in 2008. That number was easily surpassed within the first three months of 2009.  Wang's own acclaimed novel, The Civil Servant's Notebook, is being translated into English by Penguin China.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most enthusiastic readers of Chinese officialdom novels appear to be ... Chinese bureaucrats.  According to a recent article in the Shenzen Daily, many Chinese bureaucrats use these novels as guides to bureaucratic behavior that may actually enhance their possibilities of promotion.

It will be interesting to see how many of these titles (in addition to Wang's) get translated into Western languages.  It will be even more interesting to see how well such novels resonate with Western readers. Political fiction in the United States, for example, usually focuses on the machinations of top-level types like Senators, Supreme Court Justices or the President.  Are readers here (much less book collectors) really ready for The Diary of the Assistant Deputy Under-Secretary for a Department You Didn't Know Existed?

Still, it is a ground-floor book collecting opportunity ... if you read Mandarin.

Bisquing and The Private Library

Anyone who has done much provenance research in antiquarian booksellers' catalogs, or auction catalogs, will occasionally have encountered the term bisquing (or bisking), a term that refers to pages where blocks of text have been painted over with black ink or, alternatively, have been overprinted with a blank block (or, in the case of the Russian book below, a block of dots or the like):

This sort of censorship, which often occurs after a work's initial publication, has been practiced over the centuries for a variety of reasons. (In the text below, for example, the motivation was to insure that the text accorded with received religious dogma:)

As several scholars have pointed out, this sort of censorship was in centuries past applied not only to printed books, but to manuscripts as well:

  

Bisquing is similar in effect, though not necessarily in intent, to redaction (in the modern vernacular [not the traditional literary] sense of this term, referring to text that has been hidden [supposedly] in the interest of "protecting the national security," as in the text below):

Folks interested in tracing the evolution of censorship might find collecting these types of books to be a bit ... problematic.  (Your faithful blogger is not aware of any booksellers who specialize in such books. Hence, there may well be a bookselling as well as a book collecting opportunity here.)

Nonetheless, one suspects that if the old book collecting net is cast as widely as possible (multiple languages, subjects, etc.), it may well be possible to build a private library of some importance around this subject. (Cf. our previous post about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.)

Ebooks likely will make it quite difficult, if not impossible, to trace this sort of censorship in years to come. (After all, how likely is it that previous iterations of an electronic text will have been preserved for comparison...?)