To Have and To Hold
A Veritable Vello-Maniac
Sir Thomas Philips was a bibliomaniac, as quoted in “To Have and To Hold”, the lives of bibolamaniacs are fairly ever quaint and can be, inextremis, utterly alarming- none perhaps... (page 201). Philips wanted “to have one copy of every book in the world” and this ended in extremely devastating footnotes all over his home. When guests would visit his home they were in complete and utter disbelief, each room was full of paper from floor to ceiling and the smell of the paper was unbearable ! Philips then moved houses and this required 230 horses and 103 wagon loads just for his books of his collection of 77,000 items of books.
Stephen Blumberg stole over 24,000 books and his reasoning was because he just had to have them. Furthermore, the next bibliomaniac took this step to crime, his name was Don Vincente. Vincente was a rare book dealer in Barcelona, who was said to be outbid by his main rival Paxtot’s. Three days later, Paxtot’s shop was burnt to the ground and Paxtot was found murdered inside.
Suddenly there was a huge spree of murders with Don Vincente being the main suspect. It was soon to be found out that Vincente was found to be guilty with each person he murdered, he stole their books with it displayed on his shelf. He was truly insane for books.
To end on a lighter note is Jorge Luis Borges who created the Library of Babel. A man who is still a bibliomaniac but not as insane as Vinvente, but has an intricate design and mind. The Library of Babel is an inescapable universe where the books are all uniform and housed in a hexagon shaped room. This room contains every single combination of letters that are possible.
Books clearly lead people to do crazy things, or are just people just crazy?
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