Last month’s celebration for Denise Gigante‘s brand new Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (Yale University Press, 2022) was the first fête at Stanford University’s Green Library since COVID began, long ago in 2019. What a better way to rejoice than with a book about books? We’ve written about Denise’s earlier book, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, here and here. We haven’t had a chance to dive into her latest yet, but it looks like a great read about reading.

Book Madness is the fascinating history of American bookishness as told through the sale of Charles Lamb’s library in 1848. From the publisher: “The library was a heap of sixty scruffy old books singed with smoke, soaked with gin, sprinkled with crumbs, stripped of illustrations, and bescribbled by the essayist and his literary friends. Yet it caused a sensation.”

“The transatlantic book world watched as the relics of a man revered as the patron saint of book collectors were dispersed. Following those books through the stories of the bibliophiles who shaped intellectual life in America—booksellers, publishers, journalists, editors, bibliographers, librarians, actors, antiquarians, philanthropists, politicians, poets, clergymen—Denise Gigante brings to life a lost world of letters at a time when Americans were busy assembling the country’s major public, university, and society libraries. A human tale of loss, obsession, and spiritual survival, this book reveals the magical power books can have to bring people together and will be an absorbing read for anyone interested in what makes a book special.”

Profs. Gavin Jones and Peter Stansky spoke at the celebration as well – and so did Stanford University librarian Mike Keller, of course. Prof. Elaine Treharne, Benjamin Albritton, Gabrielle Karampelas, and somewhere Roberto G. Trujillo made an appearance, too.

Gavin Jones (we’ve written about him here), made some insightful remarks about “sentimentalism” in America. An excerpt:

Book Madness took me back to my time in graduate school in early 1990s, and my growing awareness of power of Sentimentalism in mid-19^th-century American culture. The fraught debate over the sentimental was still in the air – the strong, compassionate outpouring of feeling, usually toward subjects or objects thought to be in distress.

For scholars like Ann Douglas, Sentimentalism was “bad” – impotent, conservative – a mask for middle-class ideologies, rationalization of laissez-faire economics. For scholars like Jane Tompkins, Sentimentalism was “good” – a realm of social power, of salvation through motherly love, an agent of radical transformation toward higher values as religious feeling becomes secular.

I always found Tompkins’s argument more interesting and attractive – and Denise’s book has proven me right through this account of bibliomania, which is also a kind of spin on the complex and powerful role of sentimentalism in the culture of the time, helping us see its significance in new ways.

American bibliomania, as Denise describes it, is an affective relationship with books, based in a texture of sensory and material associations left in a book by each new reading. It becomes another kind of association – one of communal belonging and affective relations in which human lives are lived in books and through the networks they create. Denise’s idea of the book as “relic” becomes shorthand for this transference of religious feeling into the secular domain. Like the promise that Tompkins found in the sentimental, this affective relationship with books becomes the condition for sociality and the potential for transformation into higher orders of being.

Book Madness may perhaps land on one side of this debate over sentimentalism, though what’s more remarkable is how the book breaks down so many categorical distinctions and easy binaries.

Take the idea of “America” itself – that thing I’m meant to be an expert in.

We learn much in Book Madness about the rise of “Americana” at mid-century, the desire for a deep, sedimented, accumulated relationship with national history formed through material associations with books and other artifacts. But here we realize how the fervent nationalism in Young America is enabled by a much broader, transatlantic commerce in books. It’s fascinating to watch a kind of “American” Charles Lamb take shape through his reception in the U.S. For publisher and biographer Evert Duyckinck, one of the key players in this story, Lamb’s books come to possess that most American of powers, a Manifest Destiny to bind the nation together.

I wrote about Denise a decade ago here. As Gavin said then, as chair of the Stanford English Department: “Denise is the rare scholar with the power to tell a story that’s also the biography of an age and an intellectual culture.”

More binary-busting happens at the level of the book’s methodology. Early on, Denise makes a distinction in literary studies between book history, on the one hand, and textual interpretation on the other, only to show how intertwined they really are. Through a kind of “associative literary history” that weaves the content of books into the very fabric of their receptivity to the effects of reading, Book Madness shows how material becomes text for interpretation and how the textual becomes material to be handled and cherished.

Or think of that distinction between History and Antiquarianism – the former invested in a more abstract narrative of events, the latter more interested in moments of material culture found in artifacts, archives, and manuscripts.

This study dynamically questions that distinction by giving us the story of antiquarianism as these books – like relics – dramatically provoke the stuff of narrative. Books create relationships that demand storytelling – and it’s a story that’s part romance, part adventure – be prepared for murders and marriages, hauntings and shipwrecks along the way…. Indeed, there’s so much speed in this book – fast connections, and sudden moments of action as the study moves vertically down into the covers of books, down into those sedimental layers of readings, and then horizontally across time and space to bring books and people into enlightening associations.

I wrote about Denise Gigante a decade ago here. As Gavin Jones, then chair of the Stanford English Department, said then: “Denise is the rare scholar with the power to tell a story that’s also the biography of an age and an intellectual culture.”