Abstract

The title of this book, by one of the great editors and publishers of our time, comes from its first and longest chapter: “How to Organize a Library.” In it, Calasso celebrates the “golden rule” proposed by Aby Warburg: “In the perfect library, when we look for a given book, we end up taking the one next to it, which would reveal itself even more useful than the one we were looking for.” It demands effort, knowledge, and sensibility to “curate” such a library, where each book maintains good neighborly relations with the others. Such a library is an oeuvre requiring constantly to be maintained and refreshed, because a book is never a self-contained, self-sufficient object. Each book is connected to others in myriad and surprising ways.Calasso applies this relational understanding of books in a very short chapter on, reputedly, the first book review ever written: Madame de Sablé’s little note of 1665 on her friend La Rochefoucauld's Maximes. In that book, which prefigures some of Nietzsche's ideas, La Rochefoucauld argues that “most often our virtues are nothing but disguised vices” (Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés). Before submitting her review to the Journal des Savants, which had been inaugurated only a few months earlier, Madame de Sablé sent it to La Rochefoucauld, asking him to amend it as needed or even to “throw it into the fire.” Calasso compares the original review and the corrected version that was eventually published. La Rochefoucauld erased many passages, making a short text (273 words) even shorter (189 words). In the process, he wiped out the first sentence, the most important, where Sablé summarized what she saw as the achievement of the Maximes: “It is a treatise about movements of the heart of man which we may say have been ignored until now” (C'est un traité des mouvements du cœur de l'homme, qu'on peut dire lui avoir été inconnus jusqu’à cette heure). Calasso comments: “Nothing more radical and more courageous could be written about the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. However, the author of the work did not hesitate to cancel those very words—perhaps to avoid frightening people, himself included.” In other words, Calasso suggests that Sablé understood the Maximes better than its author did. The culture of book reviewing ushered in by Madame de Sablé taught and continues to teach us that a book may be more than its author believes it to be. Indeed, every book is in need of attentive and penetrating readers to discover its latent potentialities.