Category Archives: Kerry Clare

There is a name for my condition, and so I am human after all. This ailment of mine (though I don’t want no cure) might call for medic-alert bracelets, prescriptions. Though I’ve got the mildest of cases, but still— what a relief to have it pinned down. Not a character failing at all but an affliction, and Merriam-Webster’s Medical says so. For there is really such a thing as bibliokleptomania.

I steal books. Like most people who steal books, however, my thievery comes with strict perameters: I am not talking about copyright, and I would die before stealing from a bookshop or a library. No, rather I steal books in much the same manner people take in stray cats or foster children. I steal books from people who don’t take care of them, from establishments that keep them around as decoration. I steal books that double as coasters or doorstops. Books with shattered spines, or books that go uncatalogued— for how easily could such a book get lost, and who would ever know?

Not every one of these books, of course, goes home with me. Indeed there are some books which deserve to balance table legs or live on the backs of toilets. But some decidedly shouldn’t— good books, books with gaping holes in my own collection just waiting for them, books I covet, lust for, want. And they need me as much as I need them. I envision myself as protector of the neglected book, and my theft its liberation.

I began to suspect I was not alone in my crime when I came upon a profile of author Sheila Heti, and read that she’d found the inspiration for her novel Ticknor in a book she discovered whilst waiting for a friend at a lounge. She had “randomly pulled a book—an old leather-bound volume—from one of the shelves. She began reading and was intrigued by the uniqueness of the writer’s voice. ‘So I stole it,’ she says.”

Remarkable, her lack of compunction, her shamelessness. So matter-of-fact. She’d probably tell you that some books are meant to be stolen, have been waiting for you all their lives. Or at least I’d tell you that, if I were her. And also that these “lounges” are suspect places for books to be anyway. You know, sometimes they’re coffee shops, book-lined for ambience, but most of the books are terrible. Dumping grounds for the kinds of books that used to live on the backs of toilets, though I will admit this is probably because all the good books have been stolen. But the moral lines are so dubiously drawn here: who owns these books? They’re for the customers’ enjoyment? Who can enjoy a book for just fifteen minutes over a latte? So go on, just steal the book— it’s only right.

Of course this kind of stealing is small beans compared to what the big time biblioklepts get up to. Yes, the biblioklepts: those suffering from bibliokleptomania. There was even an article about it in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, in which writer E.C. Abbott explains that book thieving goes way back to the Middle Ages when books were rare and especially valuable. Abbott also writes of famous book thieves including Dr. Elois Pichler in the nineteenth century who stole 4000 volumes over three years from the Russian Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. He’d sneak them under his bulky overcoat, specially adapted with a storage sack inside, and when he was caught he was sent to Siberia. Also of Gilbert J. Bland, “the Al Capone of cartography”.

In another article, Pradeep Sabastian writes of Stephen Blumberg, who racked up over 22000 rare books over his “career”. “Though he had only passed high school he would masquerade as a professor in University libraries. His modus operandi ranged from wearing long coats with specially sown long pockets inside to hiding in the library after it closed… At his trial he said he always meant to return them.”

I find all this a bit delightful, though the less prolific book thieves not so much. All those petty scum who simply fail to return their library books, for example. Also those who manage to smuggle their heart’s desire out of the building without sounding the alarms— last year the British Library revealed their list of books registered missing, including a Jamie Oliver cookbook, 17 Rolling Stones albums, and four Shakespeare plays. People who cut pages out of library books or remove plates and illustrations from rare books make me sad. As does anyone who dares to steal a book for monetary gain. My disdain is also reserved for whoever it was that removed the “hotels” listings from all the Yellow Pages in the Montreal train station.

Though I must confess to being a bit in love with that woman in Maine who signed out two copies of It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health from the library fourteen years ago. For isn’t bibliokleptomania at its best at its most absurd? I adore the fact that she refuses to return them because she thinks they’re pornographic.

Begin with the assumption that a t-shirt never lies: if reading is truly sexy and somebody prints this message upon clothing, then the disconnect between literature and fashion cannot be so great. Descant bridges it with Issue 138, with fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays and theory inspired by and devoted to fashion. A literary journal with full colour spreads: now there’s a bridge.

Or rather, there’s a marriage? And an ancient marriage too, for isn’t fashion an age-old literary device? Fashion in Books is an early lesson on how to build a character, though of course also just the beginning. A character constructed solely of clothing would be awfully flimsy and require significant development in order to become multi-dimensional.

But still, “Clothes as Character”: Mrs.Turner “climbs into an ancient pair of shorts and ties on her halter top” in “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass”. Jordan Baker who “wore her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes” in The Great Gatsby. Billy in Laurie Colwin’s Another Marvelous Thing, in her “pair of worn cordoroy trousers, once green and now no colour at all, a gray sweater… and a pair of very old, broken shoes with tassels, the backs of which are held together with electrical tape.” Don’t you know these people? Don’t their clothes “become them”?

Even “Clothes as Heart’s Desire”: That dress in Anne of Green Gables: “But the sleeves— they were the crowning glory! Long elbow cuffs, and above them two beautiful puffs divided by rows of shirring and bows of brown silk ribbon.” The gold dress in Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Ladies’ Lending Library: “If she were to step into it, she would become Cleopatra: everything about her would change.”

Seeking equivalent literary references to men’s clothing, I have to admit that I’ve come up short. Of course it’s possible that I’ve been reading the wrong books, but I would like to posit instead that men’s clothes in books functions differently to women’s. Similarly to Kulyk Keefer’s gold dress (“If he were to step into it, everything about him would change”), but men’s clothes themselves are invested with no particular meaning. The man’s transformation is the key, and the clothes remain as articles. We don’t see any of Jay Gatsby’s splendid array of shirts worn by him, but rather piled upon a table in a “soft rich heap.”

In Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning factory worker Arthur Seaton has saved his meagre wages to acquire two expensive suits— his most precious possessions. Yet wearing one, it doesn’t “become him”; well beyond the point of the suit is Arthur’s attempt to elevate his station.

Carol Shields’ Larry in Larry’s Party tries out such elevation by accident when he picks up someone else’s jacket at a coffee shop— a more expensive version of his own. And inside the other jacket, with its smoother lining, detailed buttons, well-stitched pockets, Larry has a glimpse of the kind of man that he could be. But of course an article of clothing is simply an article, and Larry is Larry: ashamed by what he’s done, afraid of being found out, he takes off the jacket and stuffs it into a rubbish bin.

In “The Characters Have New Clothes”, Amy M. Spindler speculates about what would be different if writers of modern classics had had designer clothing to define their characters by. In “I bet that you look good in the bookstore”, the books themselves become fashion: which one is best carried in order to attract a mate? Penguin has demonstrated that a well-dressed book can bring forth fashion iconography of its own. For the whole range of “Reading is Sexy” attire, go here.

Fashion and literature are intrinsically linked, and Descant 138 celebrates this.