Five?

Terry Teachout, channeling Kate’s Book Blog lists authors of whom he holds five or more works on his shelves. Five? This guy lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We live in Palookaville and we have to throw away books every month; keeping five of anything seems to be an act of heroism.

Okay; here in Palookaville, we occupy a space not much bigger than some UWS apartments. But Teachout lists 41 members in the Five Club. That’s 205 books right there; it’s beginning to sound like Hitler’s boast that he saw Tristan 50 times in one year.

I’m sure we have some fives here at Chez Buce: probably 8-9 Jane Austens (more than she wrote, yes). Probably that many Henry Jameses, though I haven’t read them all. Surely half a dozen George Eliots and more Faulkners than I can shake a sycamore branch at; Waugh, yes; Naipaul, yes I think so; Nabokov, probably; Trollope, for sure; Orwell, for sure if the four-volume journalism counts as four instead of one. I guess I can’t count the books that have flowed through and out again: I suppose I have read 80 Simenons in my life, but except for the odd Livre de Poche, I don’t suppose we have any on board just now. And just what do you count as a “book,” anyway? Teachout seems to count Proust as “more than five,” which seems fair enough. But is it seven? Or 12? I don’t suppose I can count the nine “books” of Herodotus—but wait, the Foundazione Lorenzo Valla publishes a scrumptious Greek/Italian facing-pages version in a nine-volume set. And we must have a dozen translations of the Iliad around here—one author, or many? Come to think of it, what about the King James Bible? Many books, or one? Many authors, or One?

We do have some nice multi-volume sets. They don’t all get used, but I can’t bear to give them away. The newest may be Samuel Finer’s three-volume “History of Government—surely the book of the millennium (although the millennium is young). I’ve got the gorgeous old Herodotus Commentary by George Rawlinson. I hang onto the four-volume Gomme commentary on Thucydides, although I have to admit by Greek isn’t up to it. We’ve got that old Dictionary of Philosophy and the International Encyclopaedia of Social Science, both of which I acquired, I think, as book club premiums back in the 70s: I admit I haven’t really cracked them in years, but they stand solidly on the shelf and I’d hate to let them go. But five John Hasslers, five Laura Lippmans? This guy must be counting the stuff in the chicken coop on the roof.

PS: I just now noticed that call is ““five or more books by or about.” Ah, so that explains the presence of Louis Armstrong.