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The Extraordinary Compulsions of a Bibliomaniac

Naomi Manuell August 23

The inaugural Rare Book Week was held late last month by the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB). One of the highlights was a lecture given at Melbourne University Law School by the Texan lawyer, lexicographer and bibliomaniac, Bryan A Garner.

The first edition of Garner’s Manual of American Usage was published in 1998. The 3rd and most recent edition came out in 2009. Coincidentally, in that same year a reprint of the ‘classic’ first edition of Henry Watson Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage was also released. Garner’s work is every bit as useful—and as witty. If you don’t already own a copy of Garner’s Manual of American Usage, read late US author David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘Authority and American Usage’ for a few of the reasons why you should. Wallace was a huge fan. Garner is also one of the world’s pre-eminent legal lexicographers. He wrote his first legal dictionary while still at law school and is now editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, the most widely used legal dictionary in the US. He is also the author of several books on advocacy and legal writing, including one co-written with the US Supreme Court’s longest serving judge, Justice Antonin Scalia.

garner

During the lecture, Garner spoke of his complete immersion in books, something he regards as the mark of a worthwhile scholarly life. He says books give off an intellectual energy all of their own. This means Garner could power a small city, since his personal library contains around 32,000 volumes. There are 2000 volumes on Shakespeare alone, a collection of law dictionaries dating back to 1491 and not one but two first editions of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary.

Garner had a home built in Dallas, Texas in 2003-04 which included a 25 square foot library decked out in that luxurious but rather imposing ‘robber baron’ style Americans seem so fond of. Before the lecture, he screened a short film about it, but didn’t want his audience forming the impression this is some kind of show library, the sort of place one might serve pre-dinner drinks to admiring guests but very little else. Garner’s library is a place where work gets done—and lots of it. Incidentally, only half his collection is kept at home. The rest is found in custom-built shelves in the downtown offices of LawProse, the company he founded to educate lawyers in plain English and other aspects of legal writing.

Years ago, Garner was a precocious golfing talent and briefly even considered a career as a professional player. Now in his mid-fifties, he still possesses an athletic poise. He has thick sandy hair, a round unlined face and small deep set eyes one can imagine zeroing in on a golf ball with laser-like precision. His maternal grandfather was Meade F Griffin, who served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas. He offered his golf-mad grandson his entire collection of law books if he would abandon sport in favour of law school. But by the time Garner made up his mind, his grandfather had already given the collection away. Garner suggests it was this tragedy that triggered his bibliomania, though his lecture provided ample evidence he’d already succumbed at a much earlier age. Initially, he set out with the relatively modest ambition of owning every book he’d ever cited in his work. Later, he expanded this to every book he might ‘one day’ cite. Now, it’s simply any book he might ‘conceivably’ cite.

Antiquarian law books being the focus of the lecture, Garner discussed the acquisition of association copies relating to Lord Brougham, Sir Frederick Pollock, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clarence Darrow, and Lord Denning. But his collection of books on English grammar, usage and linguistics also deserves mention. Garner wistfully refers to the ‘golden age’ of English grammar, a time lasting roughly from the late 1800s to the 1920s. His collection covers this era comprehensively. But there’s also the ‘father of English grammar’, Lindley Murray, the American-born Quaker and lawyer whose work pre-dated this gilded era but whose book English Grammar had a lasting impact. Garner owns Murray’s copy of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and, in a wonderful convergence of law and language, recalls his delight on finding Murray’s will, hidden between the pages.

He’s unearthed treasures in bookshops from Wichita, Kansas to Alexandria, Virginia. Oddly though, some of the best American law books in his collection he’s bought at auctions held by the Birmingham Law Society in England. Garner calls the antiquarian book trade an ‘honourable’ one and name checks several of the dealers whose friendship he’s come to value over the years. But there’s barely a trace of guilt when he recalls the gems snapped up for a fraction of their true value simply because a bookseller failed to grasp their significance. Perhaps it’s fair, a form of punishment meted out to anyone not matching Garner’s standard of erudition. Nowadays, he buys a lot of books over the internet. It was inevitable antiquarian books collectors and sellers would eventually find their way to a computer screen. But one imagines Bryan A Garner’s bibliomaniac heart never beats quite as strongly as it does following the unexpected discovery of some long sought-after prize in a real bookshop.


 

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