5 Sep 2025
Travelers of History: When Napoleon Takes a Seat on Your Suitcase
Travel, travel... If there's one human activity that characterizes our century, it might just be that. Never before have so many people traveled, every month of the year and across all continents, travelers of all walks of life and all ages each pursuing their own adventure.
I travel quite a bit myself, for the management of the bookstore: buying old books, displaying them at international fairs, meeting clients, etc. And it is by traveling in this way with my books – like a modern-day peddler - that I've realized that the real travelers, in fact, are the books themselves!
It is generally impossible to trace the journey of a book from the time it left the press several centuries ago to the present day. But if we just follow their path since their addition to the bookstore's inventory, I can assure you that often their mileage counter could rival that of the most seasoned globetrotters. True, they mostly don't have a stamped passport. Still, there probably aren't many man-made objects (except for those whose very purpose is travel, like suitcases, right Mr. Vuitton?...) that can compete with their wanderings across our planet.
This will surely raise the eyebrows of more than one eco-conscious citizen: think about the carbon footprint of these venerable volumes doing intercontinental tourism from one book fair to another, like influencers jumping from one fine sandy beach to the next! But the defense attorney has pointed out the following:
- The carbon footprint of these grandfathers is totally green since for most of their existence they have traveled only on the back of a man (your servant, the peddler), by horse, cart, or sailing ship.
- They are entirely handmade from natural materials.
- They are monuments of history, "eyewitnesses" to our past, the legacy of our civilization, messengers of the centuries, and iconic fetishes of our culture. Do you know many hand-made monuments from natural materials, often weighing less than a kilogram and fitting in the palm of your hand?
Anyway... imagine that I had a car breakdown last week. I was right in the heart of a magnificent French region, Lozère! And it was by train that I had to continue my journey with my gear, my suitcase, and my bags of books. They were the least stressed of the whole team! They had seen it all before... Look at how proud this precious document signed by Napoleon looks, patiently waiting for the train on the platform!
One train may hide another, so here is a subsidiary question: since books are made to travel, what do you think about laws that aim to limit their circulation under the pretext of heritage defense? Do books belong to a territory? Should they have a passport that might prevent them from crossing borders?
Have a great weekend, everyone!
It can argued, convincingly I think, that antiquarian manuscripts provoke a reasonable desire to keep them where they were made, where they were used. Consider, for example, the struggle to keep the Macclesfield Psalter in England after the Earl of Macclesfield thumbed his nose at his family and sold all the treasures in his castle. It seem entirely appropriate for Minister of Culture in the UK to prevent it from leaving.
But I don’t think such a case can be made, except in very rare cases, for printed books. My purchase of a 16th century science book, printed in Milan, was cancelled due to the denial of an export license. The Italian government could locate no copy in an Italian library, so it was thought necessary to sequester the book somewhere in Italy. “Italy” didn’t exist in the 16th century. Why the modern state of Italy should hold on to such a thing escaped me.
The very nature of “the book” demands that it be looked upon by as many eye as possible. Books are printed to be sold, to disperse, to wander, to change hands, to change minds. At the heart of this issue (and I mean ‘issue’ not ‘problem’) is the difference between “book as object” and “book as instrument”. Unusual perhaps, my attraction to books as a collector has always been to them as instruments. As Denys Hay wrote at the end of his wonderful essay that introduces Printing and the Mind of Man: “The printed page illuminates the mind of man and defies, in so far as anything sublunary can, the corrosive hand of Time.”
But I don’t think such a case can be made, except in very rare cases, for printed books. My purchase of a 16th century science book, printed in Milan, was cancelled due to the denial of an export license. The Italian government could locate no copy in an Italian library, so it was thought necessary to sequester the book somewhere in Italy. “Italy” didn’t exist in the 16th century. Why the modern state of Italy should hold on to such a thing escaped me.
The very nature of “the book” demands that it be looked upon by as many eye as possible. Books are printed to be sold, to disperse, to wander, to change hands, to change minds. At the heart of this issue (and I mean ‘issue’ not ‘problem’) is the difference between “book as object” and “book as instrument”. Unusual perhaps, my attraction to books as a collector has always been to them as instruments. As Denys Hay wrote at the end of his wonderful essay that introduces Printing and the Mind of Man: “The printed page illuminates the mind of man and defies, in so far as anything sublunary can, the corrosive hand of Time.”
