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In this week’s issue, there are several tantalizing references to unusual libraries of yore, all, coincidentally, domains to which men of privilege intentionally repaired, to either escape their wives or control their own lives. Jane Kramer writes about Michel de Montaigne, who, on February 28, 1571, “moved a chair, a table, and a thousand books into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write,” while in Caleb Crain’s review of pirate scholarship, a hundred-odd years on, readers will discover “plump, incompetent Stede Bonnet, the gentleman pirate who spent his inheritance on a pirate sloop and went to sea with his library and dressing gown.” Fast forward to 1947, and Joyce Carol Oates’s review of E. L. Doctorow’s book about the eccentric Collyer brothers, who were swallowed up in a Manhattan mansion filled with detritus, and catch a glimpse of “thousands of books spilling out of the brownstone’s original library.” Fanatic bibliophiles who may be tempted to reconstruct the contents of these libraries or lock themselves up and sail away in a library of their own, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

(“The Bookworm,” Carl Spitzweg, 1850.)

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