ESSAY: RARE NECESSITIES

Harry Waterson writes:

Beneath tight brown paper, inside a bubble-wrapped box, nestled in plastic foam inside another sealed box, inside a package inside a FedEx envelope, the squat book sat — its plain red cover glowing like a battered ember: the first, unauthorized edition of "Religio Medici" by the 17th-century physician and writer’s writer Thomas Browne. It’s mine. I own it.

I own every Thomas Browne first edition now. I bought them more or less in the order in which I enjoy them, following Browne down the elaborately filigreed labyrinths of his strange obsessions, on subjects as diverse as whether elephants have knees and what species of fish Jesus ate after the Resurrection. First "Pseudodoxia Epidemica," from 1646, Browne’s extended debunking of "vulgar errors," then his "Miscellany Tracts," which contains his glorious essay "Musaeum Clausum," perhaps the first English history of lost books. Virginia Woolf described his masterpiece, "Hydriotaphia," a survey of funerary customs, as "a cathedral where the organ goes plunging and soaring and indulging in vast and elephantine gambols of awful yet grotesque sublimity." Probably the most beautiful book, physically, is his "Posthumous Writings" from 1712, with its foldout plates of the Norfolk cathedral. But the unauthorized "Religio Medici" — on the faith of a doctor — was the most expensive of my purchases (about the cost of a month’s rent on a one-bedroom in Park Slope), and also the grimiest. It is the equivalent of a 400-year-old bootleg DVD.

The affliction of the vast majority of writers is to know what everyone in the world should buy and never to have any money. To be a writer is to be able to stride into a billionaire’s home and critique the gauche fussiness of an ormolu clock over the mantelpiece when you couldn’t afford the cut flowers in the powder room. But every writer I know owns at least one object he or she cannot afford but has to have — a vintage YSL jacket, a Linn LP12 turntable, a collection of prisoner-made demon sculptures. For me, it’s Thomas Browne. These books are not conspicuous consumption. I don’t show them to anybody. They sit in a safe place in my office, where I rarely go. I need them for myself, not others.

To read the complete article, see:
I Can’t Afford These First Editions, but I Buy Them Anyway (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/books/review/first-edition-rare-books-thomas-browne-stephen-marche.html)

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