Oscar Wilde’s Personal Library

The Christian Science Monitor reviews a promising book on Oscar Wilde’s life as viewed through the prism of his personal library, proving that one can learn aplenty about a man through the books he owned, read, and digested. Wilde, it seems, truly "made his books his own." He went far beyond simply writing his name on the inside cover. Consider:

Wilde’s was a working library and its volumes were often stacked on the floor. Wilde scribbled in them, marked passages, and sometimes even chewed on them. (Literally – he would tear corners off pages and pop them in his mouth while reading intensely.) He dribbled crumbs and jam into them and sometimes used flowers to mark his place – all of which left an unusually personal imprint on his collection. He also borrowed widely from his books and perhaps even stole. (Plagiarism, he told a friend, “is the privilege of the appreciative man.”)

The book on Wilde's books is Built of Books:

Wilde was a brilliant scholar and droll, rapid-fire commentator. He was erudite beyond what most of us can even begin to imagine. Except that now, thanks to Thomas Wright, we can imagine. Wright, in a remarkable labor of love, has dedicated much of his life (about two decades) to a quest to intellectually reconfigure and read Wilde’s personal library. The result is Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.

It could be argued that all of us are indelibly marked by the books we read. But there can be few people for whom this is as strikingly true as it was of Wilde, who became celebrated as a playwright, poet, author, and professional wit.

Books were the driving force of his existence, from earliest childhood on up, and later in life, when he was brought low by tragedy and disgrace, they were his last remaining comfort.

Wright has gone to great lengths not only to learn about the titles that shaped Wilde’s life, but to get his hands on as many of Wilde’s own copies of those books as possible. The result is an idiosyncratic yet insightful take on the man Wright refers to as “my hero.”

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