Up on the third floor, in a bookcase against the south wall—the second shelf from the bottom, maybe two-thirds of the way along—there’s an aging copy of The Art of Memory, written by the British historian Frances Yates back in the 1960s.
At least I think the book is upstairs. I haven’t looked for it in ages. But I know I shelved it, once upon a time, alongside Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and a few other books about the tricks of organizing information in the mind. None of those tricks ever worked well for me, I should say. Memory, in all its strange neurology and psychology, has always interested me, but only in abstraction. I’ve been fascinated by memory books in the way I enjoy reading about baseball players without being able to play baseball.
Anyway, as I remember, my copy of Yates’s Art of Memory is an oversized paperback, off-white with a drawing of something like a phrenologist’s dummy on the cover. I wish I could recall the contents of the book better, but picturing the book’s cover does at least help bring back some of what’s inside. Now that I think about it, I remember that The Art of Memory traces the idea of systematic memory from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, with Leibniz and Giordano Bruno playing major roles. And maybe that’s enough. If I need more, I can actually go upstairs to pull down the book. Browse in it a little. Get back up to speed.
Real memory masters, the people who practice the techniques that memory books chronicle, recall a lot more. Many of them use what Yates and Spence have taught us to call a “memory palace”: a well-known place, such as a building or a neighborhood, through which the rememberers walk in their minds when they have something they want to retain in memory. Along the way, they place in specific locations a mnemonic for each piece of information. And then they need only return, strolling back through the mental landscape, to recall what they’ve memorized.
But who needs a memory palace when we have books? Plato once ironically mourned the invention of writing, claiming that it allowed people to stop memorizing. And that’s the point: Books hold information, like rooms in a house, and a library is a vast mansion of those rooms. Beyond this obvious truth, however, lies something more: something mnemonic in the physical books themselves. To know the location of the actual book is to know where the room is—and something about what’s inside it.
This is the secret that all book-review editors, biblio-centered scholars, and heavy readers know: Books on their shelves and in piles serve as de facto memory aids. Where early modern figures from Giordano Bruno to Matteo Ricci built memory palaces in their minds, book collectors build them in reality. It’s something besides, something outside, the knowledge contained in the books. The actual objects become reminders, mental tabs for ordering material, and a physical representation of the facts in memory. To recall a book is to recall information, and to think of the cover, its placement on the shelves, is to retrieve a little of the contents of memory.
I’ve always been a shelver. An organizer. I want my books chronological when I can, and alphabetical when I must. Children’s books in one set of bookcases, mysteries in another. The Middle Ages before the Renaissance, the Founding Fathers before the Victorians. The shelving and reshelving keeps them organized in the house they constantly threaten to take over. Even more, however, it keeps them organized in the mind. Each book is a reminder, in the midst of other reminders. Each spine whispers something of the information within the book, and places that information in the context of its neighbors.
For a few years now, nearly all the new pulp and genre fiction I read has been in ebooks. And ebooks seem to offer no such mechanism for memory. Or, at least, I remember them less well than I do the older sci-fi, mysteries, and Napoleonic sea stories overflowing the bedroom shelves.
Perhaps younger readers are developing their own techniques, not bound by the old bookish ways. Or perhaps they just have better memories. Certainly the people who build the real memory palaces of the mind can travel lighter. Omnia mea mecum porto, as the old philosopher said: All that is mine I carry with me. But having built my own memory palace out of shelves and shelves of real books, I can carry memory with me only if I have a few hundred book boxes and a moving van.
