The Bondage of Ballinger is a bookstore novel about the life of a bibliophile in New England late in the 19th Century.
Thomas Ballinger is bound by bibliophilia in Roswell Field’s The Bondage of Ballinger . He cannot resist buying books. Money means nothing to him except the means to increase his library. He sacrifices all else, including his wife’s happiness, to that bibliophilia. On his wedding day, while walking to the station to buy the tickets for their honeymoon, he stops at a book auction and spends all the money on boxes of books. His wife accepts that it has “saved us from such silly extravagance and useless travel,” not realizing “what a floodgate of unhappy desire and evil yearning” she opens up with her acceptance (pg 33).
Ballinger is the son of New England ministers and bibliophiles. As a young man he gains a reputation for being a bit useless, generally wandering about reading his books. He tries a variety of jobs, but none keeps his attention for long. His father, seeing that Thomas is unlikely to make a living from work, does give him excellent bookseller advise.
Never wittingly buy an inferior book. But when a poet, or a historian, or a story-writer, or an essayist of your acquaintance, puts forth a a venture well worth the while, approach him with modesty and deference, and ask him to be so good as to bring it a little nearer home to you by writing hisname, with ppossibly a fitting sentiment, on the fly-leaf.
This proves excellent advice, as Ballinger spends time with Thoreau, Alcott, Holmes, Emerson, Larcom and Celia Thaxter, collecting inscribed dedications from all of them. He opens a bookstore in town with a simple business strategy in mind. “Can you not see,” he explains to his long suffering and eternally devoted wife, Hannah, “that all I have to do is to buy a book in another part of the country, bring it here, and sell it for three and often four or five times as much as I paid for it?” When he adds that the average book-buyer never worries about the price, Hannah’s response (“we know that very well, dear”) is unheeded.
Unfortunately, Thomas Ballinger is the very type who should never own a bookstore. He is a collector, not a seller. When he finds a book that someone wants to buy, he persuades himself that he should keep the book, offering himself a variety of creative reasons, including the idea that the book-buyer is not worthy of the book. When he sets out to sell a rare book, he returns home having traded it for another, equally rare, book. The shop, inevitably, fails (though Thomas does not seem entirely aware of this).
Thomas is protected throughout the narrative by his wife and the local community. He befriends a young girl named Helen, the daughter of a wealthy local businessman and she persuades her father to protect the bankrupt bibliophile. Her father, who understands commerce but not culture, gains his own pleasure by treating the bookseller as a present he can provide to the child he loves to spoil. Seen through the eyes of this child (who grows to be a young woman as Ballinger grows old), Thomas becomes a noble figure.
You, who led me day after day through a land of enchantment and into kingdoms which otherwise I never might have known? You, who developed the best that was in me? You, who taught me nothing that was not beautiful, everyting that was helpful and nobel?
Despite the novel’s happy ending, a cruelty runs through the narrative. If Thomas Ballinger is bound by his bibliophilia, he rejoices in his chains. Hannah Ballinger, on the other hand, must sacrifice home, family, comfort, and security to Thomas’ obsession. At every turn, as Thomas fails to sell books, as he buys more and more and builds his library, she endures faithfully with never a cross word. Eventually, Helen’s father offers him a small fortune for his library, money with which he could keep Hannah safe in their home; he turns it down without a thought. Hannah responds to each betrayal with kindness, love, and loyalty. Unlike the youthful Helen, who is taught “nothing that is not beautiful”, Helen must endure decades of near-poverty as her dreams are smothered by the piles of books that fill her home.
Helen and Hannah demonstrate two ways we can engage with the bookseller. Bookselling, it is often said, will never make you rich. During interviews with booksellers in 2012, I was told that “a lot of independents deserve to go out of business” because they do not treat bookselling as a business.
The book business attracts a lot of people out of the romance, but in fact its as rigorous in terms of what it requires as any other business. 90% of people in this business aren’t business people. They’re romantics.
A used bookseller must approach the business as a commercial enterprise with all the risks and demands of a commercial enterprise. If they do not, then anyone related to that person will likely need to be as forbearing as Hannah. At the same time, and as Helen realizes, literary culture endures through the bookseller. In the words of another bookseller, “I buy and sell intrinsically fascinating, important, or unusual books, ephemera, and other cultural detritus in all fields.” The obsessions of a bookseller, like any great passion, can be rewarding but there is often a cost that must be paid.
The bookstore novel began as a genre in the 20th century, and The Bondage of Ballinger is among the earliest examples. Richard Cady of Richard Cady Rare Books in Prescott, Arizona, brought it to my attention after he noted that I had missed it in Fantasies of the Bookstore.
The author, Roswell Martin Field, Jr, was the son of the lawyer, Roswell Martin Field, Sr, who defended Dred Scot in the trial that resulted in the Dred Scott Decision. His brother, Eugene Field, was the better-known writer in the family; like Roswell, he was a poet and a journalist, best remembered for his children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”
The Fleming H Revell Company was the largest and most influential Christian publishing company in the late 19th Century. The Ballad of Banninger started a movement by the publisher to produce more general works during a period of growing prosperity. “As we departed more and more from the publishing of purely evangelical literature and embarked more into the field of general publishing with a religious or highly moral flavour,” wrote Vice President George H. Doran, “we did a greatly increased volume of business but at a much higher cost of operation.”
