The Bibliomaniac (Annotated)

Charles Nodier's The Bibliomaniac is a compact yet richly suggestive tale of book-obsession, turning the figure of the collector into both comic subject and cultural symptom. Written in Nodier's elegant, allusive prose, it belongs to the early nineteenth-century French tradition of the conte, where anecdote, satire, and the fantastic often meet. The work evokes the fervid world of rare editions, a...