In The Study (Princeton Univ., Dec.), Andrew Hui, a humanities professor at Singapore’s Yale-NUS College, chronicles the emergence of the personal library.
What prompted you to write this book?
This was a pandemic project. Covid took hold in Singapore in early April 2020, and just like everyone else I was freaking out. I was between book projects, and my original plan was to write a cultural history of why people go to museums and zoos. When we look at a work of art or an animal in an enclosed space, what are we really looking at? That idea went out the window, though, since everything was closed and we couldn’t travel. One sleepless night, I woke up and retreated into my study. I thought to myself, what could I write about that I knew really, really well? I found the answer in that room, and it was the study.
You write about the movement from bibliophilia to bibliomania. Can you elaborate on that?
During the Renaissance, you had the emergence of the study as a private space detached from the church, the court, and the university. Petrarch and Montaigne, for example, had public personae, but at the end of the day they were independent scholars and private readers. The beneficial side of the study is that it’s a place where we practice self-reflection and self-cultivation. However, if we spend too much time on our own in the study, we get cabin fever. Machiavelli spent four hours in his study each night. Conversely, Don Quixote spends the whole day reading, and he goes crazy. That’s the pivot from bibliophilia to bibliomania, in which the study becomes the world, and the world becomes the study.
What were you surprised to learn in your research?
By nature, I’m a person who collects things. I have a large book collection and long playlists on Spotify. I download far more than I can ever read, watch, or listen to. For a long time, I had a hard time coming up with the argument for my book. To say that the study was born in the Renaissance is not an argument, but a historical fact. Late in the process, I came upon this vision of the dialectic of the study in which bibliophilia turns into bibliomania, and that’s the vector through which I could see the argument.
What lessons would you like readers to take away from your book?
In this age of information abundance, I think it’s important for all of us to have our own study, whether it’s physical or virtual. These are places where for four hours a day, like Machiavelli, we can think in solitude. It’s a balm for the soul and the intellect. I think our day should be equally divided between going to the gym, the public library, the garden, and the study.
