The bibliotaph.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The House of Twenty Thousand Books - Book review

Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), 336 pp., $27.95.

In his essay "Unpacking My Library," Walter Benjamin observed, "ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them." It's a sentiment that Chimen Abramsky fully shared. Abramsky transformed his home near Hampstead Heath into one of the most important private libraries on socialism and Judaism in the world. Books invaded every corner of his house--excepting the kitchen, where his wife Miriam whipped up lavish meals for the members of his salon that ranged from E.P. Thompson to Eric Hobsbawm, from Arnaldo Momigliano to Haim BenSasson. A bookseller for decades, he became a consultant to Sotheby's, a senior fellow at St. Antony's College and Goldsmid professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London.

Scholars from around the world beat a path to Chimen's doorstep. Some were eager to see his original edition of the Communist Manifesto with Marx's own scribbled marginalia; others, his upstairs study where this bibliotaph kept his greatest treasures under lock and key, including first editions of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, printed in Amsterdam in 1670, and Descartes's Meditations, not to mention a Bomberg Hebrew Bible printed in Venice in 1521.

His eye for the genuine article could not have been keener. About a rare 1888 edition of The Communist Manifesto, for example, he wrote to a friend: "In some copies there is also a misprint; after Fleet a comma follows and then the word St. There are many reprints but they have slightly different woodcuts. I could easily recognise it if I could see it." He acquired parts of Eleanor Marx's library, which included six draft pages of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value and a cache of Marx family letters, one of which the old man had signed as "Dr. Crankey," another as "Old Nick." His greatest lament apparently was that he didn't possess any original issues of Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which was published in Cologne in 1848. With socialist and communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English and Hebrew stacked on his shelves, the question wasn't what Chimen had but what he didn't.

If this is all there were to the story, it would be intriguing enough. But in his fascinating The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Sasha Abramsky, a grandson of Chimen who frequently visited him and was expected as a boy to participate in debates about everything from Rosa Luxemburg to nuclear disarmament, shows that there is more to it than a case of staggering erudition married to acquisitiveness. He traces...