bibliomaniac

Museums, galleries and art institutions have not yet lost faith in high-quality print publications in this screened-out century, and even as venues for cultural debate keep shrinking — pour one out for Bookforum, the lively art-adjacent book review that shuttered this week — art publishing remains in fine fettle, with more titles every year than even the most committed bibliomaniac could peruse.

Museums, galleries and art institutions have not yet lost faith in high-quality print publications in this screened-out century, and even as venues for cultural debate keep shrinking — pour one out for Bookforum, the lively art-adjacent book review that shuttered this week — art publishing remains in fine fettle, with more titles every year than even the most committed bibliomaniac could peruse.

It’s a remnant of the vast private library of the 19th-century British bibliomaniac Thomas Phillipps — and, for the unprepared, a startling reveal akin to the first sight of Norman Bates’s mother in “Psycho.”

“OK, I’m a bibliomaniac — there’s your quote.”

Even as a child he was a bibliomaniac, spending his waking hours flipping pages “stiff as cartilage,” deciphering marginalia and cloistering himself in a reality of his own making.