Soren Kierkegaard

ceived account of the situation, and it is not a fabrication from whole cloth.
First and foremost, however, the above-mentioned bingeing period was a
time of intensive reading during which Kierkegaard amassed the enormous
fund of literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge on which he
would subsequently draw so generously and unblushingly in his writings.
Among the bills from 1836 that caused his father’s hands to tremble, the
largest balance was for books from Reitzel’s Bookshop, which his intellectu-
ally inexhaustible son visited several times a week every month of the year
except August, so that as time went on his collection of books became quite
considerable .Of course it could not stand comparison with the library of
the jurist J.L.A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge, which included ten thousand vol-
umes, or that of the church historian A .G .Rudelbach, which had twenty
thousand volumes, much less compete with the forty thousand volumes
owned by the historian C .F .Wegener, whose cultivation of the pleasures
of bibliophilia had compelled him to live on beef broth and codfish tails .At
its maximum extent Kierkegaard’s library apparently consisted of a couple
thousand volumes, but even as early as 1837, when Hans Brøchner visited
him at his home on Løvstræde to borrow a book by the German romantic
author Eichendorff, Kierkegaard’s book collection was sufficiently exten-
sive to take Brøchner’s breath away.
Thus Kierkegaard had been infected by a bookworm at an early age, and
he was vulnerable to the temptation of books of which he strictly speaking
had no need: “As a result of a strange compulsion I have purchased many
books that I have left standing on the shelf.” And on February 7, 1839, he
made the pleasurably penitential confession that in his view Anton Gu ̈nth-
er’s workDieJuste-MilieuinderdeutschenPhilosophiegegenwa ̈rtigerZeit[Ger-
man: “The Happy Medium in Contemporary German Philosophy”] has
“such an excellent title that I have been so infatuated and preoccupied with
it that I will probably never read the book.” He did, however, manage to
read many of the books, and in fact, as we can see, he read them quite
carefully .On occasion he would bend over a good bit of the corner of a
page, sometimes at the top of the page, sometimes at the bottom, and he
developed a complex system of notation employing various symbols,
“N.B.” [Latin:nota bene, “take careful note”] marks, and other indicators.
Similarly, he alternated between blue, red, and black ink, varied the size of
his handwriting, or suddenly switched to pencil whenever and wherever
he wanted to leave a mark in the margin .He did this “meticulously .” Kier-
kegaard had a pronounced sense for the aesthetic aspects of books .Since a
bookseller rarely sold books already bound, Kierkegaard liked to have his
books bound in half-calf or in half- or full-shirting, sometimes in glazed
paper .But the more flamboyant volumes were the exceptions .The decora-