A small love confession to books and literature. Do you live in fear that your bookshelf might fall and crush you while you sleep? Does the excessive accumulation of books endanger the very existence of your family?

Do you organize your books according to their subject, language, author, publication date, shape, or perhaps by a completely different criterion that only you know? Can one place side by side on a shelf two authors who were mortal enemies while they were alive?

These and many other problems are what bibliophiles are called to solve, the last remnants of a species that tends to disappear. Those who, besides the passion for possessing books, also want to read them.

Libraries are living entities that reflect the complexity of our inner world. They often end up creating a labyrinth from which, much to our great but dangerous enjoyment, we may never escape.

In this small treatise on the art of coexisting with an exceedingly large number of books, among others, Pessoa appears, trying to become a librarian, Matisse who applies for "guardian of the poor's rights," or even Captain Ahab and the mystery of the leg that Moby Dick bit off.

In reality, the tens of thousands of pages that occupy our shelves are inhabited by living ghosts, which, should we encounter them on our path, will never leave us again.

"Bonnet, as a scholar, possesses something of Pico della Mirandola, a will to embrace the world, to conquer it through these fragile but essentially immortal rectangular paper objects." Jean-Claude Perrier, Livres Hebdo, 5.9.2008