ABSTRACT
Transgressions in taste, which Bourdieu defines as gestures that abolish the boundary between “legitimate culture” and the everyday, have in fact always accompanied the modern aesthetic of taste as an ideal at once universal and particular, objective and uncompromisingly subjective. They confer distinction while flouting tradition, opening new areas for the practice of aesthetic expression and judgment. This chapterexamines transgressive moments of cultural practice in the formation of private libraries, materialized canons expressive of the individual tastes of the collectors. Specifically, it looks at libraries Oriental-ornamental, gastronomical, and bibliomaniacal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The three specific case studies include: (1) Joseph Addison’s description, in Spectator no. 37, of a Lady’s Library containing porcelain grotesques and other fantastic décor; (2) the gastronomical library depicted in the frontispiece to Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière’s Almanach des gourmands, the founding text of modern food connoisseurship; and (3) the rag-tag collection of old books, or bibliomaniacal relics, made famous in the essays of Charles Lamb. Here, the literary form of the essay itself emerges as an artistic counterpart to the philosophical essay of taste, guiding the public to social distinction not through reasoned principles but examples, samplings really, that blend culture and consumerism in the belletristic art of judgment.
