The Man Who Burned Books FOR HIM THE LIBRARY represented a Pierian spring, that mataphorica source of knowledge and inspiration. He drew deeply there, quelling his intellectual insecurities and nourishing his fanatic ambitions.He read voraciously, at least one book per night, sometimes more, so he claimed. "When one gives one also has to take," he once said, "and I take what I need from books." He ranked Don Quixote,along with Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Gulliver's Travels,among the great works of world literature. "Each of them is a grandiose idea unto itself," he said. In Robinson Crusoehe perceived "the development of the entire history of mankind." Don Quixotecaptured "ingeniously" the end of an era.

He owned illustrated editions of both books and was especially impressed by Gustave Dore's romantic depictions ofCervantes's delusion-plagued hero. He also owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Muller as part of a series intended to make great literature available to the general public. Volume six includes As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida. The entire set is bound in hand-tooled Moroccan leather with a gold-embossed eaglevflanked by his initials on the spine. He considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller in every respect. While Shakespeare had fueled his imagination on the protean forces of the emerging British empire, these two Teutonic playwright-poets squandered their talent on stories ofmidlife crises and sibling rivalries. Why was it, he once wondered, that the German Enlightenment produced Nathan the Wise, the story of the rabbi who reconciles Christians, Muslims, and Jews, while it had been left to Shakespeare to give the world The Merchant of Veniceand Shylock? He appears to have imbibed his Hamlet. "To be or not to be" was a favorite phrase, as was "It is Hecuba to me.

" He was especially fond of Julius Caesar. In a 1926 sketchbook he drew a detailed stage set for the first act of the Shakespeare tragedy with sinister facades enclosing the forum where Caesar is cut down. "We will meet again at Philippi," he threatened an opponent on more than one occasion, plagiarizing the spectral warning to Brutus after Caesar's murder. He was said to have reserved the Ides ofMarch for momentous decisions. He kept his Shakespeare volumes in the second-floor study of his alpine retreat in southern Germany, along with a leather edition of another favorite author, the adventure novelist Karl May. "The first Karl May that I read was The Ride Across the Desert," he once recalled. "I was overwhelmed! I threw myself into him immediately which resulted in a noticeable decline in my grades." Later in life, he was said to have sought solace in Karl May the way others did in the Bible.

He was versed in the Holy Scriptures, and owned a particularly handsome tome with Worte Christi,or Words of Christ,embossed in gold on a cream-colored calfskin cover that even today remains as smooth as silk. He also owned a German translation ofHenry Ford's anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, and a 1931 handbook on poison gas with a chapter detailing the qualities and effects ofprussic acid, the homicidal asphyxiant marketed commercially as Zyklon B. On his bedstand, he kept a well-thumbed copy of Wilhelm Busch's mischievous cartoon duo Max and Moritz. WALTER BENJAMIN ONCE SAID that you could tell a lot about a man by the books he keepshis tastes, his interests, his habits. The books we retain and those we discard, those we read as wel.