BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : Collecting Myself : A GENTLE MADNESS: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. <i> By Nicholas Basbanes (Henry Holt: $35; 638 pp.)</i>

Is “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books” any good?

My copy doesn’t pass the B.O. test, but a book dealer would call it “very good in dust wrappers, with some chipping at either end of the backstripe,” and an inkblot on page 221 where my ballpoint leaked. He’d judge it a “first edition review copy with all publicity materials intact.” He’d. . . .

But you meant the words part.

The words part is all right, too, if you go in for that sort of thing. (Not every dealer does.) Few copies will ever smell of close re-reading, but none will stink of careless writing, either. “A Gentle Madness” presents a serviceable history of books and their pursuers from Cicero to Stephen Blumberg, an enterprising guy who managed to plunder half the prestigious academic libraries in this country before a confederate finked on him. If the FBI had had to wait until Blumberg misjudged a book instead of a friend, they might never have caught him.

Blumberg is the closest thing to a fully drawn character in “A Gentle Madness,” and that’s a pity. Author Nicholas Basbanes returns several times to 20th-Century Philadelphia book dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach with evident fondness, quoting his amiable correspondence and invoking his redoubtable reputation, but the man never comes anywhere near alive. Likewise dozens of bibliophiles, -manes, -klepts, -clasts (who destroy books) and -phages (who eat them), most of whom trundle into view, acquire this or that volume, surrender it and disappear.

It might have been fun to follow the books more often, instead of the collectors. Just pick a book or manuscript and follow it from author to collector to executor to dumpster to savior, down through the centuries. This technique would have better served Basbanes’ fundamentally sound thesis: If not for these mostly benign obsessives, many beautiful books and ideas might have wound up kindling something other than the light of learning.

At this point, it’s probably time to turn over all the cards and reveal that I am one of these obsessives. Yes, thanks to a corner of my collection, future scholars won’t have to wonder just what cheesy pseudonymous thrillers Michael Crichton wrote to put himself through medical school back when he could really write, or have to guess which late-20th-Century magazine journalists felt obliged to rattle the potsherds of Thomas Pynchon’s extra-literary life. They’ll know.

Basbanes never takes us inside his own library, although he’s obviously proud of it or he wouldn’t be posing in it on his book jacket. Perhaps that’s what’s missing from his impeccably researched history--some personal sense of the bookman’s neurosis. So as I commend Basbanes’ perfectly informative book to its place on the shelves between Barthelme and--hey, what’s this 1974 Guinness Book of World Records doing here?--I take a moment to consider that Beast With 2,000 Spines, my own book collection.

At what point does a book collection become a library? Existentially, a collection is a library when you start calling it one. By this measure, my library is, unfortunately, still a book collection, and likely to remain so. Around the time it got its own room--and an allowance--I tried calling it a library, really I did. I experimented with eliding the last two syllables, English-style, “li-bury,” as in Cadbury Bar. Naturally, I felt like a fop. Liburies are for people with teakwood ladders on brass wheels. If I ever wanted to roll along from shelf to shelf, I’d need to lay track all over the house, under the bed and out to the garage, till the final plan owed more to Coney Island than to the Levenger’s mail-order catalog for book lovers. Whatever I choose to call it, my book collection continues to give me a sneaky-patrician satisfaction out of all proportion to my investment in it. Readers who don’t collect tend to treat the bibliophile with suspicion, as mourners might regard an embalmer.

But extra shelves are, at best, stopgap measures. Thinking longer-term, I’m currently in preliminary negotiations with the Los Angeles County Library System to buy a decommissioned bookmobile. No more searching for that elusive quotation while stuck in traffic. And think how easy a bookmobile will make donating the collection. No packing crates, no shipping insurance--just pull up to the Huntington and park. Instant wing!

One hitch, though. Unlike those bibliomanes who, sensing death’s (or debt’s) approach, auction or bequeath or cause to be interred beside them their beloved volumes, I have a different plan. When the great “Withdrawn From Circulation” stamp comes hovering above my head, there’ll just be time for one last farewell tour of every book sale in Los Angeles, where I’ll furtively disperse my entire collection back the way I found it, a few at a time, there to flag the next browser’s eye.

So if someday you spy a copy of “A Gentle Madness” on the three-for-a-dollar table, straining, spine skyward, for attention, pick it up. It’s a decent book, and you never know. Maybe it was once a collector’s item.