Bookishness

“ Of course he may have been allowed to dust the books in the library too. Anyhow, during his period of service in that household he contrived to amass an enormous quantity of more or less useless book-learning. He is regarded hereabouts as quite a savant. His erudition makes him respected by those who have none, and his library of miscellaneous rubbish gives him the status of a man of property.”
“It’s not all rubbish. He has a Shakespeare and a Southey, at least. ”

“ RUSKIN'S LIBRARY
In any strange house, while you wait for your host or hostess, how much you gather of their tastes and ways from the books on the table and in the shelves! You cannot help noticing either the presence or the absence of literature, and you do not need to open the volumes to guess what sort of reading the good people like. ”

“ WHAT are the books that tempt? Are they the old, familiar volumes, old friends in old clothes—well-worn editions of the classics? Or are they those same old friends decked in rich and fanciful bindings? I am acquainted with a book-lover who confesses that he has no taste for the fanciful modern reprint. You may show him Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Hunt, or Jefferies, or Stevenson in the richest of binding, and tempt him not. He is not, he declares, to be caught that way. As well might the reader go arrayed in frills and furbelows to a masculine friend and expect to be received with decorum. ”

“ Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. ”

“ Of the term now used, the best explanation I can give is this, that in the selection of books—other questions, such as rarity or condition, being set aside or equally balanced—a general preference is to be given to those which are the most witless, preposterous, and in every literary sense valueless—which are, in short, rubbish. What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the title of "The Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort in the choice of a Library." ”

“ A man like that one today would have money—a pocketbook. Whilst he was unconscious, look you, we would take it. One of us would bring it up here, here where there are a hundred hiding-places, in the ground, the trees, the cracks of the earth. A pocketbook which is lost, is lost. ”

“ If any one feels an interest in the process of exhaustion, by which such treasures were reduced to rarity, he may easily witness it in the débris of a circulating library; and perhaps he will find the phenomenon in still more distinct operation at any book-stall where lie heaps of school-books, odd volumes of novels, and a choice of Watts's Hymns and Pilgrim's Progresses. ”

“ In book-buying you not infrequently condone an extravagance by the reflection that this particular purchase will be a good investment, sordidly considered: that you are not squandering income but sinking capital. But you know all the time that you are lying. Once possessed, books develop a personality: they take on a touch of warm human life that links them in a manner with our kith and kin. ”

“ The truth is, this work of restoring borrowed volumes to one’s shelves calls for a stout heart. I confess that I am wanting in the necessary qualifications. I have not the courage to speak harshly to a fellow book-lover. So firm is his hold on my affections that I am as wax in his hands. Yet book-lovers to a man agree that the borrower who never repays stands in dire need of correction. ”

“ To deprive such a man as Cotton of the ocular and manual comforts of his library—to suppose that he could be happy in the most splendid drawing room in Europe, without his books—is to suppose what our experience of virtuous bibliomaniacs will not permit us to accede to. ”

“ Once a bookkeeper always a bookkeeper. Wadhams pondered. Fifteen hundred would not suffice to lift him from his estate for more than a few months. It would dribble away in inconsequential luxuries, the mere sweetmeats of pleasure which have no sustenance and leave a sour taste. While he was fretting over his good luck, a new book on Africa appeared at the library. ”

“ The amateur and book-collector, in commencing the foundation of a library, will do well to pause before they adopt a species of binding that will in after years create a feeling of annoyance, and perhaps lead to pecuniary sacrifice. ”

“ So it comes about that the periodical literature is, on the whole, somewhat more scrupulously devout in tone, somewhat more given to laud and dilate upon the traffic of the upper leisure class and to carry on the discussion in the terms and tone imputed to that class, somewhat more prone to speak deprecatingly of the vulgar innovations of modern culture, than the average of the readers to whom it is addressed. ”

“ Wonder not that I, a bookman's son, and at certain periods of my life a bookman myself, though of lowly grade in that venerable class,—wonder not that I should thus, in that transition stage between youth and manhood, have turned impatiently from books. ”

“ But we all have our hobbies. I can pass a bookstall on which I perceive that the ignorance of the bookseller permits him to exhibit now and then rare editions of valuable books at almost no price at all. ”

“ Of this class of workman it may be said quite as aptly as of the poet, that he is born, not made. The usual testimonies to qualification—steadiness, sobriety, civility, intelligence, &c.—may all be up to the mark that will constitute a first-rate book-keeper in the mercantile sense of the term, while they are united in a very dreary and hopeless keeper of books. ”

“ I had never before seen duelling called a noble institution, and I wish I had taken the name of the book. Book-tasting is not necessarily profitless, but it is very stimulating, and makes one hungry for more than he needs for the nourishment of his thinking-marrow. ”

“ Alas! reader, the picturesque is seldom associated with the conveniences or luxuries of life. Wash the peasant-girl’s face and bandoline her hair, she proves but a bad vignette for that most unpicturesque of books—the Book of Beauty. ”

“ But although to what is called the reading public these maxims are as yet, no less in fact than in metaphor, a closed book, its pages have long been a source of profit and delight to some of those who are best able to estimate their value. ”

“ Why, by dabbling in those accursed Annuals, I have become a by-word of infamy all over the kingdom.—Charles Lamb.
The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. ”

“ Then with a nod he replaced book, cigar, and spectacles, and ignored us. We spoke in whispers or not at all as we coasted the high book-shelves lining every part of each wall, except in one corner, where there were several guns, an ivory-handled whip, and a pair of skates. The books were on the whole grim and senatorial. We felt them vaguely—the legal, the historical, and the classical tiers—to be our accusers and judges. There were also many sporting books, many novels, plays, poems, and romances of
“Old loves and wars for ladies done by many a lord.” ”

“ Himself an indefatigable collector of books, the possessor of a library as valuable as it was interesting, a library containing volumes obtained only at the cost of great personal sacrifice, he was in the most active sympathy with the disease called bibliomania, and knew, as few comparatively poor men have known, the half-pathetic, half-humorous side of that incurable mental infirmity. ”

“ But there is something more important than persiflage and gossip—there is the new novel to choose from the circulating library. For in the country the bookstall man is also the librarian and adviser; he not only sells papers but he controls the reading of the neighbourhood. ”

“ When detained on long journeys, in some remote interior tavern, by a storm, or inability to find a conveyance, how keenly, while reading almanacks of the past years, and old fragments of books, found on the dusty shelf of the ordinary, have I felt the value of books, as a perfect cure for the impatience of such a position. In this state of privation and intellectual fasting, we master dull and tiresome books, which, under other circumstances, we should not have dreamed of reading. ”

“ To read, as a man, the menu that I ate through as a boy, the love-story that I was actor in, the tragedy that I brought about, the debt that I have never paid—how could it profit me? To keep a diary has always seemed to me merely an addition to the ills of life. ”

“ Those ephemeral sheets that flutter from the table into the waste-paper basket, which are something more than mere newspapers and less than magazines, and the magazines themselves, which are more than budgets of gossip and less than books, make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink. Thousands of people are engaged in writing them, and millions in reading them. ”

“ Strange! Aforetime, a book was burnt now and again in the market-place by the common hangman. Was he, I wondered, paid by the hour? I had always supposed the thing quite easy for him—a bright little, brisk little conflagration, and so home. Perhaps other books were less resistant than this one? I began to feel that the critics were more right than they knew. Here was a book that had indeed an intense vitality, and an immense vitality. It was a book that would live—do what one might. ”

“ If any one happens to have an old pocket-book for 1780, a single glance at the plate of fashionable heads for that year will convey a more competent idea of the same than I, unknowing in the terms of art, can produce by the most elaborate description. ”

“ The last and most inappropriate moment for getting up bibliographical lore is that moment when the pressing question is, to buy or not to buy. Master Slender, in the play, learned the difficulties which beset a man whose knowledge is in a book, and whose book is at home upon a shelf. ”

“ Such public mixtures the bookworm, that solitary self-centred individual, must, by reason of his shyness, ever consistently shun. But usher him into the private room of a private house where books, many books, have reposed for many years. ”

“ Always must we remember that the primary object of the bookplate is a reminder to those who borrow. On this score I am disposed to favour those inexpensive modern plates in which are interwoven some dear, familiar scene—a nook or corner of one’s garden, or a beloved scene in one’s native place. If the ruthless borrower has aught of good in him, surely he will be affected by such tender personal associations! But we have seen that the average borrower of books is a strange fellow. ”

“ The old promise had come true. For if any man shall live to see a bookworm, all the volumes on his shelves immediately turn to first editions, signed by the author. But the joyous spasm was too much for the poor scholar. ”

“ We value books in our time, but we do not ornament them so very much, because we would rather have twenty interesting books on our shelves to read by turns, than one precious volume locked up with clasps, and kept in a box only to be taken out on particular occasions ”

“ Governesses and masters at home supplied the necessary book knowledge; and a passion for reading grew up, which made the present of a new book the greatest delight, and our own pocket-money was chiefly spent in buying books. ”

“ It was feelingly said by one of the gentle English essayists last named: "How pleasant is the thought that such lovers of books have themselves become books!" and do so become evermore, beginning and ending with a secluded library shelf, planting the seed of kindly influences close to the noble shade which sheltered them in youth, and under which they slumbered many a summer's day. ”

“ If you find your books accumulating inconveniently, give away a portion of them to some lover of reading, who, less fortunate than yourself, is unable to expend much money with the booksellers.
I have often wondered to see a fair young stranger sitting day after day, idle and listless in the drawing-room of a hotel, when she might have known that there were bookstores in the immediate neighbourhood. ”

“ My first novel has left me with a reputation, a two-years lease of an expensive apartment, a load of debts, an angry wife, a scrap-book filled with favorable reviews, an unsalable manuscript and a prospect of bankruptcy. ”

“ The bookman is indeed perpetually engaged in his form of spring cleaning, which is rearranging his books, and is always hoping to square the circle, in both collecting the books of one department together, and also having his books in equal sizes. ”

“ Some people are supremely happy without books, except the Family Bible, the London Directory, Bradshaw, and a handful of cheap printed paper in book-form, without china, without coins, without anything except tables and chairs. ”

“ Not only months but very often years of tireless perseverance were necessary to make him sell a favorite volume. Equally interesting was that other group which came daily—a group composed of impecunious and peculiarly erratic book lovers, found in book haunts the world over: a poverty-stricken intellectual class, who in filling their minds often forget to provide for their stomachs as well. ”

“ When I praise cheap books and insist on the need for them, people turn round upon me and say, 'Physician, heal thyself! nobody's books are dearer than your own.' Whether his books shall be cheap or not, does not depend wholly upon the author ”

“ The extreme variety of the bookstall is its great attraction, and the chances of netting a rare or interesting book lie, perhaps, not so much in the variety of books displayed as in their general shabbiness. ”