Quotes by Munson Havens

“I find it necessary to confine my purchases strictly to books. My me! Yes, strictly to books.”

“Bookshops are the most charming of all shops because they relate themselves so intimately to their visitors. Mr. Rowlandson's had stairs worn by the footfalls of four generations of book-hunters. Against the background of his overflowing shelves, with his old-fashioned clothes, his stooping shoulders, his iron-gray hair, and his firm, tender, and melancholy face,—you will never visit his shop without wishing to frame him as he stands, and set him in the window, among the other rare old prints. Not that all the books in his shop are old; the moderns are there, too. But these newer books are the minority. The composed, brown calf bindings give the shop its tone,—and its faint odor, too; a cultivated taste, the liking for that odor of old books.”