Books & Reading Quotes

“For forty-five dollars I could pay for nine years' subscription to the Mercantile Library, containing all the good reading of the present day and all the standard works of the past. But I rather like to have the books, and to feel that they are my own.”

“I do not sell reefers to my young customers, but I do something almost as reprehensible — I keep "series" books on my shelves. These are books, for example, the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, today's equivalents to all the admirable, if two-dimensional, characters who gladdened our youth. They're on the public library informal Index Expurgatorius, and most teachers want their students to read only novels and classics — not such childhood classics as the Bobbsey Twins. The usual objection is that such books are unrealistic, and this is quite true. The heroes are all incredibly upright, forthright, downright, and outright, and the baddies are so bad you can hardly stand it. But if a book can keep one boy or girl off a street corner for an evening, it has served its purpose. I know a good many parents who can't do as much. Once on an experiment, I filled two shelves of a classroom bookcase with comic books and two shelves with fiction. It made quite a contrast — the fresh, colorful folders beside the worn re-bound old books. The incredible monsters and heroes were the obvious favorites, but in the stretch they faded; the old beat-up books won. All the hyperthyroid whoop-de-do seemed to pall after a while. I'm willing to let my library patrons work up to the classics, starting wherever they want to — even with series books, loathed as they are by most librarians.”

“No doubt most of you think biography dull reading. You would much rather sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a story is? It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography.”

“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

“She found herself positively quizzing her own monomania upon the subject of buying books and peeping at the titles of the great miscellaneous ill-arranged mass of books, the multitude of dusky-looking old tomes with a copious sprinkling of fresh-looking new ones, that in one way or another seemed to occupy every part of the room.”

“It is the etiquette of book collectors to respect the book plates of previous owners.”

“I always pity a fine old volume which has fallen into poor company, and sometimes buy it, even if I do not want it, that it may find itself once more among its peers.”