Book One - 2012

A rainy day and last day of my holidays so aimlessly began perusing my library shelves.  A small tatty book, "Bibliophily or Booklove" is first to dip into:  James F Willis was the author; published in 1921 in Boston and New York.  It was originally priced at $1.00.  The dust jacket, although browned with age and torn is still intact.  The dedication is to S.R.C and C.A.L. Loyal and steadfast.

This small book has six chapters and only 83 pages.  Within those, though, are some gems:

" The booklover is the richest and the happiest of men, however humble his station may be: it keeps him from vulgar company and pastimes, and is the most efficacious means for obtaining all the amenities of culture."

"they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato."

"They are not always what the world knows as practical, for spiritual development seldom produces dexterity in the baser organs."

"what food is to the body, books are to the soul"

"little men so often write just to say something; big men never write until they have something to say."

' the common books may afford enjoyment, if we are cheap enough to wish for anything as plebeian as mere enjoyment; but it is only the books called literature - the Great Books- that can enrich our life;: the books that inspire and enforce are far more needful than those that instruct and amuse - a man's book company is an index of his soul."

"they impel us to be and to become, to dare and to do."

" A mere collection of books is not a library - a bookshop is a collection of books.  A library is an organism that develops with the soul of its owner;"

"Newspapers and magazines are mainly idle things for the idle hours of idle people; to read them properly is one of the supreme acts of presence-of-mind.  They are mostly as soulless as the syndicates that publish them, and the chances are ten-to-one that that they shall waste our time or mislead us, or both." (Oh, Rupert Murdoch please read this.)

" It is only the intellectual loafer and the moral paralytic that lolls over the trash and the filth of cheap fiction: nwspapers and magazines have their place in the world: but light-reading has nothing for anybody but distraction, dissipation and debauchery.  Debilitating waste of head and heart in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading in the poisonous exhaltations of book-garbage - this is misuse of reading, the sin of it.  So much of the shallow conceit and the opinionated infallibility which prevails today is attributable quite as much to inferior reading as to the smattering of the school-mills."  (SCHOOL-MILLS!!!! Love it!  Will use it.)

"The public libraries!! When eighty percent of the books they distribute is inferior fiction full of fribbles and oddities and monstrosities, a public library is anything but a public benefit!"

"almost all the public library patrons have weak book-stomachs able to digest nothing stonger than the inspid society novel, and nothing purer than the mud of newspapers and magazines."
 __________________________________________________________________________________

 Ah - I love the sanctimonious tone of this writer; I love his sharp criticisms and his obvious enjoyment of the use of aliteration.  Preacherly in it's content, I could feel his bristle and his indignation as I read it.  Reading is serious business and we'd better not EVER forget it.

Must admit here, that as I grow older, I do enjoy a book that makes me think for four times as long as the time it takes me to read it.

Now - on to the next book!