Buying Books One Cannot Read

 WHAT the old French officer had delivered upon travelling, bringing Polonius’s advice to his son upon the same subject into my head, and that bringing in Hamlet; and Hamlet, the rest of Shakespeare’s works, I stopped at the Quai de Conti, in my return home, to purchase the whole set.
   The bookseller said he had not a set in the world. Comment! said I; taking one up out of a set which lay upon the counter betwixt us. He said, they were sent him only to be got bound, and were to be sent back to Versailles in the morning to the Count de B—.
   And does the Count de B—, said I, read Shakespeare? C’est un Esprit fort, replied the bookseller.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey & The Journal to Eliza (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1966; 1788), pp. 68-69.

Drinking and Reading

Giovanni Matteo Toscano
‘Petrus Alcionius XCVIII’

Quam vorax dapis heluo fuisti,
Quam meri bromii siticulosus,
Heluo Petre tam vorax librorum
Eras, Castaliae et sititor vndae:
Ut nunquam fueris satur bibendo,
Et nunquam fueris satur legendo:
Sic te Cynthius hinc et inde Bacchus
Suis annumerant, parumque certum est
Cui gratus fueris magis sacerdos.

Yes, you were a voracious glutton for a fine spread,
With quite a thirst, yes, for the riotous god’s own pure wine,
But, Peter, no less voracious a glutton were you
For books, and a thirster after Castalian water:
Just as you were never sated with imbibing,
You were also never sated with reading:
Thus Apollo on the one hand, and Bacchus on the other,
Count you amongst their own, and it is hardly clear
To which of the two you were the more gratifying priest.

Giovanni Matteo Toscano, Peplus italiae (Paris: ex officina Federic Morel, 1578), pp. 59-60. Cited and translated in George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator: Itineraries of Exile, Displacement and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Geneva: Droz, 2003), p. 167.

Book Tips from the 1600s

 BOOKS. AUTHORS.
   I. THE giving a bookseller his price for his books, has this advantage; he that will do it, shall be sure to have the refusal of whatsoever comes to his hands, and so by that means get many things, which otherwise he should never have seen. So it is in giving a bawd her price. 

   II. In buying books or other commodities, ’tis not always the best rule to bid but half so much as the seller asks: witness the country fellow, that went to buy two broad shillings; they asked him three shillings, and he bade them eighteen pence*.

   III. They counted the price of the books (Acts 19. 19) and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver; that is so many sextertii, or so many three halfpence of our money, about three hundred pound sterling.

   IV. Popish books teach and inform what we know; we know we know much out of them. The fathers, church story, schoolmen, all may pass for Popish books; and if you take away them, what learning will you leave? Besides who must be judge? The customer or the writer? If he disallows a book, it must not be brought into the kingdom; then Lord have mercy upon all scholars. These Puritan preachers, if they have anything good, they have it out of Popish books, though they will not acknowledge it, for fear of displeasing the people. He is a poor divine that cannot sever the good from the bad.

   V. ’Tis good to have translations, because they serve as a comment, so far as the judgment of the man goes.

   VI. In answering a book, it is best to be short, otherwise he that I write against will suspect I intend to weary him, not to satisfy him. Besides in being long I shall give my adversary a huge advantage; somewhere or other he will pick a hole.

   VII. In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

   VIII. Quoting of authors is most for matter of fact and then I cite them as I would produce a witness, sometimes for a free expression; and then I give the author his due, and gain myself praise by reading him.

   IX. To quote a modern Dutchman, where I may use a classic author, is as if I were to justify my reputation, and I neglect all persons of note and quality that know me, and bring the testimonial of the scullion in the kitchen.

John Selden, Table talk: being the discourses of John Selden, Esq. (London: printed for Joseph White, 1789; 1689), pp .21-22.

*emended, from peace.

Rub It On the Floor

  Hugo Dyson, on his visits to Oxford from Reading, became a frequent and most welcome interrupter of Warnie Lewis’s mornings: At about half past eleven when I was at work in the front room in College, in burst Dyson in his most exuberant mood. He began by saying that it was such a cold morning that we would have to adjourn almost immediately to get some brandy. I pointed out to him that if he was prepared to accept whiskey as an alternative, it was available in the room. Having sniffed it he observed “it would be unpardonable rudeness to your brother to leave any of this” and emptied the remains of the decanter into the glass. After talking very loudly and amusingly for some quarter of an hour, he remarked airily “I suppose we can't be heard in the next room?” then having listened for a moment, “Oh, it's all right, it's the pupil talking — your brother won’t want to listen to him anyway”. He next persuaded me to walk round to Blackwell’s with him, and here he was the centre of attraction to a crowd of undergraduates. Walking up to the counter he said: “I want a second hand so-and-so’s Shakespeare; have you got one?” The assistant: “Not a second hand one, sir, I’m afraid.” Dyson (impatiently): “Well, take a copy and rub it on the floor, and sell it to me as shop soiled.

Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 54.

Books and Beer on Credit

But the end of my first year [at Oxford] saw me heavily in debt: so many barrels of beer, so many books, shelf upon shelf of them, which had nothing to do with work. At Blackwell’s bookshop credit seemed to a newcomer endless (though they liked a little bit sometimes on account), but drinks were ordered through the college buttery and appeared on battels, as college bills were called (there was no credit given there) [...]

Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London: Slightly Foxed, 2010; 1971), p. 128.

Books and Food Enough

quid sentire putas? quid credis, amice, precari?
sit mihi quod nunc est, etiam minus, et mihi vivam
quod superest aevi, si quid superesse volunt di;
sit bona librorum et provisae frugis in annum
copia, neu fluitem dubiae spe pendulus horae.

What do you think I think about? What do you think, my friend, that I pray for? That I may keep what I have or even less, and to live for myself for whatever part of life remains for me, if the gods will it to remain; may I have an ample supply of books and provisions to last through the year; and may I not waver, hanging on to the hope of the fickle hour.

Horace, Epistles, I.18.108-110. My translation.

Oxford Bookshops

That they are pleasing, all who ever buy
In Oxford shops can surely testify:
Of all the shops I name or do not name
I and their other buyers can make claim
That, of our purchased parcels laid in pile
Each one was rendered friendly, with a smile,
A charming word or jest that gave a grace
Of silver to the penny’s commonplace,
So that a spirit companied the thing
Borne in the paper package tied with string,
So that it seemed a thing not bought and sold
But given, out of friendship and worth gold.

It is a pleasant pastime to go eyeing
Where things attract and tempt you into buying;
The dustless shining things which subtly wait
Yourself, the willing fish for this the bait.
Among these verses I have written down
The fruits of shopping about Oxford town,
Each with the happy memory of faces
Who greet me friendly at the customed places,
And of the streets in which the windows shine,
That are the magnets to these friends of mine;
For here, new pleasures purchasers attend,
They find the looked-for treasure and a friend.

I seek few treasures, except books, the tools
Of those celestial souls the world calls fools.
Happy the morning giving time to stop
An hour at once in Basil Blackwell’s shop,
There, in the Broad, within whose booky house
Half England’s scholars nibble books or browse.
Where’er they wander blessed fortune theirs,
Books to the ceiling, other books upstairs.
Books, doubtless in the cellar, and behind
Romantic bays where iron ladders wind,
And in odd nooks sometimes in little shelves,
Lintot’s and Tonson’s calf-bound dainty twelves.

From John Masefield, ‘Shopping in Oxford’ in Poems by John Masefield (London: William Heinemann, 1946; 1923), pp. 870-871.

An Old Bachelor’s Books

 The rest of the pretty sitting-room—looking into the orchard, and all covered over with dancing tree-shadows—was filled with books. They lay on the ground, they covered the walls, they strewed the table. He was evidently half ashamed and half proud of his extravagance in this respect. They were of all kinds—poetry and wild weird tales prevailing. He evidently chose his books in accordance with his own tastes, not because such and such were classical or established favourites.

Mrs. Gaskell, Cranford (London: W. Foulsham, n.d.; 1851-1853) p. 35.

Physical Books and Music

Lavinia Greenlaw, The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further (London: faber & faber, 2024), p. 193:

Books and music no longer have to be integrated into the furnishing of a room because they do not have to be visible. What you read or listen to is no longer automatically seen. Does this make books and records less potent signifiers of taste? Do we have to talk more about what we read or listen to because no one will notice?

The Book Collector

De inutilibus libris

Primus in excelsa teneo quod nave rudentes
Stultivagosque sequor comites per flumina vasta
Non ratione vacat certa sensuque latenti.
Congestis etenim stultus confido libellis,
Spem quoque nec parvam collecta volumina praebent.
Calleo nec verbum, nec libri sentio mentem.
Attamen in magno per me servantur honore,
Pulueris et cariem plumatis tergo flabellis.
Ast ubi doctrinae certamen voluitur, inquam,
Aedibus in nostris librorum culta supellex
Eminet. et chartis vivo contentus opertis,
Quas video ignorans, iuvat et me copia sola.

On Useless Books

It is not without good reason and good sense, that I sit in the most conspicuous part of the ship [of fools], and follow my foolish braying companions across the wide oceans. For I am the fool who relies on owning heaps of books, even though possessing such an assembly of books does not in itself supply even a shred of hope. Yet these books are preserved by me in good condition. I wipe off the decay of dust with feather dusters. But when people go on about learning, I say that the collection of books in my house is preeminent. And I live context with the books stowed away where I can see them. Ignorant of their contents, merely possessing a large pile pleases me.

Nina Hartl, Die “Stultifera navis”: Jakob Lochers Übertragung von Sebastian Brants “Narrenschiff”, 2 vols (Münster: Waxmann, 2001), II. pp. 50. My translation.

True Browsers

 A bookseller, from whom I had been buying for nearly forty years, and with whom I had grown old, told me, shortly before he closed down his shop, that the nature of customers had changed over the years. True browsers like me, who were content to spend two or three hours among the dust to find something of whose existence they previously had had no inkling, but which, by a process of elective affinity, aroused their interest and even sparked a passion, were few and were old. In so far as young people came into his shop at all, they came to enquire whether he had such and such a book, usually required reading for some course or other; and if he had not, they left immediately, having no further interest in his stock. Their need for the book in question must have been urgent, since it was available online for delivery next day; they must have been late with an assignment. So if youth were the future, the future, at least for second-hand booksellers with shops, was bleak.

Anthony Daniels, ‘The digital challenge, I: Loss & gain, or the fate of the book’, The New Criterion, 31 (November 2012), p. 4.

Don't you ever mind?

“Don't you ever mind,” she asked suddenly, “not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (London: Virago Press, 1990; 1905). p. 16.

Families in Bookshops

Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops (Boston: David R. Godine, 2020), p. 17.

Before I had a family of my own, I was deeply resentful of young families coming into the shop. I make great efforts to keep the shop clean, tidy and well organised. Nobody wants sticky-fingered children getting stuck into shelves, particularly when they contain rare and valuable books. Now, though, I understand. I understand both that there is nothing you can do to stop children behaving the way that they do and that their parents still want to have a tiny dose of culture in a world of nappies, Peppa Pig and vomit. I understand their reasons for bringing their children into a bookshop and leaving them in a corner so that they might escape for a minute or two and stumble across an unknown John Buchan title, or a paperback copy of Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve—a book so short, so perfect and so digestible that it might as well have been written for parents of young children, whose only opportunity to read comes in the precious seconds between the wipe of an arse and a feed.

Every Book By Its Scent

 I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years-never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare-it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand. For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; 1903), p. 29.