Marriage and Manuscripts

Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon 1559-1614, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), pp. 26-27:

   [...] in April  [1586] Casaubon married a second wife. Prudent it cannot have been in the middle of the public calamities, when even his poor £10 a year was precarious, to marry a girl of eighteen without fortune. But in times of distress men seek consolation, not welfare, and prudence is in abeyance. And there were many things to recommend the match. The lady had beauty, sense, worth, and her grandfather’s gentleness of disposition. Above all, Florence Estienne was the daughter of the great printer, Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus). Casaubon was naturally attracted to the editor of the Thesaurus, and had probably fallen in love with Estienne’s manuscript collections, before he began to pay his court to the daughter. 

In spite of marrying his daughter, Casaubon never succeeded in gaining full access to Estienne’s library. It is perilous to marry for books.

The Library

BIBLIOTHECA
Ista beata tibi sola est quae ducitur aetas;
   Cum tot docta vides ora vetusta loqui.

THE LIBRARY
Such a blessed library is your life's sole devotion,
   Where you see so many wise and ancient faces speaking.

Notes:
Benedetto Giovio (1471-1545), Disticha, ad Franciscum Iulium Calvum (Basel: apud Io. Frobenium, 1518), p. 50. Benedetto was the brother of the more famous historian and biographer Paolo Giovio. This poem is from a collection  of distichs which was printed along with Ludovico Pittorio's Sacra et satyrica epigrammata. My translation.

'ducitur aetas', cf. 'cui florida ducitur aetas, / Tu quoque pone animos vere monente graves'. Desiderius Erasmus, Poems, trans. by Clarence H. Miller, ed. by Harry Vredeveld, 2 vols (Toronto; London: University of Toronto Press, 1993), I, p. 270 [Poem 106.103-104].   

Félix Vallotton  (1865–1925), The Library (Musée départemental Maurice Denis "The Priory", Wikicommons)

Peking University Library, 1975

Frances Wood, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking: My Part in the Cultural Revolution (London: Slightly Foxed, 2015; 2000), p. 162:

I made progress with the library. Armed with chitties guaranteeing my urgent need to read bad books, I was issued with the works of Chen Duxiu, the first General Secretary of the Communist who became a Trotskyist and a fierce opponent of Mao. The books were stamped 'Negative Teaching Material' and 'To be Used in Criticism'. You could only get books by Zhou Yang, the main spokesman for culture and the arts until 1966, if you made it quite clear that you were aware of his position as a 'Counter-revolutionary Double-dealer'. By now I was running out of things to borrow from the Embassy library, so I was delighted to discover that the western language collections in the University library were unweeded and full of delightful reading matter composed by foreign counter-revolutionary double-dealers. I borrowed first editions of Henry James, once owned by a Peking resident with the interesting name of Mildred ffrench.