About Me

About Me
I am a bibliophile; an otherwise rational member of the community consumed by the love of books. It gives me pleasure to handle any book that has something important to say; but most of all I cherish rare editions, finely printed texts, beautifully illustrated books, and volumes scarce and unprocurable except by knowledgeable means.

The old leather binding and time-mellowed spines, that cover my floor to ceiling sort of brings a sense of ageless serenity and unruffled calm. I am reminded of the decades past that has merged into centuries since the original owners unpacked the parcels that brought them home. Now they are here with me, collected in years past from the dispersal of libraries that once knew them as freshly printed books, uncut and unopened, waiting their first visit to the binder before the family embrace of book-plate and shelf-mark. They have stood through time quietly awaiting the new reader. A sense of security pervades old books. George Crabbe called them 'The lasting mansions of the dead'. They have become my faithful and trusted friends and intimate companions of my everyday life. To part with any of them disturbs me: to lose them all would translate me to a barren existence and a life lacking its chief intellectual comfort and most relaxing pleasure.

The gradual acquisition of a well-chosen library of first and other important editions of American, Canadian, and English literature, or in the fields of science or the arts, gives a satisfaction that is difficult to equal in any other hobby. The books offered on the shelves and in the catalogs of an antiquarian booksellers assume a personally of their own. You begin to look on certain authors as close friends, and on bindings styles of favorite publishing houses with affection. You gradually become the victim of the least vicious hobbies, and of a pastime that is financially most rewarding.

Book collecting does not need to be a rich man's hobby, or a lucrative investment for those in the six-figure bracket. Everyone, no matter what your income may be, can at least have a shelf or two of their personal favorites in the style of binding in which their original writer would themselves have handled the volumes they created. Not everyone can afford to posses a fine library of several thousand books, but there are still many authors whose first editions can be picked up for small sums, and many subjects in which the collector can acquire all the key volumes before his rivals pick up the trail.

What quicker way do you know of being transported in time than by their smell, that exciting aroma of old paper, book-binder's glue, and printer's ink. Once you have started to form your own private library you will find that the pace will quicken.

The intrinsic value of any collection of books entirely depends on the taste and skill of the person who compiled it. The appreciation and understanding of what is of importance in literature, and specialized knowledge that comes from the intelligent use of works of references and bibliographies covering the fields you wish to explore, are both augmented by reading for pleasure.

Your library reflects your own individual personality. Show a collector of 18th-century poetry an almost complete set of first editions of Charles Dickens in the original cloth or Ernest Hemingway, or W.H. Ainsworth, or Benjamin Franklin, or any literary figure, great or small, whose work lies outside the magic circle of poets from the reign of Queen Anne to that of the turn of the century, and you will have difficulty in evincing any but polite interest. Good books are pleasurable things, whatever they cost, but much of the enjoyment in book collecting is derived from steering one's own course. For then you pit your taste and knowledge against the rest of the world, and your library will mirror your own identity, not that of the professional bookseller who made it for you.