I came across a most
unusual book. It had no author, editor,
or translator, but it did have notes and an index of nearly 30 pages. The
Book Lovers’ Anthology found its way to publication when compiled by the
Bodliean Library at the University of Oxford.
So we have no plot, no pictures, no characters – except for the thoughts
and fancies of many noteworthy literary figures dating back to the ancient
Greeks. Therefore, all I can do is offer
some tempting tidbits to make you smile, laugh, and occasionally groan.
In a letter to Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey wrote, “Talk of the happiness of getting a
great prize in the lottery! What is that
to opening a box of books! The joy upon
lifting up the cover must be something like what we shall feel when Peter the
Porter opens the doors upstairs, and says, ‘Please do walk in, sir.’ That I shall never be paid for my time and
labour according to the current value of time and labour, is tolerably
certain; but if anyone should offer me
£10,000 to forgo that labour, I should bid him and his money go to the devil,
for twice the sum could not purchase me half the enjoyment. It will be a great delight to me in the next
world, to take a fly and visit these old worthies, who are my only society
here, and to tell them what excellent company I found them here at the lakes of
Cumberland, two centuries after they had been dead and turned to dust. In plain truth, I exist more among the dead
than the living, and think more about them, and, perhaps, feel more about them”
(4).
Not all the contributors
are well-known. C.C. Colton, and English
Vicar, wrote, “We should choose our books as we would our companions, for their
sterling and intrinsic merit” (6). From
this side of the pond, Washington Irving wrote in his Sketch Book, “The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet
eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season
of adversity” (9). Ralph Waldo Emerson
notes, “It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best
books. They impress us with the
conviction that one nature wrote, and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great
English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy –
with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of
all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our
surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred
years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had
wellnigh thought and said” (26).
 |
| Bodleian Library, Oxford, England |
Robert Lowe, Lord
Sherbrooke spoke at the Croyden Science and Art Schools in 1869. He exhorted the students to, “Cultivate above
all things a taste for reading. There is
no pleasure so cheap, so innocent, and so remunerative as the real, hearty
pleasure and taste for reading. It does
not come to everyone naturally. Some
people take to it naturally, and others do not, but I advise you to cultivate
it, and endeavor to promote it in your minds.
In order to do that, you should read what amuses you and pleases
you. You should not begin with difficult
works, because, if you do, you find the pursuit dry and tiresome. I would even say to you, read novels, read
frivolous books, read anything that will amuse you and give you a taste for
reading” (35). I have given this exact
same advice to my students, who – in increasing numbers – do not read.
So thank you
Emerson, and Voltaire, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare,
Dickens, Swift, Laurence Sterne, Milton, Tennyson, Thackery, and many dozens
more. The Book Lovers’ Anthology: A Compendium of Writing about Books,
Readers & Libraries compiled by the Bodliean Library in Oxford, England
should not be read like a novel. Browse
through and zero in on a favorite writer.
Open the volume to random pages and find all the wonders and delights of
reading and books you share with these giants of literature. 5 stars.
--Chiron, 5/10/15
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