Books and Bookmen

Name: Books and Bookmen
Author: Ian Maclaren

by Ian Maclaren

Pages: about 32
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 35 min at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 20 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Transcribed from the 1912 James Nisbet & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
THEY cannot be separated any more than sheep and a shepherd, but I am minded to speak of the bookman rather than of his books, and so it will be best at the outset to define the tribe.
It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has many books, for he may be a book huckster or his books may be those without which a gentleman’s library is not complete. And in the present imperfect arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few books, since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them. It is the foolishness of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and his fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-halfpenny edition. The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is apropos. As he was to preside at a lecture I was delivering he had in his courtesy invited me to dinner, which was excellent, and as he proposed to take the rôle that night of a man who had been successful in business, but yet allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, he desired to create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with a certain imposing air that we should visit what he called “my library.” Across the magnificence of the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in the rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean liner. “There,” he said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, “what do you think of that?”

A short sample. Read the whole book

Books and Bookmen

From the opening

More to read