Little Literary Lights; Personal Preferences in Art, Literature, Flowers, Music - Livres de poche

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AMONG MY BOOKS LOVE my books. They have afforded me so much pleasure and real enjoyment in life that I would not part with my taste for reading for all the millions of a Rockefeller. Books are read for various purposes?information, entertainment, inspiration or relaxation. They are a mental panacea for all the ills to which flesh is heir; in leisure, traveling, sickness or sorrow?there is cheer and solace to be found in some volume. It is with keen satisfaction that I look back and think of the numberless hours spent in their perusal and browsing in old shops?with what delight I always took up a fresh tome and how gratified if it proved worthy of preservation. The one thing that grieved me most about them was when some good friend would borrow and fail to return a copy I had read and, perhaps, marked and valued beyond any other that could be purchased. I, somehow, always wanted to retain the special book I had read. It became companionable, sort of reverential with the thrill of possession and personal to me. There was a friendly bond offamiliarity established and I could identify passages easily that had interested me, whereas a new one was not the same. People who do not care specially for books cannot understand this. A book to them is either for reference or something to devour and finish as soon as possible and then cast aside. It is not now necessary to purchase twenty volumes to obtain the one particular copy you want. "Sets" are no longer fashionable as shelf decorations, which is fortunate, as there is no author whose work as an entirety is worth reading. Apropos of this, Ambrose Bierce once told me that when in London, the publishers kept after him for material all the time. He said they would print anything he offered, even his laundry list if he ha...