Adventures with Books and Autographs (Paperback)

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: BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS Of the making of books about books there is no end. This epigram occurred to me suddenly while sitting on the edge of a coal-scuttle trying to write a sonnet to the Garden of Eden. We have it from no less an authority than my friend Tom Kennedy that the sonnet is the hardest form of poetry to write, and certain 'tis that the coal-scuttle is no rocking chair, so why not let the Garden of Eden go unsung? A novel thought, and rather pleasing to me in my present mood. The sonnet market is a narrow one at best, and George E. Wood- berry is quite capable of supplying all it can absorb, so I heed not unwillingly the voice of my control and turn to prate of bookly books. Moods are far more reliable than conscious choice, any day. In the first place, do not imagine that I am going to call the roll of all the books about books that have ever been written. Burton's Book Hunter and Lang's Letters to Dead Authors are well known to the retail trade and need no further exploitation. The former is printed in such fine type that I cannot get the hang of it ? it is like trying to hear a person on the telephone when the typewriter is going. Format is not literature, but it has much to do with making literature appreciable. Without a proper format, literature is like a superb landscape presented to a blind man. It takes eyes to see it, and the better the sight, the better the view. This leads some into the error that good format is all, so we find collectors of specimens of fancy printing, of bindings, of books in languages they cannot read. All very well as a way to satisfythe collecting passion, but these men are not bookmen ? they are only half-bookmen. They have mistaken the means for the end. A good book, like a good man, must measure up to the rule, Mens sana in corpo...