"Bibliomania.".

  • John Taylor Brown
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: "Bibliomania.". Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    BIBLIOMANIA. Nothing, we suspect, is less intelligible to the uninitiated than the sort of pleasure which the inveterate book-collector derives from his peculiar pursuit, or than the intense eager- ness which he often displays in it. One of the fraternity—a man of vast knowledge, and of great power as a thinker and a writer—after having followed the business, as he calls it, from early youth to well-nigh fourscore, lately declared that it had never palled upon him for a single moment.1 Yet, to most persons, this amassing of literary treasures is simply a mania; even Mr. Burton, who ought to know better, has thought proper, in his very pleasant and witty Book-Hunter, to affect the satirical and depreciatory strain; and whether he intended it or not, the impression left on the minds of his readers is, that a collector is a poor lost creature who greatly needs to be taken care of by his friends; an office, by the way, which these same friends (particularly if they happen to belong to the female order) are always very ready to perform. The great Lord Bacon, too, once threatened Sir Thomas Bodley (the founder of the Bodleian), whom he found slow to appre- ciate his new philosophy, with a Cogitation against Libraries, to be added to the Cogitata et Visa. And we all remember Sir Walter's quiet quizzing of the book-collecting race in the mock heroics which he puts into the mouth of Mr. Jonathan 1 Preface to Catalogue of Books, the Property of a Political Economist [J. R. M'Culloch, Esq.], with Critical and Bibliographical Notices. Lond. (privately printed) 1862.