Sales catalogue: Bowes & Bowes

Date:
November 1933
Reference:
WA/HMM/CM/Sal/3/19
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sales catalogue: Bowes & Bowes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/56 page 3
    INTRODUCTION BY HUGH WALPOLE you give a part of yourself. In giving a book you may show exactly what you think of a friend, you may tell them much more subtly than in any words how much they mean to you, and by giving them just this book you are informing them that you want them to share your own most intimate thoughts and desires; and no other Christmas present can have quite this intimacy, if it is intimacy that you wish. W sou: you give a book as a Christmas present to anybody Or perhaps you are thinking to please them without any con- sideration as to what your own relationship to them may be. This is, maybe, a finer and more unselfish way. Or, better than this again, you want to lead them along the road which you think they would like to follow, but have never yet considered; you haven't known them very long, they have told you that incredible untruth “that they have no time for reading,’ but you have noticed in them a certain almost unconscious perception of beauty, a half- bewildered interest in some stray essay. Or perhaps you're hitting out in the dark; you have met some- body once or twice who attracts you strangely, you would like to know him or her a little better, you can venture to give a book when a present of another kind would seem too bold and too marked. You want to see whether they will like the thing that you yourself care for, and you send them just what you would wish to have. And then what excitement when you receive the acknowledge- ment: “How did you know so marvellously my taste, how could you have told?” ‘There is promise here of an eternal friendship. But in any case when you give books as presents, you give something that will last for ever. With other presents time and taste may steal from their flavour, but a book, even if you tire of it yourself, passes on from one hand to another; it may lie neglected on the shelf for years and then suddenly, caught by some wandering eye, give inspiration that may change a nation’s history. Best of all, books carry their own purposes with them; they know what they have to do. Never fancy that a book is dead matter in the house where it lies; if you have given it because you wish to send happiness with it, there is no end to the rich rewards that it will scatter around it; but if you give a book because you can’t think what else to give, because you want to pay little for some- Three
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