unread books

The art of tsundoku, which made you buy books that you wouldn't necessarily read, but that you just had to have. To have them there, not reading them, but so you were able to read other books in peace. [445]

—Rodrigo Fresán, The Remembered Past (Open Letter Books, 2022), translated by Will Vanderhyden

what a pity

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."

―Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Harvard Univ. Press, 2000)

incurable and infectious malady

“As you will," said the barber; "but what are we to do with these little books that are left?"

"These must be, not chivalry, but poetry," said the curate; and opening one he saw it was the "Diana" of Jorge de Montemayor, and, supposing all the others to be of the same sort, "these," he said, "do not deserve to be burned like the others, for they neither do nor can do the mischief the books of chivalry have done, being books of entertainment that can hurt no one."

"Ah, senor!" said the niece, "your worship had better order these to be burned as well as the others; for it would be no wonder if, after being cured of his chivalry disorder, my uncle, by reading these, took a fancy to turn shepherd and range the woods and fields singing and piping; or, what would be still worse, to turn poet, which they say is an incurable and infectious malady."

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), Chapter VI: “Of the diverting and important scrutiny which the curate and the barber made in the library of our ingenious gentleman”

all things done splendidly

When I first knew [William] Morris nothing could content him but being a monk, and getting to Rome, and then he must be an architect, and apprenticed himself to Street, and worked for two years, but when I came to London and began to paint he threw it all up, and must paint too, and then he must give it up and make poems, and then he must give it up and make window hangings and pretty things, and when he achieved that, he must be a poet again, and then after two or three years of Earthly Paradise time, he must learn dyeing, and lived in a vat, and learned weaving, and knew all about looms, and then made more books, and learned tapestry, and then wanted to smash everything up and begin the world anew, and now it is printing he cares for, and to make wonderfully rich-looking books—and all things he does splendidly—and if he lives the printing will have an end, but not I hope, before Chaucer and the Morte d’Arthur are done; then he’ll do I don’t know what, but every minute will be alive.

—Edward Burns-Jones, c.1890, quoted in Time Remembered‎ (1933) by Frances Horner, p. 14., and in William Morris: Words & Wisdom (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2014)

devouring reader

One first needs a good desire to eat, drink and read. One must want to read a lot, read more, always read. Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: Give us this day our daily hunger

—Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie

memory theatre

What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.

—Nathan Schneider's "The New Memory Theater." The Smart Set (Nov. 19, 2010).

footnotes to the world

There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.

—George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952), Realms of Being (Columbia U. Press, 1940)