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With a movable house, such as the canal-boat would be, you could always go off and leave your family in perfect safety." "How about safety in a storm?" asked the Bibliomaniac. "Safety in a storm?" echoed the Idiot. "That seems an absurd sort of a question to one who knows anything about canal-boats.
An actor or a great preacher becomes only a name after his death, but the architect who builds a cathedral or a fine public building really erects a monument to his own memory." "He does if he can build it so that it will stay up," said the Bibliomaniac. "I think you, however, are better off as you are.
A circumstantial history of this memorable sale was written by Dibdin the bibliomaniac. For Walpole, with all his cleverness, is a man one cannot love; and as for the bibliographical Duke, he evidently thought more of a rare edition or a unique copy than of all the charms of wit, poetry, or eloquence. I suspect that a splendid binding would please him more than a splendid passage.
"Woe betide," says Dibdin, "the young bibliomaniac who sets his heart upon Breton's Flourish upon Fancie and Pleasant Toyes of an Idle Head, 1557, 4to; or Workes of a Young Wyt trussed up with a Fardell of Pretty Fancies!! Threescore guineas shall hardly fetch these black-letter rarities from the pigeon-holes of Mr Thorpe. I lack courage to add the prices for which these copies sold."
In the dialogues, not always the most entertaining, of Dibdin's Bibliomania, there is this short passage: "'I will frankly confess, rejoined Lysander, 'that I am an arrant bibliomaniac that I love books dearly that the very sight, touch, and mere perusal 'Hold, my friend, again exclaimed Philemon; 'you have renounced your profession you talk of reading books do bibliomaniacs ever read books?"
It couldn't possibly cost more than a million of dollars to erect such a hotel, could it?" "No," said the Idiot. "And that is cheap alongside some of the hotels they are putting up nowadays." "It could be built on less than four hundred acres of ground, too, I presume?" said the Bibliomaniac, with a wink at the Doctor. "Certainly," said the Idiot, meekly.
Or else the two would spend hours nay, days, shut up together in the Castle Library, the beautiful octagon room, with its painted ceiling, and its eight walls lined from floor to roof with empty shelves, to plan the filling of which was the delight of the minister's life, since, but for his poor parish and his large family, Mr. Cardross would have been a thorough bibliomaniac.
"I know, dear M. Tabaret, that he must have money. I am acquainted with an illustrious bibliomaniac who may be able to read, but who is most certainly unable to sign his own name." "This is very likely. I, too, can read; and I read all the books I bought. I collected all I could find which related, no matter how little, to the police.
He was believed, moreover, to know the habitat of all the rare books in the world; and according to the well-known anecdote he replied to the Grand Duke, who asked for a particular volume: 'The only copy of this work is at Constantinople, in the Sultan's library, the seventh volume in the second book-case, on the right as you go in. He has been despised as 'a man who lived on titles and indexes, and whose very pillow was a folio. Dibdin declared that Magliabecchi's existence was confined to 'the parade and pacing of a library'; but, as a matter of fact, the old bibliomaniac lived in a kind of cave made of piles and masses of books, with hardly any room for his cooking or for the wooden cradle lined with pamphlets which he slung between his shelves for a bed.
You are in reality commending those who refrain from criminal practice, instead of delighting those who are fond of departing from the paths of Christianity by giving them notoriety." "But I fail to see in what respect Mr. Pedagog and I are essential to your scheme," said the Bibliomaniac. "I must confess to some curiosity on my own part on that point," added the School-Master.
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