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Updated: June 9, 2025
The chief interest of many of my readers is avowedly books; they may, they probably do, profess other interests, but they are primarily "bookmen," and when one is a bookman one is a bookman during about twenty-three and three-quarter hours in every day.
"It's not so bad as it looks," he said, pointing it out; "but then," he added, with a smile half sad and half humorous, "there are not many stars to be seen from Tichborne Street." It was a touching characteristic of the type of bookman to which Mr. Tipping belonged, that the astronomy from which he was reading by no means embodied the latest discoveries.
He is much indebted to a London publisher for a very careful edition of the Spectator, and still more to that good bookman, Mr. Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction.
A change of air might cure him, as for instance twenty years' residence on an American ranch, but even then on his return the disease might break out again: indeed the chances are strong that he is really incurable. Last week I saw such a case the bookman of the second generation in a certain shop where such unfortunates collect.
The bookman has a series of love affairs before he is captured and settles down, say, with his favourite novel, and even after he is a middle-aged married man he must confess to one or two book friendships which are perilous to his inflammable heart.
Not so does the genuine bookman form his library. The genuine bookman begins by having specific desires. His study of authorities gives him a demand, and the demand forces him to find the supply. He does not let the supply create the demand. Such a state of affairs would be almost humiliating, almost like the parvenu who calls in the wholesale furnisher and decorator to provide him with a home.
"I am a bookman," was Lowell's proudest boast not only a writer of books, but a mighty reader of books; and he is one of the most significant figures in American letters. So we come to the man who measures up more nearly to the stature of a great poet than any other American Edgar Allan Poe.
Again and again, he had said to himself: "How could I have been such a fool? a journalist, a bookman, a lover of research, professing to have the open mind which should be the condition of every man of my trade, and yet never to have studied my Bible, never to have sought to know what all the startling events of the past decade, pointed to.
I thought of my old friend again not so very long ago, when I read the account that the most brilliant of modern German classicists gives of his encounter with a French schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, and of the heated discussion that ensued about the comparative merits of Euripides and Racine. The bookman is not always killed in a man by service in the field.
This work is indispensable to a bookman. Personally, I owe it much.
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