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Updated: June 9, 2025
The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is apropos.
I say that if daily events and scenes do not constantly recall and utilise the ideas and emotions contained in the books which you have read or are reading; if the memory of these books does not quicken the perception of beauty, wherever you happen to be, does not help you to correlate the particular trifle with the universal, does not smooth out irritation and give dignity to sorrow then you are, consciously or not, unworthy of your high vocation as a bookman.
For him there are no hindrances of weather, for if the day be sunshine he taketh his pleasure in a garden, and if the day be sleet of March the fireside is the dearer, while there is a certain volume Payne's binding, red morocco, a favourite colour of his and the bookman reads Don Quixote with the more relish because the snowdrift is beating on the window.
An old quatrain gives us a list of some of the parts he played when in the towns of his enemies "He is a carpenter, he is a turner. My nursling is a bookman. He is selling wine and hides Where he sees a gathering."
Certainly the Cavalier predominated in him, the type to which he belonged being of the noble one "of which the Elizabethan age produced so many examples the man of action who was also the man of letters; the man of letters who was also a man of action; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much bookishness, nor coarse and dull by too little; not a doer who is dumb, not a speech-maker who cannot do; the knowledge that comes of books, widened and freshened by the knowledge that comes of experience; the literary sense fortified by common sense; the bashfulness and delicacy of the scholar hovering as a finer presence above the forceful audacity of the man of the world; at once bookman, penman, swordsman, diplomat, sailor, courtier, orator.
Presently I heard the tramping of feet along the passage, and then the door was pushed open and Cornelys Jensen stood in the doorway and stared at me. I lifted my eyes and stared back at him. 'This is a wise way of passing the time, he said with a sneer. The tone of his voice galled me, and I answered him angrily, perchance rashly. 'I am no bookman, I said.
The moment has now come to inform you plainly that a bookman is, amongst other things, a man who possesses many books. A man who does not possess many books is not a bookman.
Across the magnificence of the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in the rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean liner. "There," he said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, "what do you think of that?"
While other books are like the humble craft which ply from place to place along the coast, this book is as a stately merchantman which compasses the great waters and returns with a golden argosy. The subject of the book does not enter into the matter, and on subjects the bookman is very catholic, and has an orthodox horror of all sects. He does not require Mr.
By laying out the sum of sixpence a day for three years you may become the possessor of a collection of books which, for range and completeness in all branches of literature, will bear comparison with libraries far more imposing, more numerous, and more expensive. I have mentioned the question of discount. This work is indispensable to a bookman. Personally, I owe it much.
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