Through the Magic Door by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room / which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with / it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing / company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal / into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. / You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. / There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass / your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to / hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. / Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not / that familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul / embalmed in cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer's ink. Each / cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The / personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as / their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at / your command.

It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the / miraculous good fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were / suddenly to learn that Shakespeare had returned to earth, and that he / would favour any of us with an hour of his wit and his fancy. How / eagerly we would seek him out! And yet we have him-the very best of / him-at our elbows from week to week, and hardly trouble ourselves to / put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter what mood a man may be / in, when once he has passed through the magic door he can summon the / world's greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be thoughtful, / here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here are the masters of / fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can signal to any one of / the world's great story-tellers, and out comes the dead man and holds / him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such good company that one may / come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing / danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and / our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand / romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, / soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race. But / best of all when the dead man's wisdom and the dead man's example give / us guidance and strength and in the living of our own strenuous days.