Explore "Confessions of a Book-Lover" by E. Walter Walters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. -- BACON.
WHAT are the books that tempt? Are they the old, familiar volumes, old friends in old clothes -- well-worn editions of the classics? Or are they those same old friends decked in rich and fanciful bindings? I am acquainted with a book-lover who confesses that he has no taste for the fanciful modern reprint. You may show him Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Hunt, or Jefferies, or Stevenson in the richest of binding, and tempt him not. He is not, he declares, to be caught that way. As well might the reader go arrayed in frills and furbelows to a masculine friend and expect to be received with decorum. This friend of mine, I say, is as contemptuous of the modern, richly-bound classic as of any other form of foppery. He insists on meeting his friends, whether it be in print or in the flesh, in unaffected, homely attire.