Book Cemetery

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 123, 31 October 1941, Page 5

Book Cemetery

|F you can pass a second-hand bookshop without the sensation of an invisible hand clutching you by the coat collar and pulling you inside, you miss one of the joys of life. Of course you must have an objective; there is,nothing more depressing than to browse aimlessly among rows and rows of books without the slightest idea of what you are looking for. You get that feeling described so vividly by Lord Rosebery when he opened the Mitchell Library of Glasgow, with its aggregation of a quarter of a million volumes on its shelves. "The last of the great orators" (as he has been termed) must have shocked that gathering of 5,000 people when he said: "I feel an intense depression at this enormous aggregation of books, this cemetery of books, because after all, most of them are dead. The percentage of living books is exceedingly small. Some of these folios are so absolutely dead that no human being out of a madhouse would ask for them. In the coming years they will shrug their barren backs at you, appealing as it were for someone to come and take them down, and rescue them from the collection of dust, and from the neglect into which they have deservedly fallen. Think how many baffled ambitions, disappointed hopes and crushed aspirations are represented on these shelves! I have seen books to-day so large that the present generation cannot handle them, bales of sermons which have given satisfaction to no one but their authors, innumerable volumes of forgotten science, superseded history, and biographies of people whom no one cares about."-(" The Lone Shieling of the Misty Island." A, J. Sinclair, 1ZM, October 19.)