To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books.

Well, I’ve always read in bed, in early years by candlelight, succeeded by lamplight, gaslight, and now electric light, and I’ll probably be found dead there with some ponderous tome or book of poems on...

A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single...

It doesn’t matter if I’m only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months’ supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it...

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company...