Vincent Starrett > Quotes

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.”
― Vincent Starrett

“Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.”
― Vincent Starrett

“But there can be no grave for Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson...Shall they not always live in Baker Street? Are they not there this moment, as one writes? Outside, the hansoms rattle through the rain, and Moriarty plans his latest devilry. Within, the sea-coal flames upon the hearth and Holmes and Watson take their well-won case...So they still live for all that love them well; in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

“It is possible that the most misunderstood man upon earth is the collector of books…”
― Vincent Starrett, Penny Wise & Book Foolish

“Only those things the heart believes are true.”
― Vincent Starrett

“I hold a theory that, sooner or later, if a man but live long enough, certain books destined for his peculiar delight will find him, however obscure they or he may be.”
― Vincent Starrett, Books and Bipeds

“Every new search is a voyage to the Indies, a quest for buried treasure, a journey to the end of the rainbow; and whether or not at the end there shall be turned up a pot of gold or merely a delightful volume, there are always wonders along the way.”
― Vincent Starrett, Penny Wise & Book Foolish

“A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon the fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
And ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.”
― Vincent Starrett

“For one thing, a first edition certainly is the edition nearest the heart of an author, the edition upon which his hopes were laid and his ambitions builded; and particularly is this true when the book in question happens to be an author's first publication. Imagine with what flatterings of the authorical heart, with what ecstatic apprehension, he handled his own copy of the book that day it came to him from the publisher! Is not something of this spirit communicated to the collector who loves his writer and his work? Or does that explanation partake too much of sorcery? Here is the original creation, just as it came first from the presses, with all ist strangenesses and wonder for ist orignal readers, with all ist uncorrected errors and inaccuracies to mark it as the curiosity it is. And, of course, with all those mystic values that accrue and attach to the thing that is rare and hard to find. That is all very sentimental, but it is also very practical, as will appear in due course.”
― Vincent Starrett, Penny Wise & Book Foolish

“A book collector is mad enough to begin with, Watson; but tempt him with some such bait as this Shakespeare quarto and he is bereft of all sanity.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Unique Hamlet: A Hitherto Unchronicled Adventure of Mr. Sherlock Holmes

“Superficially it may appear that I am more interested in books than in people; but I think it nearer the mark to say that I am more interested in people as they are revealed to me in books than as they reveal themselves to me in daily contact.”
― Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence

“Man wants what he cannot have, or what is difficult to procure, or what he must wade through the blood of other men to get. So with collectors.”
― Vincent Starrett, Penny Wise & Book Foolish

“Old books, yes! They are the true comforters; and principally because they are old and familiar. Many excellent new tales and poems and dramas are added yearly to the catalogues, and and some of these in time will stand beside the great companions under discussion; but only Time (and you and I and all other lovers of good books) will bring about their survival.”
― Vincent Starrett, Books Alive

“The manner of a fool,' said Mr. Blackwood, 'when it masks the mental processes of a wise man, is an advantage of great worth to a detective.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder

“He thinks he knows it all,” said Anstey. “Most fools do,” retorted Thorndyke. “They arrive at their knowledge by intuition—a deuced easy road and cheap travelling too.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Detective Megapack ®: 28 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors

“They left the little city behind them and swung out into the open country. Immediately the trees resumed their solemn march on either side, very much -- it seemed to Blackwood -- as if they were files of soldiers on perpetual guard. He was ardently sick of trees, in spite of an early-morning notion that dwellers in the city were oafs and half-wits. Trees hemmed one in. They weighed mysteriously on the senses. He hoped that he would never see another adjectival tree. The poet who could sing of trees was full of bats and mice and fleas. Riley Blackwood, jiggling along a country road in northern Wisconsin, would have given up a dollar and a half for just one glimpse of a sputtering white electric sign in Clark Street.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder

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― Vincent Starrett, Adventure Tales #5

“Trees that are only trees by daylight are many and various other things at night. They are lurking, impossible monsters of the animal world or crouching human ruffians, of ferocious aspect and intent, depending upon their shape, size, color, distance from the beholder, and general state of well-being or decay. One's own well-being has some bearing on the matter. Strong nerves are needed to walk among them in the darkness.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder

“...when a man blends truth and falsehood skillfully in one comprehensive statement, it is difficult to tell the veracities from the fibs.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder

“It is an old aphorism that familiarity breeds contempt. Like most old aphorisms—which should be reexamined annually and then thrown out of court—it isn’t always true. Familiarity at worst breeds, as a rule, only familiarity; at best, it breeds something approaching adoration.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

“”
― Vincent Starrett

“Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: '______, with love from Momma.”
― Vincent Starrett, Books and Bipeds

“Grant Allen once said that an Englishman's idea of God was another Englishman twelve feet high, and I suppose that is more or less everybody's idea of God- with the necessary geographical adjustment. Zenith Brown has an idea about God that pleases me. 'God,' says Mrs. Brown, 'is obviously a friendly enough Old Gentleman most of the time, Who wishes us well and tries to see to it that we are reasonably happy. It is equally obvious the He has an idiot brother who takes over the reins whenever God Himself goes fishing. It is when the idiot brother is in charge of things that the world goes wrong and we have wars, famines, and pestilences on earth.”
― Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence

“THE LONDON “SEASON” OF THE YEAR 1886, UPON ITS surface, was much as other and similar seasons had been before it. No blare of sudden trumpets marked its advent. Victoria was still placidly upon her throne; Lord Salisbury—for the second time—had ousted Gladstone from the premier’s chair; Ireland was seething with outrage and sedition; and Beecham’s Pills were “universally admitted to be a marvellous antidote for nervous disorders.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes