Book Collecting Quotes

“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse

“To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.”
― Carlos María Domínguez, The House of Paper

“Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.”
― Augustine Birrell

“As book collectors know all too well: We only regret our economies, never our extravagances.”
― Michael Dirda

“One gift the fairies gave me ... the love of books, the magic key that opens the enchanted door.”
― Andrew Lang, Ballades & Rhymes: From Ballades in Blue China and Rhymes & a la Mode

“Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mounting up on my shelves.”
― Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

“Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

— Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library”
― Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

“The problem, in a nutshell, is that collecting books is much more than a hobby. The sheer amount of space required to house most book collections means that whoever shares your living area needs to be very understanding, or more ideally a co-conspirator, because the rest of their lives will be spent making room for your incredibly invasive pastime, until one day they trip on a folio and plummet to their doom down a staircase.”
― Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

“Ask anyone with a big book collection, and they'll tell you moving them was the hardest part of the move. Take down a bookshelf and there's often no less than four, possibly up to eight, good Lord if it's over ten, boxes of dense material. This is the single greatest argument for welcoming ebooks. Abandoning print and having your Kindle on display instead doesn't sound like such a bad idea while carrying book box number seven to the car.”
― Lauren Leto, Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere – Provocative and Humorous Literary Commentary for Book Lovers

“In Washington, D. C., there was Loudermilk's, in Philadelphia Leary's, in Seattle Shorey's, in Portland Powell's, in Boston Goodspeed's Milk Street, In Cleveland Kay's, in Cincinnati and Long Beach Old Mr. Smith's two acres of books, and so on. In that time many large book barns in New England were stuffed with books. All the citites around the Great Lakes had large bookshops. Some of these old behmoths contained a million books or more.”
― Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond

“Book collecting! First editions and best editions; old books and new books - the ones you like and want to have around you. Thousands of 'em. I've had more honest satisfaction and happiness collecting books than anything else I've ever done in life.”
― Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman

“I am often asked a stock question: 'Have you actually read all those books?' To this I have my answer ready: 'Is there anybody who has read all the books in his library?' That would be like claiming to enjoy the incredible luxury and good fortune of being able to accomplish everything in this life that one would wish.”
― Konstantinos Staikos

“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

“Buy books, then, that you have read with profit and pleasure and hope to read and reread. Buy books that you may underscore passages and write upon the margins, thus assuring yourself that the book is your own. Keep the books that mean the most to you close at hand, one or two, if possible, on a table at your bedside. Do not hide away your favorite books or keep them locked in enclosed shelves. Do not keep them under glass.”
― Burton Rascoe, The Joys of Reading: Life's Greatest Pleasure

“I hold that book-collecting is the best of indoor sports, and I think I can provide proof; at any rate, I shall try.”
― A. Edward Newton, This Book Collecting Game

“O my darling books…how dear to me are they all! For have I not chosen them one by one, gathered them in with the sweat of my brow? I do love you all! It seems as if, by long and sweet companionship, you had become part of myself.”
― Antoine Issac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy

“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

“... books were not so prolific or so easily procurable from public libraries, and then many a reader had his own little collection of books of which he was proud. He knew them and loved them and had his favourite authors. His books were amongst his greatest friends, they were there to make his heart rejoice or to afford him consolation in distress.”
― John Henry Spencer

“I read a lot, too, though I can’t figure out if I’m reading all these books because I want to be clever enough to deal with everything, or whether I’m reading them for enjoyment.”
― Matty Healy

“I’m buying a lot of books and then putting them in a nice order and then saying, I’m going to read that tomorrow. And then I’m going to read that one after it.”
― Matty Healy

“Of all kinds of human weaknesses, the craze for collecting old books is the most excusable. During the early phases of the disease, the book-lover is content to purchase only books which he [sic] reads. Next he buys books which he means to read; and as his store accumulates, he hopes to read his purchases; but by-and-by he takes home books in beautiful bindings and of early date, but printed in extinct languages he cannot read.”
― Robert Milne Williamson, Bits from an Old Book Shop

“My advice to any one who may be temped by some volume with an inscription of the author on its fly-leaf or title-page is, 'Yield with coy submission' — and at once. While such books make frightful inroads on one's bank account, I have regretted only my economies, never my extravagances.”
― A. Edward Newton, The Amenities of Book Collecting And Kindred Affections

“Magpies have an acquisitive instinct, and a similarly indiscriminate passion for accumulating junk afflicts one in a hundred of the human race. But that is not what we mean by a collector.”
― John Carter, Taste & Technique in Book Collecting

“I wish to have one copy of every book in the world.”
― Sir Thomas Phillipps

“By this time it will have been discovered that I am not much of a traveler; but I have always loved London — London with its wealth of literary and historic association, with its countless miles of streets lined with inessential shops overflowing with things that I don't want, and its grimy old book-shops overflowing with things that I do.”
― A. Edward Newton, The Amenities of Book Collecting And Kindred Affections

“Buying from Quaritch is rather too much like the German idea of hunting: namely, sitting in an easy chair near a breach in the wall through which game, big or little, is shooed within easy reach of your gun.”
― A. Edward Newton, The Amenities of Book Collecting And Kindred Affections

“Decades later, it's striking to see the archival center clearly articulating the value of collections like Estelle's, using words that no one in the archdiocese could muster at the time of the sale: "The Archival Center," its website says today, "long ago embraced the notion expressed by Lawrence Clark Powell that: 'the collecting of books is...the summum bonum {highest good} of the acquisitive desire, for the reason that books brought together by plan and purposely kept together are a social force to be reckoned with, as long as people have clear eyes and free minds.”
― Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey

“We believed in this country in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and risked everything on it.”
― Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books

“Jack, I'm going to tell you a story. A runner took a book to a famous dealer and said: 'I've got something rare here.' 'Yes,' replied the dealer, 'but customers who want it are rarer.'

Then my book is worth nothing?

Nothing whatsoever. It's a volume of old sermons, which in the trade are pretty well unsaleable. Your book is a first edition all right, and probably there never was a second, for obvious reasons.”
― Bernard Farmer, Death of a Bookseller

“No longer a mere facade--a rug or a stall--the bookstore deepened so that it could hold and display the rapidly increasing stock of books and provide backroom space for scribes and their supplies.”
― Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History