Book Collectors Book Collector Quotes

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

But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. ~ Dave Eggers

I had bill collectors chasing me. We were skipping from town to town, not leaving forwarding addresses. The agent couldn't find me when he sold my book. He finally found me. ~ Daniel Woodrell

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

Ralph Keyes calls quotation collectors "quotographers," the men and women who gather catchwords, watchwords, war words, winged words, maxims, mottos, sayings, and quips into books of a thousand pages. Through the centuries quotation collectors have saved quotations that would otherwise be lost. ~ Willis Regier

I own a few thousand snapshots, which is small by the standards of most collectors I know. I generally only buy photos I think I may actually be able to use in a book one day. I need that focus when buying, because without it I'd just buy everything and my house would be overrun with bucket loads of snapshots; there are just too many beautiful images in the world, and I'd need to own them all. ~ Ransom Riggs

On a spring day in 1988…a Massachusetts man who collected books about local history was rummaging through a bin in a New Hampshire antiques barn when something caught his eye. Beneath texts on fertilizers and farm machines lay a slim, worn pamphlet with tea-colored paper covers, titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, by an unnamed author identified simply as "a Bostonian." He was fairly certain he had found something exceptional, paid the $15 price, and headed home, where Tamerlane would spend only one night. The next day, he contacted Sotheby's, and they confirmed his suspicion that he had just made one of the most exciting book discoveries in years. The pamphlet was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's first text, written when he was only fourteen years old, a find that fortune-seeking collectors have imagined happening upon probably more than they'd like to admit. The humble-looking, forty-page pamphlet was published in 1827 by Calvin F.S. Thomas, a relatively unknown Boston printer who specialized in apothecary labels, and its original price was about twelve cents. But this copy, looking good for its 161 years, most of which were probably spent languishing in one dusty attic box after another, would soon be auctioned for a staggering $198,000. ~ Allison Hoover Bartlett

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN most interested in the question of what makes a house a home. What are the elements that move a house beyond its physical structure and provide the warmth that we all crave? In my fifteen years as a designer, I've come to understand that the answer is simple: It is about surrounding ourselves with things we love.

(...) And in this case, the beauty comes from the owners' love of books.

Books are beautiful objects in their own right - their bindings and covers - and the space they fill on shelves or stacked on coffee tables in colorful piles add balance and texture to any room. And just like any other part of a home, books require maintenance: They need to be dusted, categorized, rearranged, and maintained. Our relationship with them is dynamic and ever changing.

But our connection to them goes beyond the material. In each house we visited, the libraries were the heart of the home, meaningful to the collectors' lives. In this book, we tried to capture what they brought to the home - the life and spirit books added. Some subjects have working libraries they constantly reference; others fill their shelves with the potential pleasures of the unread. When we visited the homes, many people could find favorite books almost by osmosis, using systems known only to themselves.

(...) As we found repeatedly, surrounding yourself with books you love tells the story of your life, your interests, your passions, your values. Your ~ Nina Freudenberger

book collecting is only meaningful if it's personal," Oscar clarified. "If it's just another way of accumulating wealth instead of for the books themselves it isn't right. Collectors are trying to protect themselves. To separate themselves. It's a hierarchy. ~ Sheridan Hay

To librarians, booksellers, and collectors there is nothing limited in the subject of books about books. ~ Leona Rostenberg

My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else's in the field. ~ Thomas Hoving

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

Of all books printed, probably not more than half are ever read. Many are embalmed in public libraries; many go into private quarters to fill spaces; many are glanced at and put away ... scarcely opened until the fire needs kindling. The most ardent book-lovers are not always the greatest readers; indeed, the rabid bibliomaniac seldom reads at all. To him books are as ducats to the miser, something to be hoarded and not employed ... So pleasant it is to buy book; so tiresome to utilize them. ~ Flora Haines Loughead

Book-hunters are the most determined and interesting collectors in the world. I know of no passion to equal it. ~ Gelett Burgess

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children. ~ Emma Donoghue

A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented. ~ William Osler

We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector. ~ Walter Benjamin

For a day or two Fleury became quite active. He had his book about the advance of civilization in India to consider and this was one reason why he had taken an interest in the behaviour of the Collector. He asked a great number of questions and even bought a notebook to record pertinent information.
"Why, if the Indian people are happier under our rule," he asked a Treasury official, "do they not emigrate from those native states like Hyderabad which are so dreadfully misgoverned and come and live in
British India?"
"The apathy of the native is well known," replied the official stiffly. "He is not enterprising."
Fleury wrote down "apathy" in a flowery hand and then, after a moment's hesitation, added "not enterprising". ~ J.G. Farrell

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves. ~ Walter Benjamin

I'm a huge comic book collector. When I was a kid, I had both Marvel and DC. I was my own librarian. I made card files. I had origin stories of all the characters, and cross-referenced when they appeared in other comic books. I was full on. ~ James Mangold

I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow! ~ Rex Stout

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser. ~ Robertson Davies

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that. ~ Anthony Bourdain

In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, 'One of those things,' impelling me to remark to my cousin, 'Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn't time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel that he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it's being written. ~ William, Saroyan

As in most obituaries, the author said little about the man; they rarely do. But the reticence here was greater than usual. It mentioned that Ravenscliff left a wife, but did not say when they married. It said nothing at all about his life, nor where he lived. There were not even any of the usual phrases to give a slight hint: 'a natural raconteur' (loved the sound of his own voice); 'Noted for his generosity to friends' (profligate); 'a formidable enemy . . .' (a brute); 'a severe but fair employer . . .' (a slave-driver); 'devoted to the turf' (never read a book in his life); 'a life-long bachelor' (vice); 'a collector of flowers' (this meant a great womaniser. Why it came to mean such a thing I do not know.) More browsing ~ Iain Pears

I've been a book collector since I was young, since I was a kid. ~ Brett Ratner

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. ~ J.G. Farrell

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. ~ Lev Grossman

Truth was, I didn't really want to die today. I was in the middle of a really good book, and being alive had always worked out for me ... ~ Jessica Fortunato

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

Books are essential to me. I cannot live without them, because I cannot live without reading.

But, Arry has just said to me, you can always borrow them so why buy them?

I don't buy books just to collect them. I'm not a collector. I'm not interested in them as objects that might be valuable one day, regardless of what they are about, nor do I want to own every book ever written by one particular author or on one particular subject. I buy them because I want to read them, and I keep them because I've read them.

I can't afford to buy all the ones I'd like to, so I have to borrow quite a few, and this has taught me something about myself, which I haven't heard anyone else admit. When I've read a book which I really like, a book which MATTERS, I feel it belongs to me. I mean, the book itself, the copy I've read. It's as if I pour myself onto the pages as I read them, all my thoughts and emotions, so that by the time I've finished that copy holds inside it the essence of my reading.

A borrowed book has to be returned, so I lose this essence of myself when I give it back. Besides which, a borrowed book has inside it something of everyone else who's read it. They've fingered it and pawed over it, breathed on it, done heaven knows what else as well as read it. And knowing this spoils my reading. The other readers get in my way. I can feel their presence on the cover and on the pages. They even make it smell differently from my own books. In ~ Aidan Chambers

Having access to the library was all well and good, but as a collector you had to own the book. ~ John Baxter

The art world is a jungle echoing to the calls of vicious jealousies and ruthless combat between dealers and collectors; but I have been walking in the jungles of business all my life, and fighting tooth and nail for pictures comes as a form of relaxation to me. ~ Armand Hammer

I am more emotionally attached to book characters than actual people in my life. ~ Unknownimous

To be worthy of assassination takes more than some crappy little book. ~ Sebastian Horsley

Every book Runit hadn't written haunted him, so he understood about the mental takeover from the craft of writing. Those unwritten books, locked inside a writer's head, make an inescapable noise, like murmurs from conversation one can't quite make out blended loudly with paper pages blowing in a disturbing wind. ~ Brandt Legg