From ‘Pitfalls in Bookland’, The Spectator, 20 February 1915:
EVERY bookman knows that the taste for buying books inevitably outruns the capacity for reading them. At first a man buys a book only when he wants it vehemently—when he is so anxious to enjoy it that he despatches the preface while he is waiting for his ‘bus, and runs through the first three chapters in the suburban train. Then he begins to buy books because he will want them some day in the future; and he puts them on his shelves and forgets about them, and goes out to buy more. After this he becomes rapidly shameless and buys for all sorts of reasons. He buys books because they are standard works, because he does not know what he has done with his other copy (the first duplicate marks the acute stage of the disease), because he has not bought one for a long time, because he was never in that particular shop before and did not like to leave without getting something, because he wanted it to complete a series, because it was such a handsome edition, and even because it was such a bargain. He buys for the sheer joy of acquisition; that delight in making things grow by one’s own effort which terns respectable dentists into stamp-collectors, and induces elderly Civil Servants to take up gardening. It is not until he is compelled to change his residence and finds that the number of volumes to be moved has swollen in some incomprehensible fashion from hundreds to thousands that he realizes how firmly the habit has him in its clutch.
There was once a Methodist minister, now deceased, who suffered many things from the conflict between his bookish proclivities and the nomadic habits of life necessary in his calling. He dragged at each remove a lengthening chain of packing-cases from circuit to circuit, until at last the burden became too great, and his family were compelled to jettison them secretly and in detail by the wayside. When be retired from the ministry and sat down to an honoured old age, he established his library about him, and then the discarded volumes began to return to him like bread upon the waters. Obscure manses in the Midlands yielded up rich freights of dogmatic theology; soap-boxes, full to bursting of historical treatises, were identified by his initiate in the cloak-rooms of provincial railway stations; sackfuls of his property were reported from lonely parishes on the shores of the Atlantic, and washed up by goods delivery on his doorstep. He was probably the only human being who owned nine different sets of answers to Essays and Reviews without ever reading one of them; and when he died they descended intact to his family, who were unable either to read them, sell them, or give them away.
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