Non Libri Sed Liberi

It will never be clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books.
That it is not to read them is certain: the closest inspection always
fails to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them -- all night
if you let him -- wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed
tears over them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not
read them. Yet it would be rash to infer that he buys his books
without a remote intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers
start with the honest resolution that some day they will ''shut down
on'' this fatal practice. Then they purpose to themselves to enter
into their charmed circle, and close the gates of Paradise behind
them. Then will they read out of nothing but first editions; every day
shall be a debauch in large paper and tall copies; and crushed morocco
shall be familiar to their touch as buckram. Meanwhile, though, books
continue to flaunt their venal charms; it would be cowardice to shun
the fray. In fine, one buys and continues to buy; and the promised
Sabbath never comes.

The process of the purchase is always much the same, therein
resembling the familiar but inferior passion of love. There is the
first sight of the Object, accompanied of a catching of the breath, a
trembling in the limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a
habit of melancholy in secret places. But once possessed, once toyed
with amorously for an hour or two, the Object (as in the inferior
passion aforesaid) takes its destined place on the shelf -- where it
stays. And this saith the scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail
to remark with a certain awe that the owner goeth thereafter as one
possessing a happy secret and radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is
insufferably conceited, and his conceit waxeth as his coat, now
condemned to a fresh term of servitude, groweth shabbier. And shabby
though his coat may be, yet will he never stoop to renew its pristine
youth and gloss by the price of any book. No man -- no human,
masculine, natural man -- ever sells a book. Men have been known in
moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by temporary necessity, to
rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit what they should not, to
''wince and relent and refrain'' from what they should: these things,
howbeit regrettable, are common to humanity, and may happen to any of
us. But amateur bookselling is foul and unnatural; and it is
noteworthy that our language, so capable of particularity, contains no
distinctive name for the crime. Fortunately it is hardly known to
exist: the face of the public being set against it as a flint -- and
the trade giving such wretched prices.

In book-buying you not infrequently condone an extravagance by the
reflection that this particular