LiberCafe: August 2010

BOOKS

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.
— Anonymous, Chinese saying

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
— "Of Studies". Essays II
Francis BACON (1561-1626)

The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books.... America's greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.
— Terence COOKE (1921-1983)

My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.
— Books in My Life
Robert DOWNS (1903- )

As regards anything besides these, my son, take a warning: To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome to the flesh.
— ECCLESIASTES 12:12 (New World Translation 1961)

Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.
— Maksim GORKY (1868-1936)

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.
— Sutton Elbert GRIGGS (1872-1930)

A library book...is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, is their only capital.
— Thomas JEFFERSON (1743-1826)

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.... Children learn to read being in the presence of books.
— Horace MANN (1796-1859)

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
— Groucho MARX

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
— Moby Dick, chapter 110.
Herman MELVILLE

St. Paul wrote to his son Timothy:

When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas,
also the books,
and above all the parchments.
(2 Timothy 4:13)

In an 1863 sermon, "Paul -- His Cloak and His Books";C.H. Spurgeon said of Paul:

"He was inspired, and yet he wants books!
He had been preaching for thirty years, and yet he wants books!
He had seen the Lord, and yet he wants books!
He had a wider experience than most men do, and yet he wants books!
He had been caught up into the third heaven, and had heard things that it was not lawful for a man to utter, and yet he wants books!
He had written a major part of the New Testament, and yet he wants books!"

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
— Sesame and Lilies. Lect i, Of Kings' Treasuries
John RUSKIN (1819-1900)

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.
— Joe RYAN

Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights
Let them be your mattress
And you shall sleep restful nights
— Quoted in Bar Hebraues' Ethicon
St. EPHREM the Syrian (303-373)

'Tis well to borrow from the good and great;
'Tis wise to learn; 'tis God-like to create!
— The Library

John Godfrey SAXE (1816-1887)

BORROWING

He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot.
— Anonymous, Arabic Proverb

For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye.
— Curse Against Book Stealers
Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona

[Editor: this quote is NOT anonymous. The quote is inThe Old Librarians's Almanack which is itself a brilliant and very funny forgery by Edmund Lester Pearson. For details see, Wayne A. Wiegand, "The History of a Hoax: Edmund Lester Pearson, John Cotton Dana, and the Old Librarian's Almanack." Beta Phi Mu Chapbook No. 13. Thanks to Ken Miller for pointing this out.]

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
— Anatole FRANCE (1844-1924)

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table
Oliver Wendell HOLMES (1809-1894)

There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out.
— Tom MASSON (1866-1934)

CATALOGUE

Classification, broadly defined, is the act of organizing the universe of knowledge into some systematic order. It has been considered the most fundamental activity of the human mind.
— "Cataloguing and Classification: An Introduction"
Lois Mai Chan

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a 1000 years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.
— "Books". Society and Solitude
Ralph Waldo EMERSON (1803-1882)

A great public library, in its catalogue and its physical disposition of its books on shelves, is the monument of literary genres.
— Cited in World Literature Today, Spring 1982, p.231
Robert MELANCON (1947- )

Shera's Two Laws of Cataloguing.
Law #1 No cataloger will accept the work of any other cataloger.
Law #2 No cataloger will accept his/her own work six months after the cataloging.
— University of Illinois, Graduate School of Library Science. Occasional Paper #131, Dec. 1977.
Jesse SHERA

CENSORSHIP

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
— Clare Booth LUCE

'Children, don't speak so coarsely,' said Mr Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters' speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.
— Tempest Tost
Robertson DAVIES

"...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that "everything is permitted," as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it."
— "Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship" from On the Democratic Idea in America New York: Harper & Row, 1972. This essay originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1971.
Irving KRISTOL

"It is clear that censorship is not a cut and dried issue. There is a danger in thinking it is, for then the debate falters and understanding ends. We must realize that censorship will be with us always. It is a weapon to protect the order of society and the peace of communities. However, it is a two-edged sword and must be handled with care and caution. Of all professions librarianship must ensure that both sides of the debate remain alive. If the censorship side predominates, truth and moral progress suffer; if the anti-censorship side predominates, the drift to selfishness and anarchy presents a clear danger to the cohesion and order of the social system, the destruction of which brings us to barbarism, tyranny, and the loss of all freedom."
— "A Clash of Values: Censorship", Canadian Library Journal, February 1988, pp. 35-39
S.D. NEILL

"When a librarian really believes that a book is harmful, that its content is contrary to the welfare of the community, or that it is destructive of good taste, even if those are his opinions only, he has not only the right, but also the obligation to do what he properly can to keep that book out of the hand of those whom he thinks might be injured by it."
— "Intellectual Freedom--Intellectual? Free?" Wilson Library Bulletin, Nov. 1967, 323-4, 345.
Jesse SHERA

CENTRE OF KNOWLEDGE

Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries.
— Arthur ASHE (1943-1993)

That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
Deface their ill-placed statues.
— The Elder Brother. Act I, sc. ii, L. 177.

Francis BEAUMONT (1586-1616) and John FLETCHER (1576-1625)

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library
— Shelby Foote

No possession can surpass, or even equal a good library, to the lover of books. Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation, riches which increase by being consumed, and pleasures that never cloy.
— John Alfred LANDFORD (1823-1903)

In my day the library was a wonderful place.... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary.... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.
— Cited in American Libraries, July/August 1980, p.411-412
Norman MAILER (1923- )

A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.
— Samuel NIGER (1883-1956)

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
— Cosmos
Carl SAGAN

CHILDREN

Children's books are written for upbringing...but upbringing is a great thing; it decides the fate of the human being.
— Vissarion Grigor'evich BELINSKII (1811-1841)

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.
— Jorge Luis BORGES (1899-1986)

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
— "Book Buying". Obiter Dicta.
Augustine BIRRELL (1850-1933)

Libraries are not made; they grow.
— "Book Buying". Obiter Dicta.
Augustine BIRRELL (1850-1933)

Every library should be try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table. VIII.
Oliver Wendell HOLMES (1809-1894)

The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library,
is to look at his books. One gets the notion very speedily of his tastes and
the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves.
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table. VIII.

Oliver Wendell HOLMES (1809-1894)

It does not matter how many books you may have, but whether they are good or not.
— Epistolae Morale
Lucius Annaeus SENECA (3 B.C.-65 A.D.)

Knowing that I loved my books, he furnished me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
— The Tempest. Act I, sc. ii, L. 166.
William SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

CREATION

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
— Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475
Norman COUSINS (1915- )

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.
— William DYER (1636-1696)

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
— Life of Johnson. From James Boswell, April 6, 1775.
Samuel JOHNSON (1709-1784)

DEFINITIONS

Books

Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.
— Maksim GORKY (1868-1936)

Educational Institution

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
— "The Hero as Man of Letters". On Heroes and Hero Worship.
Thomas CARLYLE (1795-1881)

Librarians

A keeper of books.
— Anonymous

Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveller and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god
— "The Library of Babel", Labyrinths
Jean Luis BORGES (1899-1986)

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public... Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.
— Sir William Osler, 1917

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
— In The Gold Bug Variations p.35, 1991.
Richard Powers

A factor and trader for helps to learning.
— John DURY

Unlearned men of books assume the care,
As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair.
— Love of Fame. Satire ii. L. 83.
Edward YOUNG (1684-1765)

Libraries

The medicine chest of the soul.
— Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes.

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.
—Sir William Osler, 1919

Nutrimentum spiritus.
(Food for the soul.)
— Inscription on the Berlin Royal Library.

Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.
— Libraries

Francis BACON (1561-1626)

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
— Henry Ward BEECHER

A little library growing each year is an honorable part of a man's history.
— Henry Ward BEECHER

A library is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.
— Star Papers. Oxford. Bodleian Library.

Henry Ward BEECHER

A great library contains the diary of the human race.
— Address on Opening the Birmingham Free Library
George Mercer DAWSON (1849-1901)

A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.
— Samuel NIGER (1883-1956)

Librarianship

New Laws of Librarianship:

Libraries serve humanity.
Respect all forms by which knowledge is communicated.
Use technology intelligently to enhance service.
Protect free access to knowledge.
Honor the past & create the future.

— Michael GORMAN (American Libraries 9/95)

Ranganathan's Five Laws:
Books are for use.
Books are for all; or Every reader his book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
A library is a growing organism.
— Shiyali Ramamrita RANGANATHAN (1892-1972)

FREE ACCESS

My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.
— Kirk DOUGLAS (1916- )

My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.
— Letter to George Johnson, January 1824.
Joseph HOWE

HUMOUR

Si, ténte par le demon,
Tu dérobes ce livre,
Souviens-toi qu'un fripon
N'est pas digne de vivre.
— Anonymous

Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf. Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure. But th' shelf is th' main thing.
— "Books". Mr Dooley Says.
Finley Peter DUNNE (1867-1936)

Every library should be try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table. VIII.
Oliver Wendell HOLMES (1809-1894)

There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out.
— Tom MASSON (1866-1934)

You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.
— Monty Python skit

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.
— Joe Ryan

IMMORTALITY

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library
—Jorge Luis BORGES (1899-1986)

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
— Essays of Elia. Oxford in the Vacation

Charles LAMB (1775-1834)

Shelved around us lie
The mummied authors.
— "Third Evening". The Poet's Journal.

Baynard TAYLOR (1825-1878)

Thou can'st not die. Here thou art more than safe
Where every book is thy epitaph.
— On Sir Thomas Bodley's library
Henry VAUGHAN (1621-1695)

INFORMATION

Information is the manager's main tool, indeed the manager's "capital," and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.
— "Managing the Information Explosion" The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 1980
Peter F. DRUCKER

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Choruses from The Rock
— T. S. ELIOT

A democratic society depends upon an informed and educated citizenry.
— Thomas JEFFERSON (1743-1826)

Information is the currency of democracy.
— Thomas JEFFERSON (1743-1826)

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
— John F. KENNEDY

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
— James MADISON

How index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tail!
— Dunciad, Book 1.
Alexander POPE

LIBRARIANS

A keeper of books.
— Anonymous

A factor and trader for helps to learning.
— John DURY

The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.
— Mission del Bibliotecario
Jose ORTEGA Y GASSET (1883-1955)

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.
— A translation of OyG's address to the International Congress of Bibliographers and Librarians in Paris in 1934.
Jose ORTEGA Y GASSET (1883-1955)

Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed.
— The Social Audit Consumer Handbook, Macmillan, 1978, p. 41
Charles MEDAWAR

"Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don't ever piss one off."
— The Callahan Touch
Spider ROBINSON

Believers and doers are what we need -- faithful librarians who are humble in the presence of books.... To be in a library is one of the purest of all experiences. This awareness of library's unique, even sacred nature, is what should be instilled in our neophites.
— A Passion for Books
Lawrence Clark POWELL (1906- )

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
— Quoted by J.R. Kidd in Learning and Society
Bernard Keble SANDWELL (1876-1954)

Unlearned men of books assume the care,
As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair.
— Love of Fame. Satire ii. L. 83.
Edward YOUNG (1684-1765)

PLACE OF LEARNING

Library Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
— Light Armour. McGraw-Hill, 1954.

Richard ARMOUR

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.
— Cited in Writer's Digest, February 1976, p25
Ray Douglas BRADBURY (1920- )

The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.
— Henry Wadsworth LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

"There was one place where I forgot the cold, indeed forgot Siberia. That was in the library. There, in that muddy village, was a great institution. Not physically, to be sure, but in every other way imaginable. It was a small log cabin, immaculately attended to with loving care; it was well lighted with oil lamps and it was warm. But best of all, it contained a small but amazing collection from the world's best literature, truly amazing considering the time, the place, and its size. From floor to ceiling it was lined with books - books, books, books. It was there that I was to become acquainted with the works of Dumas, Pasternak's translations of Shakespeare, the novels of Mark Twain, Jack London, and of course the Russians. It was in that log cabin that I escaped from Siberia - either reading there or taking the books home. It was between that library and two extraordinary teachers that I developed a lifelong passion for the great Russian novelists and poets. It was there that I learned to line up patiently for my turn to sit at a table and read, to wait - sometimes months - for a book. It was there that I learned that reading was not only a great delight, but a privilege."
— Esther Hautzig, The endless steppe.
Puffin (pp. 138/9 of the 1981 ed).

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
— Quoted by J.R. Kidd in Learning and Society
Bernard Keble SANDWELL (1876-1954)

If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.
— Irving STONE (1903-1989)

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
— I, Asimov. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Isaac ASIMOV

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
— Andrew CARNEGIE

The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books....America's greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.
— Terence COOKE (1921-1983)

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I though it might sober me up to sit in a library.
— The Great Gatsby, chapter 3
F.Scott FITZGERALD (1896-1948)

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
— The Rambler. March 23, 1751.
Samuel JOHNSON (1709-1784)

The public library has been historically a vital instrument of democracy and opportunity in the United States.... Our history has been greatly shaped by people who read their way to opportunity and achievements in public libraries.
— Arthur Meier SCHLESINGER (1888-1965)

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
— Kurt VONNEGUT [In These Times, 8/6/2004]

VANITY

The richest minds need not large libraries.
— Table Talk. Bk. I. Learning - Books.
Amos Bronson ALCOTT

It is vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning, by getting a great library.
— The Holy and Profane States. Of Books. Maxim I.

Thomas FULLER (1608-1661)