Read History, or Be Doomed to Repeat It . . .
We've been in a historical mood lately, and have recently added John
Lord's fascinating essay, "The American
Idea" to our site, as well as articles and essays on
Adams and Jefferson,
Washington, and other topics.
Literature
If you like reading about what other people like reading, then you'll love reading William Dean Howell's My Literary Passions. Can men be allowed to be so passionate about literature now as he was then? It's an interesting question.
Leather Bindings, and All That
Is leather dressing good for your leather bindings? You can
find an answer to that question on our webpage about
Leather Dressing for Books, and you
can find lots of other helpful information on our webpage about
Caring for Your Book Collection.
Tastes Change . . .
And
if you want to see how much, you'll enjoy perusing John Cowper Powys'
One Hundred Best Books, which he
compiled in 1916. Some of the books on the list are, of course,
perennial classics. Some are now forgotten.
If you're looking for contrast - or for a more contemporary list - you could also peruse D.J. McAdam's Books You Must Read; newer authors like Kafka and Kerouac are both there, as is Hesse.
Sell a Book?! And You Call Yourself a Man?!
According
to Kenneth Grahame, "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." All
this, and more, can be found in Grahame's essay.
Forty Centuries of Ink
Recently added: Forty Centuries of
Ink (a lot of information here), plus On
Books and the Housing of Them, by William Ewart Gladstone.
Gladstone, of course, was a politician who loved books, and the wisdom contained
therein. Politeness causes us to refrain from drawing any comparisons to
today's crop of political leaders . . .
Literary Taste, Famous Books, and Self-Culture
And what have we been working on recently? We've added Arnold
Bennett's Literary Taste: How to Form It,
and Andrew Lang's
The Library. Having already published
excerpts from Samuel Smiles' Self Help,
we've now gone ahead and made the full text of this wonderful work available to our readers.
We've also added Recreations of a Country
Parson. Wouldn't it be pleasant to have a comfortable cottage that
somehow had space for a good-sized library? And maybe a nice fireplace, a
mug of tea always at hand, some cookies.... But we digress.
Website Round-Up
Fans of our demonology page (we hesitate to say they are legion) will no doubt be interested to learn that we have now added Thomas Alfred Spalding's 1880 work on Elizabethan Demonology to our website, which will hold special appeal for both demonologists and fans of Shakespeare.
Thanks to the nice folks at Google, you can search our site for a particular term or phrase:
Our e-mail address is djmcadam@gmail.com