The Project Gutenberg eBook, Books and Bookmen, by Ian Maclaren

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Title: Books and Bookmen

Author: Ian Maclaren

Release Date: January 11, 2008 [eBook #3256]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND BOOKMEN***

Transcribed from the 1912 James Nisbet & Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

BY
IAN MACLAREN

London
JAMES NISBET & CO. LIMITED
22 BERNERS STREET, W.
1912

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

They cannot be separated any more than sheep and a shepherd, but I am
minded to speak of the bookman rather than of his books, and so it will
be best at the outset to define the tribe.

It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has many books, for
he may be a book huckster or his books may be those without which a
gentleman's library is not complete. And in the present imperfect
arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few books,
since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them. It is the foolishness
of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and his
fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-halfpenny edition. The
bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is born and not
made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of the difference
between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is apropos. As he was to
preside at a lecture I was delivering he had in his courtesy invited me
to dinner, which was excellent, and as he proposed to take the role that
night of a man who had been successful in business, but yet allowed
himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, he desired to
create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with a certain imposing air that
we should visit what he called "my library." Across the magnificence of
the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of walk
by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his income, and
I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in the rear, trembling
like a skiff in the wake of an ocean liner. "There," he said, with his
thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, "wha