Quote of the Post

"A few lines glimpsed on a page may alter your whole trend of thought for the day, reverse the currents of the mind, change the profile of the city....The moment when one meets a book and knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that that book must be his- not necessarily now, but some time- is among the happiest excitements of the spirit....There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import....We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul."

Christopher Morley On Visiting Bookshops, essay, in Pipefuls

Have any of you felt that way, too? Until I read Morley, I thought I was alone in the universe. I've bought almost all my books used and there is nothing better than wandering the stacks and having something completely unexpected catch my eye. I felt all of the above when I laid eyes and hands on two amazing books in a museum gift shop: Complete Works of both DaVinci and Michelangelo. Huge format volumes, with a comparable price tag, by the great publishing house Taschen. As an artist, and reader, I have to have them- some time.

Quote of the Post

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries."

Christopher Morley The Haunted Bookshop