Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book.

“Woman’s entire existence, in order to be a source of happiness to others as well as to herself, must be one of self-sacrifice.”

“Books are food,” wrote the English critic Holbrook Jackson, “libraries so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates … . We eat them from love or necessity, as other foods, but most from love.”

When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative. One partner provides the words, the other the rhythm.

“What man who really loves his books,” he asked, “delegates to any other human being, as long as there is breath in his body, the office of inducting them into their homes?”

“Alas,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher. “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!”

books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.