Excerpt from The Friendship of Books
"A good book," said Milton, "is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit." A library thus takes on the impressiveness of a wonderful salon of the great men of the ages. Homer and Plato; ?schylus and Aristophanes; Dante and Chaucer; Shakespeare and Cervantes; Wordsworth and George Meredith; Goethe and Browning; and Carlyle and Emerson, - these are no longer dead volumes or gilded titles, but disembodied spirits assembled in a room to hold converse with us. And we, poor self-satisfied creatures, we have the privilege of talking with them and even of calling them our friends! Do we realize what this means? I am sure we do not. At any rate, we do not act as if we did. It is true we satisfy our consciences and our vanity by conferring on them the honorary degree of "classic"; but even in doing so we condemn them to a permanent seclusion in cloistral solitudes, as if they were out of place in the hurly-burly of our every-day life, and ought truly to have no part in it. At the bare mention of the word "classic," a wave of boredom overcomes us, and we politely turn the conversation or wonder "what the devil he"s doing in this galley." Books and life would seem to us to be two widely separated facts, with little or no relation to each other.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Friendship of Books (Classic Reprint)