Excerpt from Books in the House: An Essay on Private Libraries and Collections for Young and Old

If we outgrow the book it Will not be morti fied. If we find we have made a mistake we have but lost our money, though if we allow a bad failure to remain on our shelves, it may sensibly lessen the pleasure we take in a whole bookcase. Yet the ideal of our relations with books remains unaltered, even though the acquisition of a bad book of reference is a less misfortune than the hiring of a bad cook, though an ill-considered treatise on history is more easily changed than an inefficient pro fessor, and though the novel or poem which was to have given us a new philosophy of life proves easier to shake off than the clever table d'hote talker when his epigrams have begun to pal]. Mistakes we must surely make, but we do not want to make more than we need, lest we grow discouraged, while worse than almost any mistake is the failure to rise to the con ception of the possibilities which living friend ships with books may hold for us.

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