TREASURE IN BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3832, 23 August 1927, Page 74

TREASURE IN BOOKS.

. Thoreau abandoned conventional civilisation and went to live in the woods, m a house of his own building, lie took with him books of travel and Homer’s Iliad (writes Ethel Mannin, in Now and Then). The great Alexander, going into .wars, took the “ Iliad” with him in a precious casket. Petrarch counted books Ins greatest friend; Cicero said that room without books was as a body without a soul; Carlyle, that a collection of books is the greatest university.

I reflected upon these things the other day as I stood at a bookstall in the Charing Cross road looking down at an old and battered copy of Pope’s translation of the Iliad ” which I had fished out of a box marked “ All in this box. sixpence.” They had a copy of Plutarch’s “Lives’’ there for sixpence, and Kropotkin’s "Mutual Aid”—that took 10 years of research to write. And a tattered copy of Goethe’s “Faust” at which he laboured for a lifetime.

A man’s life-work for sixpence I Think of it! A book that an, Emperor carried into battle in a precious casket lying in a junk box on a dusty pavement! And for less than the price of a half-pound box of chocolates. Carlyle’s twice-written “French Revolution.”

There is an infinite sadness about all these bookshops in the Charing Cross road and Shaftesbury avenue, and their Paris cousins, the bookstalls on the Quai d’Orsay and other stretches of the Seine embankment. Here arc masterpieces, classics, lying cheek by jowl with cheap novelettes, and all the lot going for a few pence or a franc or two, and nobody wants them. Sometimes a student comes*searching for a text book, or a collector comes to hunt for a prize, but the great buying public has its nose pressed to perfumers’ ■windows and jewellers’; the great public’s purse is opened for all those bubbles and baubles that make our civilisation—l2s fid for a bottle of whisky, double the price for a bottle of chypre for sheer vanity, hundreds of pounds for a string of pearls—the secretion of a mollusc! But Homer’s Iliad” goes begging a purchaser at a Snere song.

There is surely something wrong there. Something wrong with our sense of values

and of proportion, for in an age of inflated prices bookis still remain the cheapest of all purchases—in the sense that they represent the greatest value for their purchase price. For what it costs you to see one of Shakespeare’s plays acted, for instance, you can buy the whole collection of his plays—a lifetime of enjoyment, a delighu to return to again and again. How long does a6s box of chocolates last? Yet for the same sum you can buy the best in English poetry from Chaucer to Kipling. Yet of all the luxuries of civilisation books are the least popular. The novels of “best-sellers” sell in their thousands, it is true, but the population of this country runs into millions, and in spite of our c llection of best-sellers, in spite of our numerous bookshops, and our still more numerous libraries, we cannot compare as a bookbuying country with the Scandinavian countries, or Germany, or even with France—in spite of the neglect of the old bookstalls along the Seine! It is a sorrowful thought, for, as has been written, “so short the lyfe, so long the task to lerne,” and even though we read assiduously from the earliest vears till the end of our lives, we cannot hope to cover more, than a very small part of the amazing field of the world's literature. And since we are doomed to die, anyhow, with infinite beauty and wisdom left untouched and untasted, does it "ot behove us to read as voraciously as Confucius sought knowledge, who in his pursuit forgot food and sorrows and time, so that he was old before he was aware! There are times when I shudder at the thought of all the time one wastes on trivialities, all the precious stuff of life one dissipates, when there is so much real beauty stored away in the books that life is not long enough to allow us to read. . . . To die and to have missed so much ! to have read so much and so little ... it is a chastening thought, for as Ulysses cried : “ Life piled on life were all too little.” Yet—in his words, too, “ tho’ much is taken much abides,” and I count that life well spent that has gathered into it something of tho beauty of the poets, something of the wisdom of the world’s great philosophers.

“ Consider,” says Emerson, “ what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years. . . . The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us. the strangers of another age.” “ Books,” confirms Thoreau, “ are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”