The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac | Page 3

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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF A BIBLIOMANIAC

BY EUGENE FIELD

Introduction
The determination to found a story or a series of sketches on the
delights, adventures, and misadventures connected with bibliomania
did not come impulsively to my brother. For many years, in short
during the greater part of nearly a quarter of a century of journalistic
work, he had celebrated in prose and verse, and always in his happiest
and most delightful vein, the pleasures of book-hunting. Himself an
indefatigable collector of books, the possessor of a library as valuable
as it was interesting, a library containing volumes obtained only at the
cost of great personal sacrifice, he was in the most active sympathy
with the disease called bibliomania, and knew, as few comparatively
poor men have known, the half-pathetic, half-humorous side of that
incurable mental infirmity.
The newspaper column, to which he contributed almost daily for
twelve years, comprehended many sly digs and gentle scoffings at
those of his unhappy fellow citizens who became notorious, through his
instrumentality, in their devotion to old book-shelves and auction sales.
And all the time none was more assiduous than this same good- natured
cynic in running down a musty prize, no matter what its cost or what

the attending difficulties. ``I save others, myself I cannot save,'' was his
humorous cry.
In his published writings are many evidences of my brother's
appreciation of what he has somewhere characterized the ``soothing
affliction of bibliomania.'' Nothing of book-hunting love has been more
happily expressed than ``The Bibliomaniac's Prayer,'' in which the
troubled petitioner fervently asserts:
``But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee To keep me in temptation's way, I
humbly ask that I may be Most notably beset to-day; Let my temptation
be a book, Which I shall purchase, hold and keep, Whereon, when
other men shall look, They'll wail to know I got it cheap.''
And again, in ``The Bibliomaniac's Bride,'' nothing breathes better the
spirit of the incurable patient than this: ``Prose for me when I wished
for prose, Verse when to verse inclined,-- Forever bringing sweet
repose To body, heart and mind. Oh, I should bind this priceless prize
In bindings full and fine, And keep her where no human eyes Should
see her charms, but mine!''
In ``Dear Old London'' the poet wailed that ``a splendid Horace cheap
for cash'' laughed at his poverty, and in ``Dibdin's Ghost'' he revelled in
the delights that await the bibliomaniac in the future state, where there
is no admission to the women folk who, ``wanting victuals, make a fuss
if we buy books instead''; while in ``Flail, Trask and Bisland'' is the
very essence of bibliomania, the unquenchable thirst for possession.
And yet, despite these self-accusations, bibliophily rather than
bibliomania would be the word to characterize his conscientious
purpose. If he purchased quaint and rare books it was to own them to
the full extent, inwardly as well as outwardly. The mania for books
kept him continually buying; the love of books supervened to make
them a part of himself and his life.
Toward the close of August of the present year my brother wrote the
first chapter of ``The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.'' At that time he
was in an exhausted physical condition and apparently unfit for any
protracted literary labor. But the prospect of gratifying a long-cherished
ambition, the delight of beginning the story he had planned so
hopefully, seemed to give him new strength, and he threw himself into
the work with an enthusiasm that was, alas, misleading to those who
had noted fearfully his declining vigor of body. For years no literary

occupation had seemed to give him equal pleasure, and in the
discussion of the progress of his writing from day to day his eye would
brighten, all of his old animation would return, and everything would
betray the lively interest he felt in the creature of his imagination in
whom he was living over the delights of the book-hunter's chase. It was
his ardent wish that this work, for