The agreeable eye

an eudæmonistarchives

de arte poetica liber

To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.:

Bagford the biblioclast.
Illustrations torn from MSS.
Title-pages torn from books.
Rubens, his engraved titles.
Colophons torn out of books.
Lincoln Cathedral
Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay.
Theurdanck.
Fragments of MSS.
Some libraries almost useless.

[…]

The care that should be taken of books.
Enjoyment derived from them.

Incidentally, I am still amused by The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, though its table of contents is nowhere near so … poetical:

My First Love
The Birth of a New Passion
The Luxury of Reading in Bed
The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me
Baldness and Intellectuality

[…]

The Pleasures of Extra-Illustration
The Odors which My Books Exhale.
  1. The realization (which occurred somewhere around the third line) that it was not, in fact, a ‘poem’ restored a bit of my faith in humanity. []

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ego hoc feci mm–MMXXIV · cc 2000–2024 M.F.C.