ON BOOKS AND BOOK-BUYERS. 



BY JOHN RUSKIN. 



' ' / say we have despised literature ; what do we, as a nation, care 

 about books ? How much do you think we spend altogether on our 

 libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our 

 horses ? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad 

 a bibliomaniac. But you never call one a horse-maniac, though men 

 ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people 

 ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do 

 you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public 

 and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine- 

 cellars ? What position would its expenditure on literature take as com- 

 pared with its expenditure on luxurious eating? We talk of food for 

 the mind, as of food for the body : now, a good book contains such fooa 

 inexhaustible : it is provision for life, and for the best part of us ; yet 

 how long most people would look at the best book before they wo^lld give 

 the price of a large turbot for it ! Though there have been men who 

 have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose 

 libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's 

 dinners are. We are few of us put to such a trial, and more the pity ; 

 for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been 

 won by work or economy ; and if public libraries were half as costly as 

 public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even 

 foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in read- 

 ing as well as in munching and sparkling ; whereas the very cheapness 

 of literature is making even wiser people forget that if a book is worth 

 eading it is worth buying." SESAME AND LILIES ; OR, KING'S 



REASURES. 



