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买书 Book-Buying

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[英国]奥古斯丁·比勒尔/Augustine Birrell

奥古斯丁·比勒尔(1850-1933),英国政治家、散文家。曾任教育大臣、爱尔兰事务大臣。因出版两部题为《余论》的散文集而享誉英国文坛。《买书》一文以平和的口吻谈及书、藏书,心怀喜悦而又无可奈何地回忆起过去书的物美价廉,其爱书藏书的痴情发人深思。

The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great as he is in many directions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything else, has been overheard mournfully to declare that there were more booksellers'shops in his native town sixty years ago, when he was a boy in it, than are today to be found within its boundaries. And yet the place“all unabashed”now boasts its bookless self a city!

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the advice of a sound though surly critic.

It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the term“second-hand”,which other crafts have“soiled to all ignoble use”.But why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the best books are necessarily second-hand. The writers of today need not grumble. Let them“bide a wee.”If their books are worth anything, they, too, one day will be second-hand. If their books are not worth anything there are ancient trades still in full operation amongst us-the pastry cooks and the trunk-makers-who must have paper.

But is there any substance in the plaint that nobody now buys books, meaning thereby second-hand books?The late Mark Pattison, who had 16000 volumes, and whose lightest word has therefore weight, once stated that he had been informed, and verily believed, that there were men of his own University of Oxford who, being in uncontrolled possession of annual incomes of not less than500,thought they were doing the thing handsomely if they expended50 a year upon their libraries. But we are not bound to believe this unless we like. There was a touch of moroseness about the late rector of Lincoln which led him to take gloomy views of men, particularly Oxford men.