Oktober

October (also known as Octobre), 1877 

James Tissot 

“October, baptize me with leaves! 

Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse 

me with split pea soup. October, tuck 

tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve 

my smile into a thousand pumpkins. 

O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”

                              Rainbow Rowell

Jag håller med om allt Rainbow Rowell säger — men hon glömde något av det viktigaste, något som James Tissot kom ihåg. Boken! Hur skulle man annars komma igenom en dag som denna, då det blåser och regnar‽
 I dag väljer jag en bok som jag hittat hos Gutenberg: "In the Track of the Bookworm, av Irving Browne". Det finns inte mycket att läsa om honom på nätet, kanske därför att han tycks ha varit en anspråkslös man, vilket framgår av en dödsruna:

Died, Feb. 6, 1899, Irving Browne, aged 58 years.

Irving Browne was not a great man as the world counts such. He was too generous to ever become rich, and he did not grow famous at the practice of law, simply because he had a bad habit of considering the position of the other fellow. Irving Browne was an excellent lawyer, but a poor practitioner. "You can not have both the law and the profits," he once said. And perhaps that is enough. Irving Browne possessed the heart of a true Collector — tender, sympathetic, kind. He made no pretense of loving his enemies — he had none.

Physically, Irving Browne was frail and slight; his manner mild and gentle; but in his breast there dwelt a lions heart: not even Death could fright him. He went down in the shadow without a tremor, & when too weak to speak aloud, feebly pressed my  hand and whispered Mercutio's pun, "It's a grave subject!" and smiled with the mist of death in his eyes. Conscious, sane, grateful — he was, to the very moment when his spirit took its flight.

He was the incarnation of Charles Lamb in instinct, wit and disposition, and to the day of his death carried with him the buoyant, lavish heart of youth.

Earth is poorer for the passing of Irving Browne.

                                                                       E. H.

Dessutom hittade jag ett kort stycke om honom här.

Rolig var han också, med en lågmäld underfundig humor, som först fick mig att undra om han var en tråkig och trångsynt stofil. Men jag insåg snabbt att han skrev med glimten i ögat — eller möjligtvis i pennan.

WOMEN AS COLLECTORS.

Women collect all sorts of  things except books. To them the book-sense seems to be denied, and it is difficult for them to appreciate its existence in men. To be sure, there have been a few celebrated book-collectors among the fair sex, but they have usually been rather reprehensible ladies, like Diane de Poictiers and Madame Pompadour. Probably Aspasia was a collector of MSS. Lady Jane Grey seems to have been a virtuous exception, and she was cruelly “cropped.” I am told that there are a few women now-a-days who collect books, and only a few weeks ago a lady read, before a woman’s club in Chicago, a paper on the Collection and Adornment of Books, for which occasion a fair member of the club solicited me to write her something appropriate to read, which of course I was glad to do. But this was in Chicago, where the women go in for culture. In thirty years’ haunting of the book-shops and print-shops of New York, I have never seen a woman catching a cold in her head by turning over the large prints, nor soiling her dainty gloves by handling the dirty old books. Women have been depicted in literature in many different occupations, situations and pleasures, but in all the literature that I have[Pg 37] read I can recall only one instance in which she is imagined a book-buyer. This is in “The Sentimental Journey,”

Perfekt oktoberläsning!

THE ARRANGEMENT OF BOOKS.


There was a time when I loved to see my books arranged with a view to uniformity of height and harmony of color without respect to subjects. That time I regard as my vealy period  That was the time when we admired “Somnambula,” and when the housewife used to have all the pictures hung on the same level, and to buy vases in pairs exactly alike and put them on either side of the parlor clock, which was generally surmounted by a prancing Saracen or a weaving Penelope. Granting that a collection is not extensive enough to demand a strict arrangement by subjects, I like to see a little artistic confusion—high and low together here and there, like a democratic community; now and then some giants laid down on their sides to rest; the shelves not uniformly filled out as if the owner never expected to buy any more, and alongside a dainty Angler a book in red or blue cloth with a white label—just as childred in velvet and furs sit next a newsboy, or a little girl in calico with a pigtail at Sunday School, or as beggars and princes kneel side by side on the cathedral pavement. It is good to have these “swell” books rub up against the commoners, which though not so elegant are frequently a great deal brighter. At a country[Pg 106] funeral I once heard the undertaker say to the bearers, “size yourselves off.” There is no necessity or artistic gain in such a ceremony in a library, and a departure from stiff uniformity is quite agreeable  Then I do not care to have the book cases all of the same height, nor even of the same kind of wood, nor to have them all “dwarfs,” with bric-a-brac on the top. I would rather have more books on top  In short, it is pleasant to have the collection remind one in a way of Topsy—not that it was “born,” but “growed” and is expected to grow more  There is a modern notion of considering a library as a room rather than as a collection of books, and of making the front drawing-room the library, which is heretical in the eyes of a true Book-Worm. This is probably an invention of the women of the house to prevent any additions to the books without their knowledge, and to discourage book-buying. We have surrendered too much to our wives in this; they demand book cases as furniture and to serve as shelves, without any regard to the interior contents or whether there are any, except for the color of the bindings and the regularity of the rows. All of us have thus seen “libraries” without books worthy the name, and book-cases sometimes with exquisite silk curtains, carefully and closely drawn, arousing the suspicion that there were no[Pg 107] books behind them  My ideal library is a room given up to books, all by itself, at the top or in the rear of the house, where “company” cannot break through and say to me, “I know you are a great man to buy books—have you seen that beautiful limited holiday edition of Ben Hur, with illustrations?” 
Jag som tänkt vara huslig i dag — därav blev intet, men trevligt har jag det!

bookworm (n.)

1590s, "person devoted to study;" by 1713 in reference to the larvae of certain insects that eat holes in the bindings and paper of old books; see book (n.) + worm (n.). There is no single species known by this name, which is applied to the larvae of the anobium beetle (woodworm), silverfish, and booklice.