It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.