Sit bona librorum copia. – Horace (There are plenty of good books. Let me have a good supply of books.)

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Catalogues of imaginary libraries are an obscure but fruitful area of collecting. The tradition of imaginary books, which exist only within other books, goes back at least to Rabelais, who invented a list of book titles for the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Gargantua and Pantagruel (c.1532). – Emi Hastings, “Catalogues of Imaginary Libraries,” 2014

Through all of my youth these books were my companions, and now, as I write these lines, after sixty years, they still look down upon me with their old friendliness. – James L. Whitney, “Reminiscences of an Old Librarian,” November 1909