Books and Libraries

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology that testifies to the passion books and libraries have inspired through the ages and around the world Books have long captured the love, imagination, even the veneration, of readers everywhere. Emily Dickinson envisions these precious objects as “Frigates” that “take us Lands away”; Alberto Rios calls them “the deli offerings of civilization itself.” This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: the libraries and bookshops where one can best hear “a choir of authors murmuring inside their books,” as Billy Collins has it. The poets collected here range from the writer of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE through such pillars of world literature as Catullus, Horace, T’ao Ch’ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pierre de Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Wordsworth; more recent luminaries include Jorge Luis Borges, C. P. Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Wallace Stevens, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Maya Angelou, and Derek Walcott. A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations, Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

ANDREW SCRIMGEOUR is Dean of Libraries Emeritus, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. He is Archivist Emeritus of the Society of Biblical Literature and the founding archivist of the American Academy of Religion. His essays and short stories have been published in The New York Times.

The Love of Books Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm” Dylan Thomas, from “Notes on the Art of Poetry” Theodore Beza, “Hayle to My Bookes” Robert William Service, “Book Lover” William Wordsworth, “Wings Have We” Emily Dickinson, “There is No Frigate Like a Book” William Shakespeare, “Sonnet XXIII” George Crabbe, from “The Library” Tsitsi Jaji, “Unaccompanied Minor” Maya Angelou, “I Love the Look of Words” Latin Proverb, “Words Fly Away” Tessa Ransford, “In Convents and Crypts” Henry Vaughan, “To His Books” John Donne, “A Valediction of the Book” Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Book, II)” Lynn Powell, “Sword Drill” Tony Harrison, “Book Ends”   All Sorts of Readers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “There Are Only Four Kinds of Readers” Louis MacNeice, “The British Museum Reading Room” Stephen Kuusisto, “Night Seasons” Coventry Patmore “The Revelation” Hilaire René Belloc, “On His Books” Anonymous, “A Description of a College Room” Pierre de Ronsard, “To His Valet” T’ao Ch’ien, “Reading the Book of Hills and Seas” Muddupalani, “How to Read a Book” Paul Valéry, “The Angel Handed Me a Book” Czeslaw Milosz, “Father in the Library”   Turning the Page Billy Collins, “Books” David S. Herrstrom, “Sacred Books” Stephen Dunn, “The Book and I” Charles Bukowski, “They Arrived in Time” Dante, from Inferno Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Supernatural Love” John Burnside, “September Evening: Deer at Big Basin” Yi Sha, “Sunday” Flavio Santi, “Dear Mary” Juan Manuel Roca, “The Library of the Blind” Mona Van Duyn, “In Bed with a Book” Iku Takenaka, “My Books Mel Pryor, “In a Secondhand Bookshop” Agi Mishol, “Poetry Reading” C.P. Cavafy, “Very Rarely” Derek Walcott, “This Page is a Cloud” Jean Sprackland, “The Girl Who Ate Books” John Glenday, “For My Wife, Reading in Bed”   Discovering Reading Joyce Sutphen, “Things You Didn’t Put on Your Résumé” Julia Alvarez, “Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library Laurie L. Patton, “On Learning a Sacred Language in Childhood” Lewis Carroll, “What is the Use of a Book?” Patricia Hooper, “The World Book Margarita Engle, “Tula [“Books are door-shaped”]”   Celebrating Individual Books and Authors Andrew Marvell, “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’” John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer W. H. Auden, “Auden on Montaigne” Ivor Gurney, “George Chapman – The Illiad” R. S. Thomas, “Henry James” Jorge Luis Borges, “On Acquiring an Encyclopedia” Ezra Pound, “Cantico del Sole” Andrew D. Scrimgeour, “Winter Pages” Siegfried Sassoon, “To an Eighteenth Century Poet” Joseph Brodsky, from “Elegy for John Donne” Giovanni Boccaccio, “Boccaccio Sends Petrarch a Copy of Dante” Anne Stevenson, “Re-reading Jane” Wendy Cope, “My Father’s Shakespeare”   Because of Libraries Alberto Rios, “Don’t Go into the Library” J. K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets William E. Gladstone, “Books Are a Delightful Society” Liz Lochhead, “Random” Yuriy Andrukhovych, “Library” Kostas Koutsourelis, “Library” Laurynas Katkus, “On the Sixth Floor” Jill Osier, “Elegy” Robert L. Chapman, “Library” Rosemary Griebel, “Library” Naomi Shihab Nye, “Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things" Alasdair Paterson, “On the Library” William Cowper, from “An Ode Addressed” Walt Whitman, “Shut Not Your Doors to Me Proud Libraries” Frederick Buechner, “Holy a Place” Gerald Stern, “Stepping Out of Poetry” Lesbia Harford, “Closing Time: Public Library” Abraham Cowley, “Mr. Cowley’s Book Presenting It Selfe” Margaret Cavendish, “Fame’s Library within the Temple” John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Library” Gillian Clarke, “In a Cardiff Arcade” U. A. Fanthorpe, “In the English Faculty Library, Oxford” James Russell Lowell, “Literature for Desolate Islands” Ian McMillan, “Adult Fiction”   Always the Librarians Joseph Mills, “If Librarians Were Honest” Andy Jackson, “Enquiry Desk” Rita Dove, “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967” William Mcllvanney, “In the Library” Nikki Giovanni, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long” Sean O’Brien, “The Beautiful Librarians” John Holland, “On the Death of Esther Caterer” Philip Metres, “Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker’s Stroke”   The Writing of Books Wislawa Szymborska, “The Joy of Writing” Durs Grünbein, “On Learning Old Vocabulary” Amit Majmudar, “Vocative” Alicia Ostriker, from Ars Poetica Gabriela Mistral, “The Teller of Tales” Alexander Pope, “Sound and Sense” Philippe Jaccottet, from “Songs from Below” Ilya Kaminksky, “Author’s Prayer” William Blake, from Songs of Innocence Les Murray, “The Privacy of Typewriters” Li Sen, “Confronting Nujiang” William Stafford, “A Writer’s Fountain Pen Talking” Odia Ofeimun, “I Am a Writer,” Petrarch, from Canzoniere 1, “O You Who Hear” Gaius Valerius Catullus, “To Whom Shall I Offer this Book?” William Butler Yeats, “Where My Words Go” Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book” Marcus Valerius Martialis, “Epigrams 1,3, “My Little Book” Horace, Ode 3.30, “More Lasting than Bronze” Guido Cavalcanti, “Sonnet XVIII” Uejima Onitsura, Untitled haiku Johann W. Goethe, “Authors” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Poet and His Songs” Callimachus, “The Very First Time”   Marginalia John F. M. Doraston, “The Bookworm” Robert Burns, “The Book-Worms” Evenus, “Page-eater” Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh Ben Jonson, “To My Book-seller” Thomas Hornsby Ferril, “Bookmarks” Tarannum Riyaz, “The Scent of Old Books” Robert Herrick, “Make Haste Away” Udava R. Tennakoon, “Books Up on Books” Decimus Ausonius, “You’ve Bought Books” Eugene Field, “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer” Andrew Lang, “Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise” Adilia Lopes, “I Don’t Like Books” Lope de Vega, “So Many Books” Ecclesiastes 12:11-12, “The Sayings of the Wise” Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”   Rethinking Books and Libraries Frank Osen, “Bookshop Shopping” Douglas Dunn, “December’s Door” Joe Lucia, “The Afterlife of Libraries” Bertolt Brecht, “The Book Burnings” Michael Symmons Roberts, “The Future of Books” Elaine Equi, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn”   Index of Authors