On Reading, Writing and Living with Books by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf [PUSHKIN PRESS — THE LONDON LIBRARY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782272618
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2016-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

The oldest and most worn-out woodcut, representing King Pippin, Goody Two Shoes, or the grim Soldan, sitting with three staring blots for his eyes and mouth, his sceptre in one hand, and his other five fingers raised and spread in admiration at the feats of the Gallant London ‘Prentice, cannot excite in me a feeling of ingratitude. Cooke’s edition of the British Poets and Novelists came out when I was at school: for which reason I never could put up with Suttaby’s or Walker’s publications, except in the case of such works as the Fairy Tales: which Mr. Cooke did not publish. Besides, they are too cramped, thick, and mercenary; and the pictures are all frontispieces. They do not come in at the proper places. Cooke realised the old woman’s beau ideal of a prayer-book—“A little book, with a great deal of matter, and a large type”:—for the type was really large for so small a volume. Shall I ever forget his Collins and his Gray, books at once so “superbly ornamented” and so inconceivably cheap? Sixpence could procure much before; but never could it procure so much as then, or was at once so much respected, and so little cared for. His artist Kirk was the best artist, except Stothard, that ever designed for periodical works; and I will venture to add (if his name rightly announces his country) the best artist Scotland ever produced, except Wilkie, but he unfortunately had not enough of his country in him to keep him from dying young. His designs for Milton and the Arabian Nights, his female extricated from the water in the Tales of the Genii, and his old hag issuing out of the chest of the Merchant Abadah in the same book, are before me now, as vividly as they were then. He possessed elegance and the sense of beauty in no ordinary degree; though they sometimes played a trick or so of foppery. I shall never forget the gratitude with which I received an odd number of Akenside, value sixpence, one of the set of that poet, which a boarder distributed among three or four of us, “with his mother’s compliments.” The present might have been more lavish, but I hardly thought of that. I remember my number. It was the one in which there was a picture of the poet on a sofa, with Cupid coming to him, and the words underneath, “Tempt me no more, insidious love!” The picture and the number appeared to me equally divine. I cannot help thinking to this day, that it is right and natural in a gentleman to sit in a stage dress, on that particular kind of sofa, though on no other, with that exclusive hat and feathers on his head, telling Cupid to be gone, with a tragic air.

I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books. The idea of an ancient library perplexes our sympathy by its map-like volumes, rolled upon cylinders. Our

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