And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?
New Year's Eve Esaays of Elia (1823)
I have frequently thought of Lamb when people talk about the loss of books and the rise of e-books. Not that Lamb would have wanted e-books. The point is Lamb would not have wanted what we call books. A paperback would have been, I suspect, as repellant to him as an e-book.
I used to encounter an old professor in the stacks when I was a grad student. On the several occasions when I was carrying an eighteenth century book, he would say to me, "Ah, I see you have a real book."
