'Books, Books, Books'

The name I remembered but not what he had written, which is hardly unusual when the writer in question was first encountered in childhood and his readability hasn’t survived into adulthood. Very young children pay attention to the work, not its author. In this case, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” by Eugene Field (1850-95), which begins with lines I half-remember: 

“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night

  sailed off in a wooden shoe —

Sailed on a river of crystal light,

  into a sea of dew.”

 

A reader asks if I had read a prose work by Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, published posthumously in 1896. “It sounds like something you would like,” she writes. It does but isn’t. In his short life, Field assembled a personal library of some four-thousand books – not bad for a nineteenth-century Midwesterner who earned his living as a journalist and was never wealthy. His prose has a folksiness and lazy romanticism about it that is typical of its time and place, so I skimmed. I suspect Field was more collector than reader. There’s a staginess about his declarations of bookish love. It seems intimately meshed with his love of England and his cozy sense of Anglophilia:

 

“Lamb loved old books, old friends, old times; ‘he evades the present, he works at the future, and his affections revert to and settle on the past,’—so says Hazlitt. His favorite books seem to have been Bunyan’s Holy War, Browne’s Urn-Burial, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Fuller’s Worthies, and Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying. . . . there were few modern volumes in his library.”

 

Like me and generations of other readers, Field was smitten early by Robinson Crusoe. He celebrates other great readers, including Dr. Johnson and Thomas De Quincey. “Books, books, books,” he writes, “give me ever more books, for they are the caskets [poor choice of metaphor?] wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity—words, the only things that live forever! . . . For one phrase particularly do all good men, methinks, bless burly, bearish, phrase-making old Tom Carlyle. ‘Of all things,’ quoth he, ‘which men do or make here below by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.’”

 

Field writes in one of his poems, “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer”:

 

“Let my temptation be a book,

Which I shall purchase, hold, and keep,

Whereon when other men shall look,

They’ll wail to know I got it cheap.”