When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.
George Orwell - Bookshop Memories (1936)
For myself, public libraries possess a special horror, as of lonely wastes and dragon-haunted fens. The stillness and the heavy air, the feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these other readers, “all silent and all damned,” combine to set up a nervous irritation fatal to quiet study.
Kenneth Grahame – Pagan Papers (1894)
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