I was a bookseller for 6 years and I've been a reader my whole life! I love reading books about books and have a few in my library waiting for my attention.
Quotes
from Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham (published in 2024)
Books
Books remind us of the brutal follies of tyrants, big and small. They teach us that knowledge is an ongoing process, not a fixed set of givens. (Page 9)
a book is—to quote the poet John Milton—a human spirit treasured up for a life beyond life. If the Nazis were to succeed in utterly wiping a people from the Earth, they would have to destroy their books as well. (Page 10)
The event was reportedly a bit of a farce, since books don’t actually burn very well; the fires took an embarrassingly long time to get going and, afterward, books were retrieved from the piles barely charred. But people around the world recognized the threat for what it was, and they protested vehemently against the conflagration. (Page 10)
"You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.” (Page 10)
a new field arose in both literature and history departments called book history, the study of the material history of texts. It is a discipline saturated with mourning—with a moral urgency to recover lost worlds from the documents those worlds left behind. (Page 359)