You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self. The knowledge that they are there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have to read them all. Some of them twice. This reply is both true and unexpected.
Books are of the people, by the people, for the people.
Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. William Lyon Phelps - 1933 Home .