Cirrus@Austlit

'As one of Anthony Powell’s characters put it, books do furnish a room. It made a great title for a novel. But there comes a point where books not only furnish a room, they take it over completely. Like all addictions, book collecting has its unavoidable consequences. You may not waste away like Thomas De Quincey’s Opium Eater or pickle your liver like Jack London’s John Barleycorn, but you do have to come to terms with storage problems, and I was running out of space. Indeed I had been out of space for years. And once books reach a critical mass, they can kill, at least according to the literary record. Remember poor Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, crushed to death beneath a falling bookcase: a warning to lower-class youth of the dangers of aspiring to high culture.'  (Introduction)