re. Collectors

Collectors have risked arrest, hidden books underground and behind walls, rescued them from candle-makers and pie shops, traversed the length and breadth of countries, often blown their whole fortunes, been lonely, shivered at street bookstalls week after week and sweated as auction bids edged higher and higher. They may have been eccentric and sometime obsessive, but they saw books as doors to other worlds, and to other ways of beings, and in this they helped us to be our more extraordinary selves. Very many were idealists who collected, as Cardinal Borromeo did, in the hope that 'crude centuries may not return'