Nonfiction · 1896
The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
Eugene Field was a newspaper columnist first and a book collector second, though by his own account the second habit consumed most of what the first one earned him. The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac collects his essays on the particular derangement of caring more about a book's binding, edition, and printing history than its contents — first editions chased across continents, auction rooms, dealers both honest and not, and the specific self-justifying logic of a man who cannot walk past a bookshop.
Field died in 1895, and this collection was published posthumously in 1896, drawn together from his newspaper columns; he died before writing the closing chapter he had planned, and the book appears as he left it, introduced by his brother Roswell Martin Field.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1896 text exactly as Eugene Field wrote it.
Contents
- Introduction
- I — My First Love
- II — The Birth of a New Passion
- III — The Luxury of Reading in Bed
- IV — The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me
- V — Baldness and Intellectuality
- VI — My Romance with Fiammetta
- VII — The Delights of Fender-Fishing
- VIII — Ballads and Their Makers
- IX — Booksellers and Printers, Old and New
- X — When Fanchonette Bewitched Me
- XI — Diagnosis of the Bacillus Librorum
- XII — The Pleasures of Extra-Illustration
- XIII — On the Odors Which My Books Exhale
- XIV — Elzevirs and Divers Other Matters
- XV — A Book That Brings Solace and Cheer
- XVI — The Malady Called Catalogitis
- XVII — The Napoleonic Renaissance
- XVIII — My Workshop and Others
- XIX — Our Debt to Monkish Men
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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