The Project Gutenberg EBook of On Books and the Housing of Them, by
William Ewart Gladstone

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Title: On Books and the Housing of Them

Author: William Ewart Gladstone

Posting Date: February 15, 2009 [EBook #3426]
Release Date: September, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Charles Hall

ON BOOKS AND THE HOUSING OF THEM

By William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)

In the old age of his intellect (which at this point seemed to taste
a little of decrepitude), Strauss declared [1] that the doctrine of
immortality has recently lost the assistance of a passable argument,
inasmuch as it has been discovered that the stars are inhabited; for
where, he asks, could room now be found for such a multitude of souls?
Again, in view of the current estimates of prospective population for
this earth, some people have begun to entertain alarm for the probable
condition of England (if not Great Britain) when she gets (say) seventy
millions that are allotted to her against six or eight hundred millions
for the United States. We have heard in some systems of the pressure of
population upon food; but the idea of any pressure from any quarter upon
space is hardly yet familiar. Still, I suppose that many a reader must
have been struck with the naive simplicity of the hyperbole of St. John,
[2] perhaps a solitary unit of its kind in the New Testament: "the
which if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world
itself could not contain the books that should be written."

A book, even Audubon (I believe the biggest known), is smaller than a
man; but, in relation to space, I entertain more proximate apprehension
of pressure upon available space from the book population than from
the numbers of mankind. We ought to recollect, with more of a realized
conception than we commonly attain to, that a book consists, like a
man, from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul. They are not
always proportionate to each other. Nay, even the different members
of the book-body do not sing, but clash, when bindings of a profuse
costliness are imposed, a