A. Edward Newton
Alfred Edward Newton (1864—1940) was an American author, publisher, and avid book collector. He is best known for his book Amenities of Book Collecting (1918), which sold over 25,000 copies.
Over a collecting career that covered more than four decades, Newton assembled a library especially rich in British literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Yale) and Robert B. Adam (Buffalo) he fostered an interest in the English neoclassical writers, especially Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, at a time when their works were largely ignored. Newton promoted them by writing about them and by purchasing first editions of their works. His love of books encompassed the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries as well. As a prominent collector widely known for his magazine articles and colorful public persona, he played a central role in the great boom in book collecting, or "this book-collecting game," as he called it, which peaked between about 1910 and 1930.
At the time of his death, it was estimated that Newton had approximately 10,000 books in his collection, focusing on English and American literary works, the major part of which were auctioned by Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York in April, May, and October 1941. Highlights of the sale included the autograph manuscripts of Thomas Hardy's novel Far From the Madding Crowd and Charles Lamb's essay Dream Children. However, the fall in rare book prices steadily through the Great Depression meant that many sold lots brought only a fraction of prices they would have realized at the time of the Jerome Kern sale in 1929. The three volume Newton sale catalogue remains a useful reference for literature collectors.
“Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.”
“The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity...”
“My depth of purse is not so greatNor yet my bibliophilic greed,That merely buying doth elate:The books I buy I like to read:Still e'en when dawdling in a mead,Beneath a cloudless summer sky,By bank of Thames, or Tyne, or Tweed,The books I read — I like to buy.”
“There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something.”
“Who was it who said, "I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish?" Whoever it was, I agree with him.”