“A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.“About what?”He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”“The books?”He nodded.“Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and — Here! Lemme show you.”Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

“That's the question isn't it? Is Henry Blaire real? Its definitely what I get asked the most. And all I can say is -- what do you define as real? The pages of the book are real, so therefore he is too.”

“It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas [Aquinas] that he loved books and lived on books ... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.”

“What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.”

“What can you do with a person who says that he is absolutely uncertain about everything, and that he is absolutely certain about that?”

“He walked among the bookstore shelves, hearing Muzak in the air. There were rows of handsome covers, prosperous and assured. He felt a fine excitement, hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains the air around them.”