Each Book Was A World Unto Itself,

Not Until I Came To Canada Did I Realize That Snow Was A Four-letter Word.

It Has Always Been My Experience That, Whatever Groupings I Choose For My Books, The Space In Which I Plan To Lodge Them Necessarily Reshapes My Choice And, More Important, In No Time Proves Too Small For Them And Forces Me To Change My Arrangement. In A Library, No Empty Shelf Remains Empty For Long. Like Nature, Libraries Abhor A Vacuum, And The Problem Of Space Is Inherent In The Very Nature Of Any Collection Of Books.

The Shelves Of Books We Haven't Written, Like Those Of Books We Haven't Read, Stretches Out Into The Darkness Of The Universal Library's Farthest Space. We Are Always At The Beginning Of The Beginning Of The Letter A.

We Can Roam The Bloated Stacks Of The Library Of Alexandria, Where All Imagination And Knowledge Are Assembled; We Can Recognize In Its Destruction The Warning That All We Gather Will Be Lost, But Also That Much Of It Can Be Collected Again; We Can Learn From Its Splendid Ambition That What Was One Man's Experience Can Become, Through The Alchemy Of Words, The Experience Of All, And How That Experience, Distilled Once Again Into Words, Can Serve Each Singular Reader For Some Secret, Singular Purpose.

As Centuries Of Dictators Have Known, An Illiterate Crowd Is The Easiest To Rule; Since The Craft Of Reading Cannot Be Untaught Once It Has Been Acquired, The Second-best Recourse Is To Limit Its Scope.