'A Collection of Good Books'

“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.” Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statement or evidence of “interleckchul” (Flannery O’Connor’s spelling) status are comically pretentious. Aldous Huxley published his essay “If My Library Burned Tonight” in the November 1947 issue of House and Garden magazine (!). He posits a fire that destroys his library: “[A]s an emergency measure, in the first few weeks after our hypothetical fire, I shall buy myself only the most indispensable aids to mental health and security.” Many of Huxley’s choices are admirably predictable: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, Dante. He doesn’t select obscure titles merely to show off – a common scam among bloggers and other readers. Nor does he sanctify even those he chooses: “There will be Wordsworth because he is one of the forces of nature, and this in spite of the…