'How Magnificent the Language!'

Fifty-one years ago I was working as a clerk in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, perhaps the best job I ever had though my six-day-a-week paycheck never topped the double digits. One of the stockrooms in the basement was situated under the bar adjacent to the bookstore – the Domino Lounge. You could hear patrons talking and dancing, the juke box, running water and flushing toilets. Here was kept the overstock of such paperback imprints as Noonday, Vintage and Signet. I see from the date I wrote on the front endpaper that on August 30, 1975 I purchased The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, edited by Norman J. Endicott as part of the Anchor Seventeenth-Century Series. Along with Rasselas, Pascal’s Pensées and Ulysses, it is the most heavily annotated and underlined volume I own. I pulled down the Browne collection recently after rereading Dr. Oliver Sacks’ essay “On Libraries.” He recalls his love of the Queens College library at Oxford: “[I]t was in the stacks that I found and fell in love…