Brothers in Spirit. Some Notes on the How-to of Book Collecting

John Ferguson (1838–1916) & Duke August the Younger (1579–1666)People collect books for different reasons: out of interest in certain topics, out of bibliophile passion or to accumulate cultural capital. And books can be like elixirs. As the poet John Milton so poignantly put it in Areopagitica (1644): ‘Books are not absolutely dead things (...), they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.’ Everything suggests that books are more...