Our book today is the inimitably-titled little 1896 masterpiece by Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, and you only have to open it at random to any page in order to be ushered immediately into the living presence of its quirky, funny, utterly adorable author. Should ill chance ever land you in Denver, Colorado, you can go to the quaint house Field occupied while he was editor of the Denver Tribune (although it’s not where he occupied it, since, in a bit of a long story, the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown had it moved after his death); you can politely walk through its rooms and peer at its placards, and you can do the same thing with half a dozen other sites throughout the Midwest dedicated to Field’s memory, and if you’re the perceptive type (this would make you a rarity among those forlorn folk who find National Historical Sites interesting, but you never can tell), you’ll readily intuit from the number of such sites that the man was well-remembered, possibly even well-loved. You’ll have no idea how right that intuition is, however, until you go not to where he used to live but to where he lives still: his books.

He was most famous in his day for his gently funny newspaper columns (he poked more fun at Boston than any Amherst man should be allowed to do, but he knew every street and bookshop of the Hub, and his teasing was done with affection) and especially his children’s poetry such as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue.” But all the while he was turning out such stuff, he was also writing essays about the world of books, and those essays, collected in Love Affairs of a Biliomaniac, form his most charming work. Not his most personal – that would be Notes from the Sabine Farm, his antiquated but utterly convincing meditation on his beloved Horace; and not his most enduring – those silly little poems are all of him that endures; but his most charming.

In these pieces, he rambles through the Republic of Letters as his fancy takes him, now talking about book-collecting, now recounting the time he failed to buy anything at a particular shop because Gladsone had come in right before him and bought every single book in the place, now eulogizing some one of his favorite writers, be it Izaak Walton or Cicero or Boswell. Like many a book-person before and after him, he had quiet (sleepy?) praise for one particular reading habit:

Observation has convinced me that all good and true book-lovers practise the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed. Indeed, I fully believe … that no book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.

And since he himself was hopelessly infected with what he called the “bacillus librorum” – and since he lived long before the advent of the electronic reader (an invention he would have hailed as a godsend, as all real readers must do), he also did his full share of the activity that’s been associated with bibliomania from the beginning – lugging around:

As for myself, I never go away from home that I do not take a trunkful of books with me, for experience has taught me that there is no companionship better than that of these friends who, however much all things else may vary, always give the same response to my demands upon their solace and their cheer.

At several points in Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, he simply stops what he’s doing and launches into a passionate address, as besotted lovers will tend to do, and they not only always ring true, they’re always delightfully dorky:

And thou, homely little brown thing with worn leaves, yet more precious to me than all jewels of the earth – come, let me take thee from thy shelf and hold thee lovingly in my hands and press thee tenderly to this aged and slow-pulsing heart of mine! Dost thou remember how I found thee half a century ago all tumbled in a lot of paltry trash? Did I not joyously possess thee for a sixpence, and have I not cherished thee full sweetly all these years?

It’s impossible to read an outburst like that and not glance immediately at one’s own homeliest volumes, rescued from lots of trash and treasured for years. Nothing would have pleased Field greater than to know that one of his own books could be among that number.