The opening quotation is from the Ethical Will of Judah ibn Tibbon, the
"father" of Jewish translators. The original is fully analyzed in an essay
by the present writer, in the _Jewish Quarterly Review_, iii, 453. See also
_ibidem_, p. 483. The Hebrew text was printed by Edelmann, and also by
Steinschneider; by the latter at Berlin, 1852.
A writer much cited in this same essay, Richard of Bury, derived his name
from his birthplace, Bury St. Edmunds. "He tells us himself in his
'Philobiblon' that he used his high offices of state as a means of
collecting books. He let it be known that books were the most acceptable
presents that could be made to him" ("Dictionary of National Biography,"
viii, 26). He was also a student of Hebrew, and collected grammars of that
language. Altogether his "Philobiblon" is an "admirable exhibition of the
temper of a book-lover." Written in the early part of the fourteenth
century, the "Philobiblon" was first published, at Cologne, in 1473. The
English edition cited in this essay is that published in the King's
Classics (De la More Library, ed. I. Gollancz).
The citation from Montaigne is from his essay on the "Three Commerces" (bk.
in, ch. iii). The same passages, in Florio's rendering, will be found in
Mr. A.R. Waller's edition (Dent's Everyman's Library), in, pp. 48-50. Of
the three "Commerces" (_i.e._ societies)--Men, Women, and Books--Montaigne
proclaims that the commerce of books "is much more solid-sure and much more
ours." I have claimed Montaigne as the great-grandson of a Spanish Jew on
the authority of Mr. Waller (Introduction, p. vii).
The paragraphs on books from the "Book of the Pious," §§ 873-932, have been
collected (and translated into English) by the Rev. Michael Adler, in an
essay called "A Medieval Bookworm" (see _The Bookworm_, ii, 251).
The full title of Mr. Alexander Ireland's book--so much drawn upon in this
essay--is "The Book-Lover's Enchiridion, a Treasury of Thoughts on the
Solace and Companionship of Books, Gathered from the Writings of the
Greatest Thinkers, from Cicero, Petrarch, and Montaigne, to Carlyle,
Emerson, and Ruskin" (London and New York, 1894).
Mr. F.M. Nichols' edition of the "Letters of Erasmus" (1901) is the source
of the quotation of one of that worthy's letters.
The final quotation comes from the Wisdom of Solomon, ch. vi. v. 12; ch.
viii. vv. 2, 16; and ch. ix. v. 4. The "radiance" of Wisdom is, in ch. vii,
26, explained in the famous words, "For she is an effulgence from
everlasting light, an unspotted mirror of the working of God, and an image
of His goodness."