ABSTRACT
In his late autobiographical work, Suspiria de Profundis, Thomas De Quincey tells a story about an incident in a bookshop when he was about seven which, he says, had a profound effect on the subsequent development of his adult psyche. The situation calls to De Quincey mind a story from the Arabian Nights, the retelling of which completes this sequence. Elsewhere in his writings De Quincey expresses a similarly profound concern for the proliferation of books. Since the invention of the steam press, De Quincey thinks, there are simply too many books. The two responses to books and book acquisition outlined in De Quincey works conform to two strands in the wider culture of books and book collecting at the time. The Oxford English Dictionary cites usages of the term bibliomania through the eighteenth century, but it becomes newly fashionable around the 1810s.
