ABSTRACT
As a librarian I have spent most of my life glancing with a rather jaundiced eye at the ranges upon ranges of books which have passed by my door on their way to the library shelves. It is one of the frustrations, of course, of any librarian’s life that most of these books must remain unread, or at the most must be glimpsed in the kaleidoscope of bibliographic wonder which makes up a library’s book collection. Again, a commonplace in the academic conversation is the complaint that no scholar can possibly have more than a passing acquaintance with the enormous number of books which appear in his field of academic interest. It is my opinion, however, that much of this complaint of a surfeit of reading materials, this frustration because of quantity, is a matter of posturing rather than actuality. It is somehow fashionable for the scholar, the librarian, to feel sorry for himself because of the vast quantity of material he must survey. This attitude, as a matter of fact, represents in a way the sort of thing defined by Benedictine monks as “over-scrupulosity,” as a conscious form of humility, which when it is examined carefully, may be found not to represent humility at all, but instead a variety of pride.
