when you collect one thing you always incidentally collect others. The
fisherman who casts his net for shad usually secures a few other fish,
and once in a while a turtle, which enlarges the mesh to suit, and gives
sweet liberty to the shad. To focus exclusively on dollars is to secure
jealousy, fear, vanity, and a vaulting ambition that may claw its way
through the mesh and let your dollars slip into the yeasty deep.

Ragged Haggard and his colleague, Cave-of-the-Winds, collect bacteria;
while the fashionable young men of the day, with a few exceptions, are
collecting headaches, regrets, weak nerves, tremens, paresis--death. Of
course we shall all die (I will admit that), and further, we may be a
long time dead (I will admit that), and moreover, we may be going through
the world for the last time--as to that I do not know; but while we are
here it seems the part of reason to devote our energies to collecting
that which brings as much quiet joy to ourselves, and as little annoyance
to others, as possible.

My heart goes out to the collector. In the soul of the collector of old
books, swords, pistols, brocades, prints, clocks and bookplates, there is
only truth. If he gives you his friendship, it is because you love the
things that he loves; he has no selfish wish to use your good name to
further his own petty plans--he only asks that you shall behold, and
beholding, your eye shall glow, and your heart warm within you.

Inasmuch as we live in the age of the specialist, one man often collects
books on only one subject, Dante for instance; another, nothing but
volumes printed at Venice; another, works concerning the stage; and still
another devotes all his spare time to securing tobacco-pipes. And I am
well aware that the man who for a quarter of a century industriously
collects snuffboxes has a supreme contempt for the man who collects both