"Circulating library" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man, then, grew prematurely old in reading, year out year in, aloud to Mr. Demetrius, one after another, all the German translations of French novels procurable at Robert Lempel's circulating library without understanding a single word of them. Mr. Demetrius had, naturally, no library of his own, for reading to him, in his condition, was pretty much the same as medicine, and who would ever think of keeping a dispensary on his own ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... hair was not dressed; and her lace cap was all on one side. The upper part of her was clothed in a loose jacket of blue merino; the lower part was robed in a dimity dressing gown of doubtful white. In one hand, she held a dirty dogs'-eared book, which I at once detected to be a Circulating Library novel. Her other hand supported a baby enveloped in flannel, sucking at her breast. Such was my first experience of Reverend Finch's Wife—destined to be also the experience of all aftertime. Never completely dressed; never completely dry; always with a baby in one hand and a novel in ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his neighbours for a great scholar, if Hudibras and Baker's Chronicle, Tarlton's Jests and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among the fishing rods and fowling pieces. No circulating library, no book society, then existed even in the capital: but in the capital those students who could not afford to purchase largely had a resource. The shops of the great booksellers, near Saint Paul's Churchyard, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... spellbound over the Greek Bible of antiquity, whilst they wade through torrents of magazine quotations from a petty versifier of to-day, and in an idle vacation will graze, as contentedly as cattle in a fresh meadow, through the chopped straw of a circulating library. A generation which will listen to "Pinafore" for three hundred nights, and will read M. Zola's seventeenth romance, can no more read Homer than it could read a cuneiform inscription. It will read about Homer just ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... loss how to spend their time. They had nothing to do. They pestered Mr. Korley to bring them up the last novels. But his mind was too full of stocks; he always forgot the novels. On Saturday he went over to Newtown, hearing there was a circulating library there. He found the sign, but no books. "I had some books once," the proprietor explained, "but the Wheathedge folks carried them all off and never returned them." Thus it happened that when the week after my visit to the free reading-room, I met Mr. Korley on board the train, ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... ridiculous yearly sum of ten-and-six (it was all he could rise to) Ransome had become a member of the Poly. Ten-and-six threw open to him every year the Poly. Gym., the Poly. Swimming Bath, and the Poly. Circulating Library. For ten-and-six he could further command the services (once a week) of the doctor attached to the Poly. and ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... your anger, which I have now excited (for have I not questioned the perfection of your darling?); the storm may pass over me. Nevertheless, I will, when I can (I do not know when that will be, as I have no access to a circulating library), diligently peruse all Miss Austen's works, as you recommend.... You must forgive me for not always being able to think as you do, and still believe ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... of three or four days, at the most a week, which John occasionally spent at Thornby Place, were necessarily ephemeral, and the weakness of Mrs Norton's sight rendered continuous reading impossible. Sometimes Kitty Hare brought a novel from the circulating library to read aloud, and sometimes John forgot one of his books, and a volume of Browning still lay on the table. The room was filled with shadow and mournfulness, and in a dusty grate the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... be sure, knew all about this unwelcome visitor. They went with bottles and jugs secretly to bring him what he wanted; they went to the circulating library for him; they let him in when he had been out in the twilight all shabby and slovenly. They would not be human if they did not talk about him. They say he is very good-natured, poor gentleman—always has a pleasant word—is nobody's enemy but his own; and to see how "the ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... summer resorts. It is probably of the innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the heroes' hands open. On every seat one found them poring upon the glowing page, and met them ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... Robeson Hamilton (b. 1820), State Librarian of New Jersey, was descendant of John Hamilton, acting Governor of New Jersey (d. 1746). John Cochrane Wilson (1828-1905), Librarian of the Law Library of the Equitable Life Assurance Company. Miss Catherine Wolf Bruce established a Free Circulating Library in Forty-second Street in memory of her father, George Bruce the type-founder, in 1888. It is now a branch of the ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... teacher at the Conservatory in the neighbouring town of Darmstadt, and was engaged. He found it an arduous and not too profitable post. He has described it as "a dreary town, where the pupils studied music with true German placidity." They procured all their music from a circulating library, where the choice of novelties was limited to late editions of the classics and a good deal of sheer trash, poor dance music and the like. His work, which was unmitigated drudgery, consumed forty ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... Ralph had a private table, at which Cheditafa and Mok assisted in waiting, and Mrs. Cliff had taught both of them how to dust and keep rooms in order. Sometimes Ralph sent Mok to a circulating library. Having once been shown the place, and made to understand that he must deliver there the piece of paper and the books to be returned, he attended to the business as intelligently as if he had been a trained ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... prayer-meetings. When, however, a Sunday or two before, he had the assurance to preach a funeral sermon, to "improve the death"—such being his impressive phrase—of a Miss Snooks, (who had kept a circulating library in the neighborhood, but had not been a member of his congregation;) and who, having been to the theatre on the Thursday night, was taken ill of a bowel attack on the Friday, and was a "lifeless corpse when the next Sabbath dawned"—you ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... myself to sleep with La Dame de Monsoreau, which I have procured from the circulating library in the Rue Alphonse Karr—(the literary horticulturist is the genius loci and the godfather of my landlady)—and I will empty flagons with Pere Gorenflot and ride on errands of life and death with Chicot, prince ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Moreover, now and then, one must go to buy tobacco, a matter one can trust to no hireling, lest he get it dry. It cannot be always seaside, even as it cannot be always May, and through the gaps thought creeps in. Going over the cliff and along the parade, and down by the circulating library to the cigar divan, where they sell Parique tobacco, the swinging of one's legs seems to act like a pendulum to the clockwork of one's brain. One meditates all the way, and chiefly on how few people ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... privacy is secured throughout the whole arrangement of the Institution. On this floor are the suites of offices, parlors, and private consultation-rooms, some fifteen in all; also a well furnished reading-room and circulating library, for the use of the inmates of the Institution. On all sides are beautifully frescoed walls adorned with numerous choice engravings and other pictures. All the rooms throughout the house are furnished in the best of style, and in a manner to afford ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... to any place within a hundred miles of London, and in one day they can be examined, discussed, and returned—at any rate, in theory. The mistress of the house has all her local tradesmen, all the great London shops, the circulating library, the theatre box-office, the post-office and cab-rank, the nurses' institute and the doctor, within reach of her hand. The instrument we may confidently expect to improve, but even now speech is perfectly clear and distinct over several hundred miles of wire. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... we had no pigskin library or five-foot shelf of sleep-producers, but each member had some favorite books in his cabin, and they helped to form a circulating library. ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... to me that for the present season he had rented a corner of the wagon as a book-store, which, as he wittily observed, was a true circulating library, since there were few parts of the country where it had not gone its rounds. I approved of the plan exceedingly, and began to sum up within my mind the many uncommon felicities in the life of a book-pedler, especially when his character resembled that of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "Chronicle." This is a proof that nothing can be said against my argument requiring a serious answer. Gladstone felt ashamed of the review. It has helped the book; but it would be read even without this and the recommendation of the "Guardian"—so Longman says. One circulating library here has taken twenty-five copies, and wants more. So the book cannot be ignored; and that is all I first of all wished for, aculeum reliqui. As the people of this country, with a few exceptions that one can ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... believe it was the only one among us, and it had edified, as Mr Binder the bookseller used to say, at least three successive generations of young ladies, for he had himself given it twice new covers. We had, however, not then any circulating library. But for all her antiquity and lappets, it is not to be supposed what respect and deference Miss Jenny and her brother, the laird, received—nor the small praise that came to my share, for having had the spirit to invite them. The ball was spoken of as the genteelest ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... without being able to obtain a sight of any periodical whatever; and such would assuredly be our case, as, in the little wild moorland village where we reside, there would be no possibility of borrowing a work of that description from a circulating library. I hope with you that the present delightful weather may contribute to the perfect restoration of our dear papa's health; and that it may give aunt pleasant reminiscences of the salubrious climate ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... were sometimes glad to take refuge in the Scottish scenery and the pictorial Vicar during that interval of dulness and indigestion which succeeds a middle-class dinner. Georgy read a great many books; but they were all novels, procured from the Bayswater branch of a fashionable circulating library, and were condemned unread by Mr. Sheldon, who considered all works of fiction perfectly equal in demerit, and stigmatised them, in a general way, as "senseless trash." He had tried to read novels in the dreary days of his Bloomsbury probation; but ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... only in the city itself, but all over England: the railroads have extended their business very greatly. In order to satisfy as many customers as possible, they buy some works by hundreds. For instance, such a circulating library has two hundred copies of Macaulay's History, a hundred of Layard's Nineveh, a hundred of Cumming's hunting adventures, and so on. When the first excitement about a book is over, these extra copies ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... pages as another man; and one of his pages is as tedious as another man's three. His book is swelled to its vast dimensions by endless repetitions, by episodes which have nothing to do with the main action, by quotations from books which are in every circulating library, and by reflections which, when they happen to be just, are so obvious that they must necessarily occur to the mind of every reader. He employs more words in expounding and defending a truism than any other writer would employ in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... window the notable characters whom Allan pointed out to him in the Edinburgh Exchange. He now removed to a better shop, and set up for his sign the heads of Ben Jonson and Drummond, who agreed better in figure than they had done in reality at Hawthornden. He established the first circulating library in Scotland. His shop became a centre of intelligence, and Ramsay sat a Triton among the minnows of that rather mediocre day —giving his little senate laws, and inditing verses, songs, and fables. At forty-five—an ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... others' houses, or at least a sort of how-d'ye-do acquaintance. The case was otherwise. The attorney and the doctor joined our society that their families of ten or twelve sons and daughters might keep under the sixpences and shillings of the circulating library; but they soon became jealous of new books, although they often returned them uncut and unread; and so far from knitting the bonds of acquaintance, we at last thought our plan served to estrange the members, by affording the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... house, and his needs and habits are of the simplest kind. What does he or his daughter know of the great worldly theory of necessities, the great worldly scale of pleasures? Miss Blunt's only luxuries are a subscription to the circulating library, and an occasional walk on the beach, which, like one of Miss Bronte's heroines, she paces in company with an old Newfoundland dog. I am afraid she is sadly ignorant. She reads nothing but novels. I am bound to believe, however, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... universally read—not merely by the highly educated portion of the community, for they are able to judge for themselves; but read by every tradesman and mechanic; pored over even by milliners' girls, and boys behind the counter, and thumbed to pieces in every petty circulating library. I wrote the work with this object, and I wrote accordingly. Light and trifling as it may appear to be, every page of it (as I have stated) has been the subject of examination and deliberation: it has given me more trouble than any work I ever wrote; and, ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... northern nations of Europe than those of the mother country, Portugal. I was glad to see several new booksellers' shops, and also a fine edifice devoted to a reading-room supplied with periodicals, globes, and maps, and a circulating library. There were now many printing-offices, and four daily newspapers. The health of the place had greatly improved since 1850, the year of the yellow fever, and Para was now considered no ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... it, if you will follow my advice. I taught you how to write a fashionable novel, it will be hard, indeed, if I cannot send you up the Rhine. One little expense must be incurred—you must subscribe a quarter to a circulating library, for I wish that what you do should be ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... the adult fiction lists in the Monthly Bulletins of the New York Free Circulating Library from November, 1895, to March, 1897, inclusive, and are all such titles as contain a possessive, whether expressed by the possessive case or by the preposition "of" with the objective. Some titles are included in which the grammatical ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... furniture, incandescent lights of fierce brilliancy, and a pianola. Mrs. Peter Bullsom, stout and shiny in black silk and a chatelaine, was dozing peacefully in a chair, with the latest novel from the circulating library in her lap; whilst her two daughters, in evening blouses, which were somehow suggestive of the odd elevenpence, were engrossed in more serious occupation. Louise, the elder, whose budding resemblance to her mother was already ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... room of its own in the Lower Temple, with circulating library, piano and all the cheerful furnishings of a parlor in the home. To this bright room comes many a girl from her dreary boarding house to spend the evening in reading and social chat. It has been the cheery starting point in many a girl's ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... people. In decent families, which did not profess extraordinary sanctity, there was a strong feeling against all such works. Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three years before Evelina appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and husbands when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. This feeling, on the part of the grave and reflecting, increased the evil from which it had sprung. The novelist having little character to lose, and having few readers among serious people, took without scruple liberties which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... incidentally benefactor of the British provinces and the brain of a large firm of chemists and druggists with branches in scores, hundreds, of towns. He has several branches in my group. Each branch has a circulating library, patronized by the class which has only heard of Mudie, and has not heard of the Grosvenor. Mr. Jesse Boot has had the singular and beautiful idea of advertising his wares by lending books to customers and non-customers at a loss of ten ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett |
