A room full of books of one's own

I promised to keep updating with things I liked from volume 1 of Virginia Woolf's diaries. So here are some things she had to say about books and libraries.

"L[eonard] found Desmond at the L.L. [London Library]: together they look up the word f--- in the slang dictionary, & were saddened & surprised to see how the thumb marks of members were thick on the page." (82)

On a London bookshop:

"He would not commit himself to name any probable price, from which I judge that he is calculating on the lust to possess it when I see it. And, after all, nothing gives back more for one's money than a beautiful book - obviously I'm slipping....These bookshops have an air of the 18th century. People drop in and gossip about literature with the shopkeeper who, in this case, knew as much about books as they did. I overheard a long conversation with a parson, who had discovered a shop in Paddington full of Elzevirs." (126)

Apparently the huge publisher Elsevier has been around for a long time, or else the name has been resurrected.

Then there's this slightly puzzling footnote by the editor, Anne Olivier Bell, about a librarian at the London Library who I want to know more about:

"Frederick James Cox (1865-1955) joined the staff of the London Library when he was sixteen and worked there until the year of his death. Installed near the entrance, he acted both as sentry and encyclopaedia." (177)

So there you go. As usual,

All quotations from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One 1915-1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.