Every Text Assumes A Reader.

Maybe This Is Why We Read, And Why In Moments Of Darkness We Return To Books: To Find Words For What We Already Know.

In My Fool Hardy Youth, When My Friends Were Dreaming Of Heroic Deeds In The Realms Of Engineering And Law, Finance And National Politics, I Dreamt Of Becoming A Librarian.

Ordered By Subject, By Importance, Ordered According To Whether The Book Was Penned By God Or By One Of God's Creatures, Ordered Alphabetically Or By Numbers Or By The Language In Which The Text Is Written, Every Library Translates The Chaos Of Discovery And Creation Into A Structured System Of Hierarchies Or A Rampage Of Free Associations.

We Can Imagine The Books We'd Like To Read, Even If They Have Not Yet Been Written, And We Can Imagine Libraries Full Of Books We Would Like To Possess, Even If They Are Well Beyond Our Reacher, Because We Enjoy Dreaming Up A Library That Reflects Every One Of Our Interests And Every One Of Our Foibles--a Library That, In Its Variety And Complexity, Fully Reflects The Reader We Are.

In A Library, No Empty Shelf Remains Empty For Long.