Speaking of Books: The Best Things Ever Said about Books and Book Collecting

""A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again,"" notes Carl Van Doren. A few pages earlier, Chaim Grade quips, ""If anyone asks you if you've read all those books, it means you don't have enough books."" Robert Kaplan and Harold Rabinowitz (A Passion for Books) quote hundreds of writers and bibliophiles and a few bibliophobes in Speaking of Books. Divided into chapters like ""What to Read,"" ""The Pleasures of Buying and Owning Books"" and ""Good Books and Bad,"" this book is chock-full of witticisms, advice, criticism (Ambrose Bierce's one-sentence review from 1929 goes, ""The covers of this book are too far apart""), aphorisms, opinions, etc., by the eminent likes of Emily Dickinson, Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino, Anna Quindlen and George Bernard Shaw. Ten b&w illus. ( June 26)