I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with strangers. I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North Pole and the South, the Sahara and the Karoo* for granted. As Johnson said of the Giant’s Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should not like to go to see them.* And so with books. Time is so short that I have none to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library. I could almost say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is published I read an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion, and a book has to weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I embark on it. When it has proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but meanwhile the old ships are good enough for me. I know the captain and the crew, the fare I shall get and the port I shall make and the companionship I shall have by the way.
From ‘On Re-Reading’, in ‘Windfalls’ (1920), a selection of essays by Alfred George Gardiner (1865-1946), who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Alpha of the Plough.’
* A semi-desert natural region of South Africa, with no precise scientific definition.
* The Giant’s Causeway is a natural rock formation made up of some 40,000 regular, interlocking, mostly hexagonal columns of basalt, the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. It lies in County Antrim on the north coast of Northern Ireland. In his Life of Johnson, Thomas Boswell recorded that his friend always spoke kindly of the Irish but had a peculiar aversion to the idea of going to Ireland. “Should you not like to see Dublin, sir?” Boswell asked him. “No, sir; Dublin is only a worse capital” came the reply. “Is not the Giant's Causeway worth seeing?” persisted Boswell. “Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see.”