This library is a catacomb in which each book is a tomb; and I who disturb its quietness visit the grim place like an improvident necromancer. I revive, as the whim takes me, one or another of the dead, where but for my unwholesome arts would decay peacefully each uncharmed compost of rags and glue and oak and macerated wood splinters. I offer an initiatory strange sacrifice, of time and eyesight…
—James Branch Cabell, These Restless Heads, (p. 195)
