Recent discovery: Holbrook Jackson, English bibliophile (1874-1948).

Just to give you a taste, he writes, in “The Uses of Books,” about discovering, while visiting an acquaintance, a false bookcase that was actually a door to a cupboard packed with cigars.

… I am not sure that he was not making as worthy a use of books as many whose pretensions approach more nearly to reality. But, at the same time, it would have been less gracious, but more strictly in keeping with the tradition of honesty, if he had kept real books on his shelves and consumed them as cigar lighters. The latter method of dealing with books would confer a double blessing upon men, in the first instance by getting rid of a lot of unnecessary old books, and in the second by providing additional royalties for the authors of new ones. And the Goddess of Nicotine, one might imagine, would be more readily propitiated by the gift of fire: as the Muses, with their traditional incense.