Bookselling and, for that matter, book collecting, are in my blood. Soon after I joined my father at Bertram Rota Ltd. we came across a sophisticated copy of a modern first edition (in fact, first edition sheets removed from a soiled binding and put into an immaculate binding case from a slightly later printing in a crude and misguided attempt to increase the value). Even now, thirty-seven years later, I still remember the intensity of my father’s anger as he explained to me what had happened and why. Speaking perhaps of private rather than institutional collecting, he said that we booksellers made the rules and also acted as referees. If we cheated, everything became meaningless.
— Anthony Rota, on The Texas Forgeries, in : Forged Documents (1990)
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I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those for whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
— Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (1964)