Through the Magic Door
by
Arthur Conan Doyle
eBooks@Adelaide 2008
This web edition published byeBooks@Adelaide.Rendered into HTML bySteve Thomas.Last updated Thu Feb 19 13:44:09 2009.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence(available athttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/).You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and to make derivativeworks under the following conditions: you must attribute the work in the mannerspecified by the licensor; you may not use this work for commercial purposes; if youalter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work onlyunder a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clearto others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you getpermission from the licensor. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by theabove.For offline reading, the complete set of pages is available for download fromhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/d75th/d75th.zipThe complete work is also available as a single file, athttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/d75th/complete.htmlA MARC21 Catalogue record for this edition can be downloaded fromhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/d75th/marc.bib
eBooks@AdelaideThe University of Adelaide LibraryUniversity of AdelaideSouth Australia 5005
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
Chapter 1
I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which itadorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, andthen you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that issordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in theirranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but tohold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has
deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth andnatron of leather and printer’s ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds theconcentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have faded intothe thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the miraculousgood fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were suddenly to learn thatShakespeare had returned to earth, and that he would favour any of us with anhour of his wit and his fancy. How eagerly we would seek him out! And yet wehave him—the very best of him—at our elbows from week to week, and hardly trouble ourselves to put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter whatmood a man may be in, when once he has passed through the magic door he cansummon the world’s greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be thoughtful,here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here are the masters of fancy. Or isit amusement that he lacks? He can signal to any one of the world’s great story-tellers, and out comes the dead man and holds him enthralled by the hour. Thedead are such good company that one may come to think too little of the living. Itis a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should never find ourown thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race. But best of all when the dead man’s wisdom and strength in the living of our own strenuousdays.Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green settee, where you can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of volumes. Smoking is notforbidden. Would you care to hear me talk of them? Well, I ask nothing better, forthere is no volume there which is not a dear, personal friend, and what can a mantalk of more pleasantly than that? The other books are over yonder, but these aremy own favourites —the ones I care to re-read and to have near my elbow. Thereis not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow memories to me.Some of them represent those little sacrifices which make a possession dearer. You see the line of old, brown volumes at the bottom? Every one of those
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Chapter 9 for Through the Magic Door - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an author most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor…
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