Commonplace Book

'To-day the craft of letters has been turned into a strictly commercial transaction, and books are manufactured with the prompt neat aplomb of a pot of factory jam. Those must have been great days when it was a hall-mark of nobility to have written a book; when nobody wrote except for the love of it; when no mediocre work was turned out. Greater days still when it might mean martyrdom to have written a book; when the whole life and soul of a man went into it, freighting it with such beauty and wonder that it would defy the centuries. Have we lost the art of distillation by which the spirit was rendered to an essence and preserved in an indestructible form?'

Mary Webb (no source noted) quoted in Mary Webb: Her Life and Work by Thomas Moult (Chapter Nine)