The Book-Hunter
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in the history of book collecting, bibliography, and book culture
- Those who enjoy the Victorian essay style and are willing to read slowly
- Book lovers building a personal collecting interest who want to understand the book-hunting tradition
Not a good fit for
- Library professionals seeking modern classification schemes or practical retrieval guides
- Academic readers expecting tight argumentation or clear chapter structure
- Beginners impatient with old-fashioned English essay style
Reading tips
- Read selectively by essay, one or two at a time; there is no need to finish the whole book.
- When a specific title or edition comes up, jot it down and verify it against modern bibliographical tools.
- Read alongside works on book history or collecting culture to understand the nineteenth-century book-hunting context.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book a practical guide to book collecting?
Can I read this without a background in bibliography?
Why is it said to suit slow reading rather than speed reading?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
John Hill Burton (1809–1881) was a Scottish advocate, historian and economist, born in Aberdeen and died in Edinburgh. He rose to prominence in 1846 with his Life and Correspondence of David Hume, which combines documentary editing with biographical narrative and remains an important reference for Hume studies. He also wrote a seven-volume History of Scotland and The Book-Hunter, a work on book collecting and the pleasures of reading, written in an essayistic style that blends learning with leisure and is often cited by bibliophiles. His other works include The Scot Abroad. He served as Secretary to the Scottish Prison Board and as Historiographer Royal for Scotland, and is regarded as one of the pioneers who introduced modern historical research methods into Scottish historiography.
