Among the helluones librorum, the Cormorants of Books, there are wretched Reaſoners, that have canine Appetites, and no Digeſtion.

Study was his Gabriel Naudé's] principal occupation, and he was indeed a true "Helluo librorum;" ſo that he underſtood them perfectly well.

The Helluo Librorum, or Glutton of Books, was a character well known at the university, and mentioned by the ancients; but I believe their idea is far exceeded by many a fair subscriber at the circulating library. I have known a lady read twenty volumes in a week during two or three months successively.

[L]et us perform a good knife and fork as helluones librorum at those two magnificent repositories of legible or illegible rarities. Here we may feast on Editiones Principes, Uniques on vellum, books without date or place, literary frauds, colophons, catchwords, and dainties, as the ballad has it, 'past expression.'

And, even physically considered, knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold; for he who reads really much, finds his capacity to read increase in geometrical ratio. The helluo librorum will but glance at the page which detains the ordinary reader some minutes; and the difference in the absolute reading (its uses considered), will be in favor of the helluo, who will have winnowed the matter of which the tyro mumbled both the seeds and the chaff.

There is surely some point beyond which the acquisition of other men’s thoughts must not be carried. This we say for the sake of those helluones librorum, who read forever and without stint; browsing as diligently as oxen in the green herbage of rich meads, but, unlike these, never lying down to ruminate. Life is too short, Art is too long, for a human mind to make perpetual accretion of book-learning, without halt. Sufflaminandum est.

It is now about 250 years since Robert Burton, one of the most famous of our English helluones librorum, sounded the praises of Sir Thomas Bodley, and that great Oxford library, which our own King James wished to have for his prison, if fate ever made him a prisoner, where he might pass his life chained amongst books—"his catenis illigari, cum hisce captivis concatenatis ætatem agere."

Are there not many desultory, indiscriminate, wholesale readers,—mere "helluones librorum," or book-gluttons,—who would profit by thus thoroughly digesting and assimilating one great author, instead of regaling themselves upon all the luscious, lulling fruits that tempt their literary appetites?

From the bibliomaniac's "immense and curious library" to the "modern antiquary" with his "cabinet of never-to-be-described oddities" to the impossible science of bibliography to the cacoethes scribendi to the Helluo Librorum or "great devourer of books," whether in the college or the circulating library, the compulsion to pathologize book collection, authorship and reading had itself become endemic – a kind of "itch" whose compulsive reiteration suggested an ironic echo of the very afflictions these critics set themselves against ….

Helluo librorum

Meaning

Noun

Rhymes