Books being delicate

More from Grant Richards' biography. This letter from Oscar Wilde, refusing to supply a review copy of his Poems:

16 Tite Street

S.W.

Dear Sir,
    The new edition of my poems is limited to 200 copies, and these are meant not for reviewers, but merely for lovers of poetry, a small and quite unimportant sect of perfect people - so I fear I cannot bid my book wander towards Mowbray House - its rainment, gold smeared on tired purple, might attract attention in the Strand, and that would annoy it, books being delicate and most sensitive things, and, if they are books worth reading, having a strong dislike of the public.
    So, you see I must perforce refuse your request.
    Yours truly,
        Oscar Wilde.

Object Lessons

OBJECT LESSONS

An email from out of the blue invites me to join Creative Spaces, a new site which is very web2.0, basically a mixture of facebook, digg, stumbleupon &c. &c. but focusing on the collections of nine museums and galleries. To be honest, it's not for me ... all my efforts are devoted to www.victorianlondon.org ... but if you like that sort of thing - or, rather, if you have the time to devote to it - it could become a nice meeting-space for the museum-inclined. I have, however, trawled its search engine for anything interesting and Victorian, and found the following:

- a rather nice 1840s dollhouse (V&A)

- a moustache spoon (V&A)

- a clockwork pig (V&A)

- a stereoscope (V&A)

- a bustle pad (V&A)

- a songsheet satirising the young Oscar Wilde (V&A)

Spot the connection? Yes, you can find a lot of interesting stuff at the V&A ... see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/!