Bibliophiles Beware Comberbatch

I’ve just discovered the following musing on the subject of borrowing books, and thought it might appeal to the bibliophiles among you.  That’s everyone, then?

To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your borrowers of books — those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.  There is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations!

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out  (you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!), with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera Bonaventurae, choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre — Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs — itself an Ascapart! — that Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that ‘the title to property (my Bonaventure, for instance) is in exact ratio to the claimant’s powers of understand and appreciating the same.’  Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?

Which indeed?  Foul gaps in bookshelves: enough to send shivers down your spine.  Gold star for anyone who can tell me where this extract comes from.

Ellie