Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Charles Lamb (1775–1834), the English essayist and inveterate book-lover, often wrote with comic exasperation about the everyday indignities that befall readers and collectors. This line comes from his essay “The Two Races of Men,” in which he contrasts “men who borrow” with “men who lend,” treating the subject as a moral and social taxonomy. Lamb’s humor draws on the early nineteenth-century culture of private libraries and circulating books, where lending was common but returns were unreliable. The complaint reflects a collector’s anxiety: a borrowed book may come back damaged, incomplete, or not at all, leaving a once-orderly shelf permanently disfigured.

Lamb turns a petty grievance into a mock-epic indictment. By calling borrowers “mutilators,” “spoilers,” and “creators of odd volumes,” he suggests that the harm is not merely financial but aesthetic and even moral: the borrower disrupts the integrity of a collection and the owner’s carefully maintained order. The phrase “symmetry of shelves” elevates shelving into a kind of domestic art, while “odd volumes” evokes the particular torment of a set rendered incomplete. Beneath the wit lies a serious point about trust and reciprocity—lending books tests social bonds, and the borrower’s carelessness becomes a small emblem of disregard for another person’s values.