“…but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit…”
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →
About this line
Areopagitica was Milton’s pamphlet to Parliament against licensing — the requirement that nothing be printed without government approval. This line is its beating heart: to kill a good book, he argues, is to spill the distilled life of the mind that made it.
Why we carry this line
Are you a book lover? If you are, no explanation necessary. Signed: another book lover.
The design
A ribbon hangs beside the quote, cut with a notched tail like the one sewn into a bound book. It sits where you'd leave a marker in a page you mean to come back to.
The dots at each end are ours. Milton's sentence keeps going: "imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life."
What happened next
Milton wrote Areopagitica to argue that no government should decide what gets printed. He published it in 1644 without a license, in open defiance of the rule. The printers’ guild complained to Parliament, and nothing happened to him.
A few years later, a new government came to power and put Milton to work. In the 1650s, one of his jobs was censor for its official newspaper.
Today this line runs over the entrance to the New York Public Library’s Main Reading Room.
