I used my mad mac iphoto skills to bump the color and contrast so it can almost be read.
The quotes, there are sort of two here, are from Thomas Carlyle's book On Heroes, in the chapter on "The Hero As Man of Letters" written in 1840 and generally about as fun as it sounds. The library cherry picked some beauties though, no? Here's the paragraph from which they were harvested.
Certainly the Art of
Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible
voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether
vanished like a dream. Mighty
fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed,
many-engined,–they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon,
the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some
ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece!
There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up
again into life. No magic Rune
is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been:
it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.