The title of a collection of Gordon N. Ray's essays. Books as a Way of Life (1988), summarizes his career as a scholar, a book collector, and what he called a "public servant" of the humanities; the latter category includes Ray's teaching career, his administrative activities at the University of Illinois, and his years as secretary general and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In combining the scholar, the collector, and the "public servant," Ray was the modern counterpart of his chosen object of study, the Victorian "man of letters." As a scholar, Ray recovered from manuscripts, letters, and diaries the lives of William Makepeace Thackeray, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, and Henry James. These scholarly "adventures," to use Richard Altick's term, reinforced Ray's lifelong bibliophilia, and the collecting, in turn, supplied the materials for his scholarship. For Ray, collecting rare books was not just a matter...