FRIENDSHIP AND OTHER ESSAYS is a conveniently shirt-pocket-sized collectible little book with a leather cover - yes, you can smell the leather - probably published around 1924. I have briefly sampled its contents. "Friendship" begins with the intriguing line: "Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience and remembered like heat lightning in past summers."

This tiny book also contains Thoreau's more famous "On Duty of Civil Disobedience," an essay I found hard to get through back in college and probably still would today.

This is a book I would probably only recommend to serious collectors of antiquarian books, but not for their 'value,' as there were more than a million of these Little Leather Library Corporation books published during their heyday back in the 'teens and twenties of the 20th century. Today they would be primarily curiosities or conversation pieces. I value my own copy because it was a gift from a dear friend. ( )