"Many books in my library are now behind and beneath me; I read them years ago, with considerable pleasure; I have read them since with disappointment; I shall never read them again. They were good in their way once, and so were the clothes I wore when I was ten years old — but I have outgrown them. Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years. The deeper you dig into Scripture, the more you find that it is a GREAT abyss of TRUTH."

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...an avid reader and "book hound"

At the time of his death, Spurgeon reportedly had a massive personal library of more than 12,000 volumes in addition to the thousands he had secured for his Pastors' College. About 7,000 of these books are at the William Jewel College.

In his early youth, Charles spent a great deal of time living with his grandfather, a Congregationalist minister, in the little village of Stambourne. In his little book, Memories of Stambourne [published by Pilgrim Publications], he tells how he would spend many hours in a "little chamber" upstairs in the minister's "manse" (parsonage), reading the old books — "enormous folios, such as a boy could hardly lift."

SPURGEON'S God-given Mental Abilities

Spurgeon was what we now call a "speed-reader" and also possessed a "photographic memory." It is said that a gentleman once brought several large books to Spurgeon and asked him to read them as a "test." After a few days, the gentleman would return and ask questions about the contents of the books. To his amazement, Spurgeon could not be "stumped" by a single question!

Mr. Benjamin Haddock of San Diego, California, was a student at William Jewell College when the Spurgeon collection was received at the College in 1905. He helped unpack the books when they arrived! Now in his eighties, Mr. Haddock had earlier been an orphan at Spurgeon's Orphanage and had been baptized at Spurgeon's Tabernacle by C. B. Sawday, an assistant to Thomas Spurgeon [one of C. H. Spurgeon's twin sons and his successor as Pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle].

Spurgeon fell in love with the volumes of Puritan divinity by the time he was six years old and reveled in their racy writings for half a century. His was a virtuoso's passion running the whole scale from the ponderous duodecimos of his grandfather's manse to the royal octavos in the Old Curiosity Shop. Early in life he started a collection. He ransacked bookstalls and kept an eagle eye on booksellers' catalogs for any he did not possess.

His discernment in these books became as delicate as a china-collector's — "It is easy to tell a Puritan book by even its shape, and the type." He hunted originals, not cut reprints — "I harbor a prejudice against all new editions, and a preference for the originals, even though they wander about in sheepskins and goatskins, and are shut up in the heaviest of board."

So great was his love for his Puritans that he had Susannah read them to him while they were engaged! Susannah said — "I heard his dear voice explain what I couldn't understand, condensing into short sentences whole pages of these discursive old divines, and pressing from them all the richest nectar of their hidden sweetness." The two of them in courtship days actually issued a book of Puritan anthology, Smooth Stones Taken From Ancient Brooks [re-published in 1996 by Soli Deo Gloria, available from Pilgrim]. So assiduously did he collect, that at his death in 1892 nearly seven thousand Puritan volumes were in his library.

We stop to note some interesting facts about this collection. It was offered for sale in 1905 for $2,500! England was napping. Dr. J. T. M. Johnson, John E Franklin, President John Priest Greene, and Dr. J. E. Cook, of Missouri, swiftly raised three thousand dollars (price was ante-ed) and bought the entire lot — fifty cents a volume! Dr. J. W. Thirtle of London supervised the packing, in thirty-eight cases lined with water-proof canvas. He shipped them on the S.S. CUBA, Saturday December 16, 1905, billed to New Orleans, thence by the Illinois Central to Kansas City, and fifteen miles farther to a little country town called Liberty, where they arrived in January, 1906.

There they are today, in William Jewel College, undivided — and almost unknown! A priceless collection of rare volumes, stately folios, duodecimos, quartos; all marked with Spurgeon's own hand; a set never to be duplicated and never rivaled. Strange! if any one now wishes to drink from the wells of Puritan divinity, he will need to go to this quiet little Missouri village. Who would ever have thought of finding Spurgeon's well-thumbed books "west of the Mississippi River"? In that collection there is a priceless copy of his Commenting and Commentators, annotated in his own hand for the improvement of later editions. There is also the Comprehensive Bible which he used in New Park Street — by any standard of rare book appraisals its present value should be five thousand dollars (1934).

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Furthur Information...                                                               THE SPURGEON COLLECTION @ William Jewell College            "Who's C. H. SPURGEON?"