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To add a little support to my previous post (#2), here's Spurgeon:
If a man can purchase but very few books, my first advice to him would be, let him purchase the very best. If he cannot spend much, let him spend well. The best will always be the cheapest. Leave mere dilutions and attenuations to those who can afford such luxuries. Do not buy milk and water, but get condensed milk, and put what water you like to it yourself. This age is full of word-spinners - professional book-makers, who hammer a grain of matter so thin that it will cover a five-acre sheet of paper. These men have their uses, as gold-beaters have, but they are of no use to you. Farmers on our coast used to cart wagon-loads of sea-weed, and put them upon their land; the heaviest part was the water: now they dry the weeds, and save a world of labor and expense.
Don't buy thin soup; purchase the essence of meat. Get much in little. Prefer books which abound in what James Hamilton used to call "bibline," or the essence of books. You require accurate, condensed, reliable, standard books, and should make sure that you get them. In preparing his "Horae Biblicae Quotidianae," which is an admirable comment upon the Bible, Dr. Chalmers used only the "Concordance," the "Pictorial Bible," "Poole's Synopsis," "Matthew Henry's Commentary," and "Robinson's Researches in Palestine." "These are the books I use," said he to a friend, "all that is biblical is there; I have to do with nothing besides in my biblical study." This shows that those who have unlimited stores at their command, yet find a few standard books sufficient. If Dr. Chalmers were now alive, he would probably take Thomson's "Land and the Book" instead of "Robinson's Researches." At least, I should recommend the alteration to most men.
This is clear evidence that some most eminent preachers have found that they could do better with few books than with many when studying the Scriptures. And this, I take it, is our main business.
From: Lectures to My Students; reprint (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2008), p. 206. I've broken up the one long paragraph into three shorter ones, for readability's sake, and shortened a sentence or two from longer sentences, for the same reason.
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