[Bibliophilism or bibliomania?].

Book lovers existed since the beginnings of books, but, at least in French, the words expressing the love of books only appeared during the XVIIth and the XVIIIth centuries. "Bibliomania" and the corresponding French term "bibliomane" were first to appear at the end of the XVIIth century and that makes sense and shows that that people thought, at the time, that it twas a kind of mania to collect and appreciate books. "Bibliophile" only appeared in 1740, and remained unknown in Diderot and D'Alembert Encyclopédie. This is quite surprising because bibliophilism was often at the origin of very useful collections of scientific books constituting precious tools for history of sciences.