Reading pleasure, doubled

On a plaque in a small library, I saw this sentence, attributed to Katherine Mansfield:

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

I thought immediately of our household’s two-person adventure in reading, the Four Seasons Reading Club (now on the Dhammapada, the final volume in the Penguin Little Black Classics series). But I also thought that Katherine Mansfield was certainly not writing about reading two people reading two copies of one book at the same time. What she was describing though is close to that.

The sentence on the plaque is a slight modification of a sentence in a letter Mansfield wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell, January 1922. From The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1928):

I love reading good plays; and so does M. We have such fun talking them over afterwards. In fact, the pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. It is one of the many pleasures of our solitary life. Pleasures we have — ever increasing. I would not change this kind of life for any other.

Related reading
All OCA Katherine Mansfield posts (Pinboard)

[M. is John Middleton Murry, then Mansfield’s husband.]