the
fashion for the moment, and for which he competes with others as wise
as himself, till the prices become ridiculous? English and American
millionaires acquire specimens of early typography, poetry, binding,
or what not, because they hear that it is the thing to do. One
gentleman will give L100 more for a copy, because he is credibly
informed that it is three-eighths of an inch taller than any other
known; and a second will take something from the vendor on the
assurance that no library of any pretensions is complete without it.
This sort of child's-play is not Book-Collecting. The true book-closet
and its master have to be kinsfolk, not acquaintances introduced by
some bookseller in waiting. Humanly speaking, the poor little
catalogue made by Hearne of his own books and MSS. comes nearer home
to our affections than those of Grenville and Huth.

In speaking and thinking of real books, it is necessary again to
distinguish between articulate productions of two classes--between
such a work, for example, as Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ and such an one
as Thoreau's _Walden_, or between Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_ and Sir Thomas Browne's _Urn-Burial_. The present is an
enterprise directed toward the indication to collectors of different
views and tastes of the volumes which they should respectively select
for study or purchase. There are millions who have passed through
life unconsciously without having read a book, although they may have
seen, nay, possessed thousands. Those which might have been
recommended to them with advantage, and perused with advantage, were
too obscure, too dull, too cheap, too unfashionable. It is of no use
to read publications with which your acquaintances have no
familiarity, and to the merits of which it might be a hard task to
convert them. But, as we have said, we want space to enter into these
details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that
literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in
Book-Form--Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit
illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences
and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age--what
Thoreau call its "tit-men."

We might readily instance masterpieces of erudition or industry which
leave nothing to be desired in the way of information and safe
guidance, and which, at the same time, do not distantly realise our
conception of Books--rea