Braidwood for L60. A
second copy in paper covers, also uncut, exists; but the general
condition is not so good.

There are in London and other English centres, however, American
export and commission agents, independently of those houses which make
shipments to the States a collateral branch of their business. It has
been the cry, ever since we can recollect, that our cousins were
draining the old country of its books, and yet the movement
continues--continues with this difference, that the Americans have now
plenty of ordinary stock, and are more anxious to limit their
acquisitions to rarities. The number of public and private libraries
has become very considerable; the most familiar names are Lenox,
Carter-Brown, Tower, and Pope, the last the purchaser of the _King
Arthur_ printed by Caxton in 1485, and formerly in the Harleian and
Osterley Park collections. There is an occasional reflux of
exportations, and we should like to hear one day of the _Arthur_ being
among them.

One not very pleasant aspect of American and other plutocratic
competition has been to convert most of the _capital_ old English
books from literature into _vertu_. What else is it, when two
imperfect Chaucers bring L2900, and a Walton's _Angler_, L415, and
where for the second and third folio Shakespeares persons are found
willing to give a profit on L500 or L600?

The Transatlantic buyer, or indeed the buyer at a distance anywhere,
has no option in employing an agent on the spot to acquire his
_desiderata_, and he is practically in his hands. So long as your
representative is competent it is well enough, and on the whole the
American agencies in London are, we think, both that and
conscientious. But the frequenter of the salerooms cannot fail to note
a very unsatisfactory aspect of this business by proxy, where an
inexperienced amateur with a well-lined purse employs an almost
equally inexperienced person to act on his behalf--that is to say, one
who is a bookseller by vocation, but who enjoys no conversance with
bibliographical niceties. His principal consequently scores very
poorly by buying _wrong_ things at the _right_ prices; but if he is
satisfied, who need be otherwise? And his error, if his property is
not realised in his lifetime, never comes home to him! Nevertheless,
to buy with other people's eyes and judgment is not, after all, the
best form; all that can be pleaded for it is, that it is the sole
resource of the individual who ha