e to his own collection of any
work, regulate his bids by that standard, regardless of commercial value,
except as a limit beyond which he will not go. Few librarians can
personally attend auction sales--nor is it needful, when limits can so
easily be set to orders. It is never safe to send an unlimited bid, as
there may be others without limit, in which case the book is commonly
awarded to the most remote bidder.

There are many curiosities of the auction room, one of them being the
frequent re-appearance of book rarities which have been through several
auctions, sometimes at intervals of years, keenly competed for by rival
bibliophiles, and carried off in triumph by some ardent collector, who
little thought at the time how soon his own collection would come to the
hammer.

There are also many curiosities of compilation in auction catalogues. Not
to name errors of commission, like giving the authorship of books to the
wrong name, and errors of omission, like giving no author's name at all,
some catalogues are thickly strewn with the epithets _rare_--and _very
rare_, when the books are sufficiently common in one or the other market.
Do not be misled by these surface indications. Books are often attributed
in catalogues to their editor or translator, and the unwary buyer may
thus find himself saddled with a duplicate already in his own collection.
There has been much improvement in late years in the care with which
auction catalogues are edited, and no important collection at least is
offered, without having first passed through the hands of an expert,
familiar with bibliography. It is the minor book sales where the
catalogues receive no careful editing, and where the dates and editions
are frequently omitted, that it is necessary to guard against. It is well
to refrain from sending any bids out of such lists, because they furnish
no certain identification of the books, and if all would do the same,
thus diminishing the competition and the profit of the auctioneer, he
might learn never to print a catalogue without date, place of
publication, and full name of author of every book offered.

Never be too eager to acquire an auction book, unless you are very
thoroughly assured that it is one of the kind truly designated
_rarissimus_. An eminent and thoroughly informed book collector, with an
experience of forty years devoted to book auctions and book catalogues,
assured me that it was his experience that almost every book