or round numbers drives me
to the assertion that there are at least 300,000,000 books in these
countries, not counting bibles and prayer-books. It is a poor show!
Russia is greatly to blame, her European population of 88,000,000
being so badly provided for that it brings down the average. Were
Russia left out in the cold, we might, were our books to be divided
amongst our population _per capita_, rely upon having two volumes
apiece. This would not afford Mr. Gosse (the title of one of whose
books I have stolen) much material for gossip, particularly as his two
books might easily chance to be duplicates. There are no habits of man
more alien to the doctrine of the Communist than those of the
collector, and there is no collector, not even that basest of them
all, the Belial of his tribe, the man who collects money, whose love
of private property is intenser, whose sense of the joys of ownership
is keener than the book-collector's. Mr. William Morris once hinted at
a good time coming, when at almost every street corner there would be
a public library, where beautiful and rare books will be kept for
citizens to examine. The citizen will first wash his hands in a
parochial basin, and then dry them on a parochial towel, after which
ritual he will walk in and stand _en queue_ until it comes to be his
turn to feast his eye upon some triumph of modern or some miracle of
old typography. He will then return to a bookless home proud and
satisfied, tasting of the joy that is in widest commonalty spread.
Alas! he will do nothing of the kind, not, at least, if he is one of
those in whom the old Adam of the bookstalls still breathes. A public
library must always be an abomination. To enjoy a book, you must own
it. 'John Jones his book,' that is the best bookplate. I have never
admired the much-talked-of bookplate of Grolier, which, in addition to
his own name, bore the ridiculous advice _Et Amicorum_. Fudge! There
is no evidence that Grolier ever lent any man a book with his plate
in it. His collection was dispersed after his death, and then
sentimentalists fell a-weeping over his supposed generosity. It would
be as reasonable to commend the hospitality of a dead man because you
found amongst his papers a vast number of unposted invitations to
dinner upon a date he long outlived. Sentiment is seldom in place, but
on a bookplate it is peculiarly odious. To paste in each book an
invitation to steal it, as Grolier seems to have done, is fo