ion.
So that I cannot be said to be really antagonistic to cheap reprints.

Strong in this consciousness, I beg to state that cheap and handy
reprints are "all very well in their way"--which is a manner of saying
that they are not the Alpha and Omega of bookishness. By expending L20
yearly during the next five years a man might collect, in cheap and
handy reprints, all that was worth having in classic English
literature. But I for one would not be willing to regard such a
library as a real library. I would regard it as only a cheap edition
of a library. There would be something about it that would arouse in
me a certain benevolent disdain, even though every volume was well
printed on good paper and inoffensively bound. Why? Well, although it
is my profession in life to say what I feel in plain words, I do not
know that in this connection I _can_ say what I feel in plain words. I
have to rely on a sympathetic comprehension of my attitude in the
bookish breasts of my readers.

In the first place, I have an instinctive antipathy to a "series." I
do not want "The Golden Legend" and "The Essays of Elia" uniformed
alike in a regiment of books. It makes me think of conscription and
barracks. Even the noblest series of reprints ever planned (not at all
cheap, either, nor heterogeneous in matter), the Tudor Translations,
faintly annoys me in the mass. Its appearances in a series seems to me
to rob a book of something very delicate and subtle in the aroma of
its individuality--something which, it being inexplicable, I will not
try to explain.

In the second place, most cheap and handy reprints are small in size.
They may be typographically excellent, with large type and opaque
paper; they may be convenient to handle; they may be surpassingly
suitable for the pocket and the very thing for travel; they may save
precious space where shelf-room is limited; but they are small in
size. And there is, as regards most literature, a distinct moral value
in size. Do I carry my audience with me? I hope so. Let "Paradise
Lost" be so produced that you can put it in your waistcoat pocket, and
it is no more "Paradise Lost." Milton needs a solid octavo form, with
stoutish paper and long primer type. I have "Walpole's Letters" in
Newnes's "Thin Paper Classics," a marvellous volume of near nine
hundred pages, with a portrait and a good index and a beautiful
binding, for three and six, and I am exceedingly indebted to Messrs.
Newnes for creating