hybrids, and the seedlings, how varied and
impossible their classification! Most men have bought books, some have
read a few, and others many; but beyond this rough grouping together we
shall not attempt anything. One thing, however, the majority of
book-collectors agree in, and that is in regarding their own generation
as a revolution--they have, as Butler has described it in his picture of
an antiquary, 'a great value for that which is past and gone, like the
madman that fell in love with Cleopatra.'

Differing in many, and often material, points as one book-collector does
from another, the entire passion for collecting may be said to focus
itself into two well-defined grooves. A man either collects books for
his own intellectual profit, or out of pure ostentatious vanity. In the
ensuing pages there will be found ample and material facts in regard to
the former, so that we may say here all that we have to say regarding
the latter. The second type of book-enthusiast has two of the most
powerful factors in his apparently reckless career--his own book-greed,
and the bookseller who supplies and profits by him.

'What do you think of my library?' the King of Spain once asked Bautru,
the French wit, as he showed him the collection at the Escurial, at that
time in the charge of a notoriously ignorant librarian.

'Your Majesty's library is very fine,' answered Bautru, bowing low; 'but
your Majesty ought to make the man who has charge of it an officer of
the Treasury.'

'And why?' queried the King.

'Because,' replied Bautru, 'the librarian of your Majesty seems to be a
man who never touches that which is confided to him.'

There are many varieties of the ignorant collector type. The most
fruitful source is the _nouveau riche_. Book-collecting is greatly a
matter of fashion; and most of us will remember what Benjamin Franklin
said of this prevailing vice: 'There are numbers that, perhaps, fear
less the being in hell, than out of the fashion.' The enterprising
individual who, on receipt of a catalogue of medical books, wired to the
bookseller, 'What will you take for the lot?' and on a price being
quoted, again telegraphed, 'Send them along,' was clearly a person who
wished to be fashionable. Another characteristically amusing
illustration of this type of book-collector is related by an
old-established second-hand bookseller, who had bought at a country sale
some two or three hundred volumes in a fair condition. But they