ves a niche in this place. We
refer to men like Purcell, in Red Lion Passage, Red Lion Square,
Holborn, who are almost as much printsellers as booksellers. They make
one book by destroying many others. Grangerizing is the proper name of
this practice; but as the Rev. Mr. Granger has been productive of more
curses than a dozen John Bagfords--an evil genius of the same type--the
process is now termed extra-illustrating. However much one may denounce
the whole system, it is impossible, whatever a particular book-hunter's
idiosyncrasy may be, not to feel interested in some of the collections
which these enterprising and ruthless biblioclasts manage to get
together. Mr. Purcell is an adept at this game, of which, doubtless, Mr.
F. Harvey, of St. James's Street, is one of the most clever, as he is
certainly the most eminent of professors. Mr. Purcell's collection of
prints, engravings, press-cuttings, and so forth, cover an
extraordinarily wide field. In fifty cases out of a hundred, booksellers
who make grangerizing a speciality find it pays far better to break up
an illustrated book than to sell it intact. When they purchase a book,
it is obviously their own property, to preserve or destroy, as they find
most agreeable. Personally, we regard the system as in many ways a
pernicious one, but it is one upon which a vast amount of cant has been
wasted.

But bookshops and stalls are obviously not the only places at which
bargains in books are likely to be secured, as the following anecdote
would seem to prove: 'A writer and reader well versed in the works of
the minor English writers recently entered a newspaper-shop at the East
End and purchased a pennyworth of snuff. When he got home he found that
the titillating substance was wrapped in a leaf of Sir Thomas Elyot's
black-letter book, "The Castell of Helth." The next day the purchaser
went in hot haste to the shop and made a bid for the remainder of the
volume. "You are too late, sir," spoke the shopkeeper. "After you had
gone last night, a liter_airy_ gent as lives round the corner gave me
two bob for the book. There was only one leaf torn out, which you got.
The book was picked up at a stall for a penny by my son." The purchaser
of the pennyworth at once produced the leaf, with instructions for it to
be handed to his forestaller in the purchase of the volume, together
with his name and address; and next day he received a courteous note of
thanks from the "liter_airy_ gent" a