dwelling upon--equally trivial in seeming,
equally important in its essence--which is the selling of books by the
great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all
classes of the British population together and both sexes--artisans and
their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and
other large cities,--what proportion of the population of the British
Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once
in their lives? Is it ten per cent.--or five per cent.--or two per
cent.? The exact proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very
small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and
publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the
handling of books--cheap reprints of good books in particular. The
combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United
States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in
England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library
which is as yet too recent an institution to have had an easily
measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in
bringing the multitude in immediate contact with literature, have been
the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and
stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most
profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping
is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books--is
involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly
displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books
of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of
chief importance was the institution of the cheap libraries of the
"Classics"--tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them
shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in
glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and
sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading
habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always
remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries,
it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to fall a victim
to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or
thirty-eight cents on a copy of _The Scarlet Letter_ or _Ivanhoe_,
Irving's _Alhambra_, or _Bleak House_, to