This is too much.' He
closed by expressing a desire to resign, saying that he did not know
he 'was joining a faddists club,' and takes occasion to remark further
that 'the books are cheaply finished, not even being trimmed and
gilded;' also that he 'can buy better books in the stores, _with full
gilt edges_, for less money.'"

So much has been written about the vagaries of book-collectors and
bibliomaniacs that the subject has long since become threadbare, and
about the only unexplored field of labor left to the choice of him who
would gain a hearing with the reader--if one can be found who is not
already weary of reading what the wags think of his (or her) own
peculiar whims--is to fall in with the spirit of the age and compile
an "International Library of the World's Greatest Gibberish about
Bibliomaniacs." We have the "World's Greatest" everything else in
book-lore, and I shall not be surprised if some enterprising publisher
gets out a "definitive" _de luxe_ edition of the "World's Greatest
Dictionaries." Indeed, the Holy Bible itself has not escaped, for they
are now making a "de luxe" edition, in fourteen volumes! to be sold by
subscription. It will not be an "Autograph Edition," however.

The freaks and fancies of capricious book-gatherers and bibliomaniacs
have undergone so few changes in the last hundred years that modern
writers on Bibliomania, after vainly searching the horizon for some new
development in the way of symptoms of the disease, or characteristics of
those afflicted, have wandered off into the verdure of adjacent fields
to avoid repetition. Some of them, from sheer lack of anything new to
say, have set upon each other in the most unflattering terms. Many of
the writers on the delectable "Joys of a Book-buyer," or "Habits of a
Bibliomaniac," etc., evidently appreciate the fact that these much
persecuted human beings have other pastimes and habits than collecting
books, and that they really inhabit the earth in all its civilized parts
and partake unstintedly of its many pleasurable diversions. But again,
there is another extreme, for I once read a book issued under the
misleading title of "Pleasures of a Book-collector," or something of the
sort, which might have been more appropriately called the "Pleasures of
a Single Man," seeing that the work had more to do with the hero's
hopeless love for a fair damsel, and his hours at clubs, cafes, and
other places of amusement in which I had no special inte