through life with all its vicissitudes, knowing many masters and earning
the gratitude of none. And so at length, deprived even of a home, they
find their way into the streets, where they are soon reduced to wreckage.

At first sight it would seem that they owe their situation to their
quality, both intrinsic and extrinsic--that they are valueless either as
literature or as specimens of book-production, or that they are imperfect
or odd volumes. In many cases this may be true, but in general it is not
so. The wrecks of handsomely produced books of high-class literature are
common on the bookstalls and barrows, as all collectors of modest means
are aware. They owe their situation _chiefly to inconsiderate handling_
and to the carelessness of their successive owners.

As to the practice of inserting illustrations in books that are published
without them, 'Grangerising,' as it is called, it is perhaps best left
alone. At first sight there appears to be small harm in providing, let us
say, a volume of travels or the description of a town with an appropriate
engraved frontispiece, or adorning your biography of So-and-so with a
portrait. But the temptation to overstep the bounds of seemliness is so
great that it is seldom the collector stops at a mere frontispiece. In
most cases the Grangerite soon loses his self-control, and develops an
acute mania for embellishing his volume with all and every print upon
which he can lay his hands, apposite in the slightest degree to the
subject of the book. Every year the sale-rooms witness these
monstrosities. Biographies issued in a single volume are 'extended'
('rended asunder' would be a better term) to fifteen or twenty volumes by
the insertion of hundreds of engravings depicting every place mentioned
in the text and every man or woman that the subject of the biography ever
met. I have seen an octavo volume multiplied into twenty-five folio ones
in this fashion, the leaves being inlaid to suit the size of the huge
portraits and views stuffed into the disjointed sections of the wretched
book. Nor is it only engravings that are used. Play-bills,
lottery-tickets, tradesmen's advertisements, autograph letters, maps,
charts, broadsides, street ballads, bills even, all are grist for the
Grangerite's mill.

It is a singularly futile hobby, and it is certainly a pernicious form of
bibliomania, for it is responsible for the destruction of many good
books. Whether its devotee imagines that any