, they are made. It is the youthful vigour and enthusiasm of
the young collector, prompting him into the byways and alleys of
book-land, that bring bargains to his shelves.

So, if you are young and enthusiastic, and not to be deterred by a series
of wild-goose chases, happy indeed will be your lot. For over the
post-prandial pipe you will be able to hand such and such a treasure to
your admiring fellow-spirit, saying: 'This I picked up for _n_-pence in
Camden Town; this one cost me _x_-shillings at Poynder's in Reading:
Iredale of Torquay let me have this for a florin; I found this on the
floor in a corner of Commin's shop at Bournemouth; this was on David's
stall at Cambridge, and I nearly lost it to the fat don of King's'; and
so on and so on.

Bargains, forsooth! Our book-hunter was once outbid at Sotheby's for a
scarce volume which he found, a week later, on a barrow in Clerkenwell
for fourpence! The same year he picked up for ten shillings, in London,
an early sixteenth-century folio, rubricated and with illuminated
initials. It was as fresh as when it issued from the press, and in the
original oak and pig-skin binding. He failed to trace the work in any of
the bibliographies, nor could the British Museum help him to locate
another copy. David's stall at Cambridge once yielded to him a scarce
Defoe tract for sixpence. But this being, as Master Pepys said, 'an idle
rogueish book,' he sold it to a bookseller for two pounds, 'that it might
not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it
should be found.' A copy has recently fetched twenty guineas.

Doubtless every bibliophile is perpetually on the look-out for treasures,
and it is essential that he learn, early in his career, to make up his
mind at once concerning an out-of-the-way book. He who hesitates is lost,
and this is doubly true of the book-collector. More than once in his
early days of collecting has our book-hunter hesitated and finally left a
book, only to dash back--perhaps a few hours later, perhaps next day--and
find it gone.

Once upon a time a spotlessly clean little square octavo volume of
Terence, printed in italics, caught his eye upon a bookstall. One
shilling was its ransom, but it was not the price that deterred him so
much as the fact that every available nook and corner of his sanctum was
already filled to overflowing with books. 'A nice clean copy of an
early-printed book,' he mused. But early-printed books were not