B bl nam 93 



of the appetite. The consciousness of some extravagance must be 

 always present in his mind; there must be a sense of sacrifice in the 

 attainment. ■ In a rich man the disease cannot exist ; he cannot enter 

 the kingdom of the Bibliomaniac's heaven. There is the same differ- 

 ence of sensation between the acquirement of books by a wealthy man, 

 and by him of slender purse, that there is between the taking of fish 

 in a net and the successful result of a long angling pursuit after one 

 especially fat and evasive trout. To haunt the book stores ; there to 

 see a long desired work in luxurious and tempting style ; reluctantly 

 to abandon it for the present on account of the price ; to go home and 

 dream about it; to wonder, for a year and perchance longer, whether 

 it will ever again greet your eyes ; to conjecture what act of despera- 

 tion you might, in heat of passion, commit on some more affluent 

 man, in whose possession you should thereafter find it; to see it turn up 

 again in another book shop, its charms slightly faded, but yet mellowed 

 by age, like those of your first love, met in later life — with this dif- 

 ference, however, that whereas you crave those of the book more than 

 ever, you are generally quite satisfied with yourself for not having, 

 through the greenness of youth, yielded untimely to those of the lady; 

 to ask with assumed indifference the price, and learn with ill-dis. 

 sembled joy that it is now within your means ; to say you'll take it ; 

 to place it beneath your arm, and pay for it (or more generally order 

 it " charged ") ; to go forth from that room with feelings akin to those 

 of Ulysses when he brought away the Palladium from Troy ; to keep 

 a watchful eye on the parcel in the car on your way home, or to gloat 

 over the treasures of its pages, and wonder if the other passengers 

 have any idea what a fortunate individual you are; and finally to 

 place the volume on your shelves, and thenceforth to call it your own ; 

 this is indeed a pleasure denied to the affluent; so keen as to be akin 

 to pain, and only marred by the palling which always follows posses- 

 sion, and the presentation of your bookseller's account three months 

 thereafter. 



It is customary to ridicule the expenditure of money in books, 

 beyond the few volumes " which no gentleman's library should be 

 without," and which are usually the very books which any gentleman's 

 library can best dispense with. The wise man will caution his book- 

 loving friend against this vice, and at the same time knock the ashes 

 from his cigar, not reflecting that he himself is burning up the price 

 of a neat little library every year. Another sagacious adviser will give 

 similar counsel and at the same moment crack his whip over a thou- 

 sand dollars' worth of horse-flesh, which is eating up large paper and 

 rich bindings at the rate of several hundred dollars annually. Another 



