illegible type, and legions of Aldines, books quite as dirty, if not
so dumpy, and equally illegible, for they are printed in italics. You
think you are in luck, invest largely, and begin to give yourself the
airs of an amateur and a discoverer. Then comes somebody who knows
about the matter in hand, and who tells you, with all the savage joy
of a collector, that nobody wants any Elzevirs and Aldines, except a
very few, and they must be in beautiful old bindings, uncut down,
or scarcely cut down by the binder. These you may long for, but you
certainly will never find them in the fourpenny box. The Duffer is
always making the mistake of buying small bargains, as he thinks them,
and so he will spend, in some time, perhaps, a hundred pounds. With
a hundred pounds, and with luck, and prudence, and cunning, he might
perhaps buy one small volume which a collector who knew his business
would not wholly disdain. But, as it is, he has squandered his money,
and has nothing to show for it but a heap of trash, of the wrong date,
without the necessary misprints in the right places, ragged, short,
and, above all, _imperfect_. I suppose I have the richest collection
of imperfect books in the world. One hugs oneself on one's _Lucasta_
(very rare), or one's Elzevir _Cæsar_ of the right date, or one's
first edition of MOLIÈRE, and then comes, with fiendish glee, the
regular collector, and shows you that _Lucasta_ has not the portrait
of LOVELACE, that _Cæsar_ has not his pagination all wrong (as he
ought to have), that the Molières are Lyons piracies, that half of
GILBERT's _Gentleman's Diversion_ is not bound up with the rest,
that, generally speaking, there are pages missing here and there all
through your books, which you have never "collated," that "a ticket
of PADELOUP, the binder, has been taken off some broken board of a
book, and stuck on to a modern imitation, and so forth, all through
the collection. You cannot sell it; nobody will take as a present
this Library of a Gentleman who has given up collecting; even Free