customer, with the payment of the bookseller's
bill. But this is a mere popular superstition.
Such payment is not the last, but the first
term in a series of goodly length. If we wish
to give to the block a lease of life equal to
that of the pages, the first condition is that it
should be bound. So at least one would have
said half a century ago. But, while books
are in the most instances cheaper, binding,
from causes which I do not understand, is
dearer, at least in England, than it was in my
early years, so that few can afford it.[11] We
have, however, the tolerable and very useful
expedient of cloth binding (now in some
danger, I fear, of losing its modesty through
flaring ornamentation) to console us. Well,
then, bound or not, the book must of
necessity be put into a bookcase. And the
bookcase must be housed. And the house must
be kept. And the library must be dusted,
must be arranged, should be catalogued. What
a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless
indeed things are to be as they now are in
at least one princely mansion of this country,
where books, in thousands upon thousands,
are jumbled together with no more
arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even
the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has
been respected; where undoubtedly an
intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune