The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great as he is in many directions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything else, has been overheard mournfully to declare that there were more booksellers, shops in his native town sixty years ago, when he was a boy in it, than are today to be found within its boundaries. And yet the place "all unabashed" now boasts its bookless self a city!
Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the advice of a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the term "second-hand", which other crafts have "soiled to all ignoble use". But why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the best books are necessarily second-hand. The writers of today need not grumble. If their books are worth anything, they, too, one day will be second-hand. If their books are not worth anything there are ancient trades still in full operation among us—the pastrycooks and the trunk-makers—who must have paper.